More Fun and Less Friction with Tim McLaughlin, Cofounder and CEO of GoTab

Waiting to be served drinks and food and settling the tab rank most certainly as the pain points of the dining experience. As the famous song goes, "You got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative." In that spirit, to relieve the friction and induce more seamless service, Tim McLaughlin combined his skills as a technologist with his experience as a brewery restaurant owner to cofound GoTab, a restaurant commerce platform. GoTab increases the volume of hospitality and profitability – a tune we can all groove to!

Read the interview with Tim McLaughlin, "Using Technology to Foster Hospitality" in Boston Hospitality Review.

The “Distinguished” podcast is produced by Boston University School of Hospitality Administration.

Host: Arun Upneja, Dean
Producer: Mara Littman, Director of Corporate and Public Relations
Sound Engineer and Editor: Andrew Hallock
Graphic Design: Rachel Hamlin, Marketing Manager

Music: “Airport Lounge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Transcript

Arun Upneja: Welcome to the Distinguished Podcast, produced by the Boston University School of Hospitality Administration. I'm Arun Upneja, Dean of the school, and today I'm pleased to welcome our guest, Tim McLaughlin. Tim is the co-founder and CEO of GoTab Incorporated, a leading restaurant commerce platform that helps more than 1,000 large and mid-sized restaurants, breweries, bars, hotels, and other venues. In 2022, Insider named Tim to its annual restaurant Innovators Powers Players list and Incorporated recognized GoTab as a power partner for the company's proven track record supporting entrepreneurs and startups. Welcome, Tim, to the Distinguished podcast.

Tim McLaughlin: Thank you for having me, Arun.

Arun Upneja: In your career, you started out as a technologist. Then in 2013, you co-founded Caboose Brewing Company, an upscale brewery and farm-to-table concept in Fairfax, Virginia. You also own Ferment Nation, a craft beer and cider distributorship. So what led you to make this shift from hospitality to this career?

Tim McLaughlin: Well, it's funny. Probably not a lot of people go from sort of conference rooms and whiteboards, which is what my prior life was comprised of, to the sort of messy world, if you will, of patrons and guests in restaurants. But the reality is, I'm a physical person, I like physical things, I like physical spaces. I'm actually a mechanical engineer, despite having been in software for my whole life. And I wanted to do things with my hands, like make beer and meet people and make people smile. So that to me is a lot more fun than sitting in another conference room discussing where to move a pixel on a screen. Not to say I don't do that, but it's fun to see the physical manifestations.

Arun Upneja: Fantastic. We are all School of Hospitality, so we love that. So let's talk about GoTab. You founded it in 2016. In the early days, GoTab consisted of code on the receipt for mobile payments, which was at that time pretty novel. But innovation and invention are usually inspired by the need to solve or address a problem. And so you've been owner of a restaurant and brewery. What was the problem or pain point that led you to found GoTab?

Tim McLaughlin: The high points are the experience of meeting great people, hanging out with your friends, enjoying great food and beverage or great spaces, maybe seeing a show, lots of things that are amazing. There's a lot of not fun things too, like standing in lines can be really not fun when you don't want to do it. Maybe the first time is kind of fun, the anticipation can be exciting, but the second time gets pretty old, and the third time is something nobody really likes to do. Another one is paying. Paying is, and I don't know anybody who has ever highlighted the payment aspect of an experience as the highlight of it. Initially with GoTab, our goal was to solve what we viewed as the un-fun part, which is paying and particularly this was a need because my first brewery, this was a time when breweries were relatively scarce in Virginia, it was packed. We actually had lines out the door, couldn't see people. I had the really agonizing experience of getting my first Yelp review that was a one-star review because they couldn't get a table. Anybody in hospitality has experienced that. You get the joys of loving Yelp. Someone who doesn't come in and gives you a one-star review. So, our thought was, okay, if we can get people out of tables faster, and we're not doing it by pushing them out. We're doing it by making something they don't want to be doing is waiting for a check to go faster. We thought we'd get there. I don't know if I'm allowed to jump forward, but the reality is it actually wasn't compelling at all. It was too much of a technical shift. It was too much of a mind shift and pattern. And we really had like 3%, optimistically 5% uptake. It really wasn't a compelling solution.

Arun Upneja: As you were expanding GoTab beyond your own restaurant, what were some of the initial challenges in the early adopter phase?

