As you might have read in one of Andy’s blogs this week, a group of us from Radiant’s hospitality division recently attended the annual Restaurant Leadership Conference (RLC) in Scottsdale, AZ. This event draws 800+ attendees annually and is designed to bring executives and decision makers together from restaurant companies all over North America for 3 days to share insights and trends on what is going on in the industry.
I wanted to share a few thoughts about the conference with all of you.
The first was that attendance was actually up for the show. This in itself should be a surprise with what is going on in the economy and what is happening with travel budgets recently. Given that every other show we have attended this year has been down at least 20% to 60%, many may have assumed the same for RLC. What this tells me is that the quality of the event, the speakers and the attendees make this the one show people will not miss and will use their limited budget towards.
The second was the willingness of the restaurant executives to continue to spend quality time with the sponsors/vendors and the feeling of “partnership” was as present as ever. There was an overwhelming theme of executives looking to vendors to help provide a product or service that will help their operations save money and build efficiencies.
The third was that, as a group, we were all starting to feel the economy turn and that people were starting to plan how they would do business as the recovery approaches. For me this is very positive sign, because the restaurant industry is usually one of the first groups to recover. Overall we all understand that we have a long road ahead of us, but there was plenty of optimism I have not seen at industry events in the past year.
I left the conference feeling better than ever about our industry and our company. People often think investments in products like ours are made only when things are going well, but in truth we may actually add more value to operators in down times, when finding that extra 2% to 3% savings is most critical. In times like these, Radiant has products that are uniquely positioned to help restaurant operators, big and small, drive more profit to the bottom line. Personally spending time with dozens of this industry’s decision makers this past week and talking about how they use or could use our solutions only reaffirmed that they understand the value of our offerings.
