David Cantu | Restaurant Back Office Should Be a GPS, Not a Rearview Mirror | ChatGTM S2 E44

Inside The Conversation

Restaurant back-office technology has spent decades telling operators what already happened.

*David Cantu believes it should tell them what to do next.*

David, CEO of *Craftable* and co-founder of *HotSchedules*, returns to ChatGTM with Michael Beck and Chad Horn to talk about rebuilding restaurant back office around the people actually running restaurants.

His analogy nails the shift: *the old back office is a rearview mirror. The new back office should be a GPS.*

That means forecasting sales, determining what to order and prep, planning staffing, identifying leakage and surfacing the few actions a manager can take before the opportunity is gone.

The conversation goes deep into restaurant profitability, technology adoption, inventory, waste, forecasting, AI and David's belief that we need to *connect managers emotionally to margins.*

And despite building heavily with AI, when asked what's currently overhyped in restaurant technology, David's answer is simple: *AI.*

*CHAPTERS*

00:00 Welcome to ChatGTM
01:53 David Cantu Returns
04:13 What Followed David Home From Prosper?
05:34 Why Great Leaders Never Stop Learning
06:00 Removing Friction From a Manager's Day
08:09 The Power of Connection
10:47 Developing the Next Generation of Leaders
12:00 Removing Back-Office Friction
12:49 Why Back-Office Implementations Fail
14:17 Connecting Managers Emotionally to Margins
15:10 Are Your Highest-Sales Stores Really Your Best?
16:14 The Fear of Another Tech Implementation
17:13 Making Restaurant Tech Implementation Work
18:26 The Items Driving Restaurant Profitability
19:57 What's Changed in Restaurant Technology?
21:26 Restaurants Are Still Using Fax Machines?!
22:21 Modernizing Restaurant Workflows
23:21 The Restaurant Ordering Problem
24:15 What David Learned Checking Deliveries
25:09 How Much Purchased Food Never Reaches the Plate?
25:37 Why Restaurant PARs Are Outdated
27:02 From 60K to Nearly 1M Lines of Code
28:15 Finding Money in Any Economy
29:00 Adoption, Adoption, Adoption
30:34 Stop Burying Managers in Dashboards
32:11 From Rearview Mirror to Restaurant GPS
32:49 What Prescriptive Restaurant Tech Looks Like
34:00 Forecasting Sales, Orders, Prep & Staffing
35:34 Building Forecasts Operators Trust
36:32 How Accurate Can Forecasting Become?
38:55 When Is It Time to Leave Legacy Tech?
39:29 Why Generic AI Isn't Enough
41:28 Turning Restaurant Data Into Action
42:46 Finding Voids, Comps & Hidden Problems
43:40 Building Technology for the Front Line
44:06 Are Managers Getting Their Share?
44:58 A Million Ways Restaurants Lose Margin
46:45 Why David Is Going to FSTEC
48:56 Why David Doesn't Obsess Over Competitors
49:42 Rapid Fire
50:02 AI Assistant or AI Agent?
50:14 The Metric Operators Don't Understand
51:07 The Most Overhyped Restaurant Tech: AI
51:18 David's Leadership Advice
52:54 The Future of Restaurant Operations
53:20 Stop Selling AI. Tell Operators What It Does.
55:01 Where to Find David & Craftable
56:00 Why ChatGTM Has These Conversations
56:56 Closing

*Is your restaurant technology telling you what happened, or helping you decide what to do next? Tell us below.*

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