Tim McLaughlin: Well, I think I just told you the first portion of putting a code and later a QR code, like first one was digits, then later we moved to QRs, as QRs are support on iPhones. It really didn't get there. So, I'd say the first time we had a product market fit was when I opened my second brewery in 2018. We opened it with QRs not just for paying, but QRs for ordering. Which was all of a sudden we went from; do we have a business here or not in GoTab? To, oh my God, we actually have a business because we saw on Fridays and Saturday nights, when there were lines, and mind you, this is way early, this is, QRs were barely nascent in most people's understanding of technology. When there were lines, 60% of our beer ordering volume would go through the QRs. So this is now five years ago, two years prior to COVID. Many people didn't know how to scan a QR in this country. So the big challenge though from that was, okay, we proved this success in my own brewery, and we proved it in a highly educated, young crowd that is Fairfax, Virginia, very diverse, so just very early adopters, if you will. We quickly found out that nobody else wanted any of this. The hospitality industry basically said this QR thing, this is not hospitality. And my contention has always been hospitality, it's great to talk to a person when the person is available, it's not great to have to sit there and wait if someone isn't available. And that's really the itch we're trying to solve, but in hospitality, I think, we've always hoped or imagined or dreamed we'd have the resource to be everywhere at the same time.

Arun Upneja: So I guess you were a little bit ahead of time there, but was that the time when you were actively trying to sell it to other restaurants, and they said no?

Tim McLaughlin: We absolutely were. We knocked on lots and lots and lots of doors. In fact, in 2019, we knocked on a whole bunch of doors that said, you're crazy, this is not hospitality. Fortunately for us, unfortunately for the world, when COVID hit, all the places that told us to pounce and in 2019 called us back. So that was kind of the lucky or unlucky break. I mean, many businesses were made or destroyed, unfortunately by COVID. But in our case, we view it as it accelerated technical adoption by probably three to five years. And so a lot of things that were, I mean, actually another one that was huge is video conferencing.

Arun Upneja: Right. Yeah.

Tim McLaughlin: We did a lot of video conferences for our demos, but we couldn't get our clients to do video conferences. So similarly, that has become ubiquitous. And similarly, QR codes loved or hated, they've become ubiquitous as well. 

Arun Upneja: So then here are the two use cases. One is ordering and the other one is to pay the check.

Tim McLaughlin: There are actually many cases for QRs. A QR code is just a bunch of data. We use them for positioning. So anytime you have a QR code on a table or in a hotel room, maybe on a bench, it tells us where it's positioned because it's a unique QR code. As you wander around a restaurant, we in the hospitality industry know every table has a number. We know where to deliver their food or their beverage. So that's another case. Another case we use QR codes is for passing off or sharing tabs. So if I open a tab for you and me, and maybe we're getting, maybe I'm paying for something for you, I can securely show you my QR code. I could also text it to you, and that lets you join my tab, meaning I'm paying, and maybe a low service environment where there isn't someone coming out and saying, oh, is your check together or not? This is a way for me to securely pass information to your device that's, again, ubiquitous.

Arun Upneja: The question is, I mean, initially there is an investment to put GoTab into the restaurant or the bar or whatever establishment you have. So how do you justify the cost? What is some of the advantages of putting this in? Does it decrease cost? Does it increase revenue?

Tim McLaughlin: I should be clear; we've evolved a lot since then. GoTab can act like a fully conventional POS, no QR codes at all. So where GoTab has moved since COVID, everything I spoke about was really prior to COVID. In COVID, we rolled out our own fully functioning mobile POS, so handheld POS, countertop POS. And one of the things that we built even before COVID also was the kitchen operations. One of the things that most people don't realize and candidly why QR codes have been so hated is because they tend to break the kitchen. And what I mean by that is when you deploy, like the scenario you just described, when you deploy a bunch of QR codes, that means every guest in your restaurant or hotel now has a POS. So there's no throttling, if you will, there's no limiting of orders. And if you have a hundred people in a space, and maybe in a normal restaurant you might have two or three POS terminals, you can only take three orders at a time, two orders at a time. If you have a hundred people, you actually have a hundred phones, which means you have potentially a hundred orders all simultaneously come into your bar, into your kitchen. And unfortunately we lived through this, we ran the US Open for golf once, and they didn't build a large enough bar. They had two bars and then unfortunately it was on the West Coast. So the bars opened at 10 a.m. and there were 15,000 people there at two bars. As you might imagine, everybody wanted a beer at 10 a.m. Pacific time, because many of them were on the East Coast time. And so, you know, 10,000 beer orders came in roughly at 10 a.m. to come out of two bars. So obviously there were a lot of angry people. One good thing about GoTab is we enable a lot of ordering. One bad thing is we can totally annihilate your ability to deliver on those orders. So the next problem that we ended up having to solve was, okay, how do you manage that flow? How do you set expectations so that you don't take too many orders? So we ended up building all of these different things, so kitchen operations, KDS, POS. And then as COVID passed, thankfully, you know, people have gone back to full-service restaurants where they can and want that. And so GoTab now is a full, you know, fixed POS, handheld POS. You don't have to use a QR anywhere. And we do. We have fine dining restaurants using GoTab, and they don't want a QR at any point on their table. There are other features that we have that are actually very cool, even in a fine dining restaurant, like texting the guests their tab when they are seated, so that they can walk out or view their tab at any point, or God forbid there isn't a server nearby and they want a glass of wine, they can get that. So there's not a QR involved, but there's all kinds of other capabilities. So I digressed, but the point is that we've moved into a lot of other use cases where the same principles of high efficiency kitchen operations, knowing where the guest is, knowing where to take it to them, are all pervasive into our system.

Arun Upneja: So another thing I want to mention, and we were talking about this before the podcast started, I was in Austria recently and you've been traveling a lot, and anytime you go to Europe, I want to settle a check. The server comes to my desk, to my table, and presents me the tab, and I show the credit card, and it's cleared right there on the spot. Besides saving time, it also gives me a lot of comfort that there is no fraud happening. So I've not seen that in the US. Why is that?

Tim McLaughlin: I mean, you are seeing it with handhelds. Some of the big POSs have handhelds. The reason is because people are sitting on a lot of old systems they purchased 20, 30 years ago. They don't realize the efficiency gains that they could get from a newer system. And so they are remaining on those where they print the ticket, they bring it out for signature, and they take your credit card back. It's sort of the economic cost fallacy. They believe that it's going to cost them a lot. You asked earlier about the ROI, and I unfortunately skipped that question. I didn't mean to. The reality is our system runs on commodity cell phones. So you actually have no capex or no upfront costs. I know other systems are trying to get there as well, so I definitely won't claim to be the only one that does that. But for running a full-service kitchen with full KDS and multi-station KDS, you can't do that right now. A lot of those systems are proprietary, and you're looking at a big upfront hardware cost. I think that's why people are stuck with these 20-year-old systems or even 10-year-old systems that are really not as flexible. The newer systems like ours is all software. You can run it on an Android device, you can run it on an iOS device, you can install the POS on your own personal phone. You can just go download it from the app store and start it up, and that didn't cost us anything, and it didn't cost you anything. I'd say as that becomes more prevalent, and some of the new credit card reading technology, which is you can actually take a credit card now and touch it to a phone, and that is now a credit card reader, so you don't have to buy these stupid $200, $300, $400 credit card readers, and you're going to see a lot more of this stuff become prevalent. I'd say in a sense Europe leapfrogged the United States in its adoption of mobile POS, although it's now inferior because now the US is going to leapfrog Europe and move to, I would say, commodity cell phones as a mobile POS, which is what we're doing.

Arun Upneja: So earlier you mentioned that when a server approaches you and takes the credit card out of your vision, that's not allowed by credit card companies. And I guess that's the reason why in Europe they try to settle it right on this part. So that's very strange that in the US we are used to our credit cards being taken out of our sight.

Tim McLaughlin: I agree. It's very strange. It shouldn't really be the case. There are emerging standards for sort of higher, I don't want to say security, lowering fraud in Europe that are making their way to the US. But even things like the CVV code, which you now have to enter all the time in e-commerce, or some of what they call two factor verification, where if you ever do a big online purchase that makes you enter in a code that was texted to you. It's funny, that standard is actually not even high enough for Europe to use. So that standard that we're using, which is called 3DS, is actually not acceptable in Europe because even though it's better than what we have here, it's still not good enough for their requirements. So I would say in general, yes, there's a lot of sorts of legacy in the US. I think once people get past the sunk cost fallacy and realize that there's a lot of gains, the biggest shift is really just shifting your operation. It's not a capital expense. It's really just realizing, okay, I'm going to have to teach my people to work a little differently. And if I do that, I can recognize really big guest experience improvements, first and foremost, but then also a ton of efficiency gains. We, just for example, you asked earlier about the ROI, our average, and this is average, our average restaurant is 25.8% labor costs. That's average. That's not a bad number for a labor cost in a restaurant. In fact, I know plenty that are north of 30. And then our sales per labor hour is 83 bucks. And again, these are just the average numbers. The ROI we see is like three to six months on the product rolling out, assuming you've implemented some of the better practices and you aren't treating it like a cash register. And that's really what we find is if you take advantage of what the technology can do for you, you can get really substantial gains in efficiency and a guest experience. If you treat it like a cash register, then yes, it's really going to be no better than a cash register.

Arun Upneja: Right. And just to sort of highlight one aspect of it, when a customer takes the tab and you have to take it now, first you have to go inside, print it, bring it, then you go to take it down, back inside. All of those steps are saved because someone says, okay, I want my tab. You're right there. Show them the tab and they pay on the spot. I mean, that just saves so much time. And going back to your earlier point of having a more rapid turnover, table turnover, that's just so critical.

Tim McLaughlin: Well, so there's a feature we have on our handheld POS. So it's specifically designed for splitting. If you've ever had the joy of being a server, you get to enjoy splitting guest checks. And all you can do is split a check wrong. So we actually have the ability with our mobile POS, we can drop it on the table. It looks a lot like a check presenter, intentionally. So it's like a leather folio. And the idea is that the guest can do their own splitting at the table on that device. So they can pick which items they want to pay for, they hit pay, they tap their credit card, they pass it to their friend who does the same, and they can split evenly, they can split by item. And again, if you've ever done splitting at brunch, it's a nightmare from a server's perspective. It may take you 20 minutes, and that's not time that you're getting paid for. So in an ideal world, you drop off the POS, basically the POS converts into a check presenter, you drop that on the table, they do their own splitting, you walk away, screen turns green when it's done, you pick it back up, it's a mobile POS. Of course, if you need to have two, you can, because they're low cost. But it's a thankless job, payment is. It's just a transactional job and a choose-up time. We should absolutely come say goodbye. You should absolutely come spend the time as a server. But we just don't think like picking which item goes on which bill is really a great use of anyone's time.

Arun Upneja: What is also very interesting in a bar situation is that you have to, if you move, you have to settle your bill and then move to another place. That just creates a lot of friction in the service and the hospitality.

Tim McLaughlin: Correct. Another one actually you just mentioned, which I find, and maybe I'll save it for a tipping discussion. I say I order a drink at the bar and then I have to close out my check to go to the table and we all know the reason for that is, so the bartender gets their tip. In our system, tips are attributed to whoever took the order. So what that means is that the tip for the bartender will be apportioned out of the total tab. Even as the guest wanders around, if they order something at the bar, then that portion of the tip goes to the bartender if they go to the table. That portion of the tip goes to whoever came to their table and took the order. And then anything that they order on their own, we leave in a pool up to the restaurant to decide how they allocate that. So there is no need to this whole silly model of closing out the tab, because we know every single order and who took it. And if you want to assign the tips for that order to that, and I hate to use this word in hospitality, but in other industries we would call them salespeople, right? So if someone comes out and takes your order, in effect they kind of are a salesperson, and they're doing their job by coming and approaching you and finding what it is you would like. And then, of course, we attribute that tip to them, which is a very fair model. It certainly drives the right behavior as well, which is, hey, go see how the guest is doing and see if they need anything. And of course they get the tip for that effort.

Arun Upneja: That is just fantastic. So since we are on tips, so let's talk about a big complaint that is there that people are being nudged for tips. Every single place you go, the screen is turned, you mentioned that at the beginning, you turn the screen, and you say, and you're asking for a tip, and the tip system has expanded beyond it used to be traditionally restaurants and bars and now convenience stores and picking up even takeout orders. Has this trend gone too far?

Tim McLaughlin: I mean, I think so. But that might be because I'm not, you know, I guess the people who are, what we see is tips are correlated with age, inversely correlated with age, and so that puts me on the old side, right, because I'm not totally keen on it. I heard there's now taking tips at grocery stores. It certainly is the case. I personally think it's gone way too far. I think long term we'll probably move, I hope that we move the direction of, say, some of the European countries where it's just, it's not expected, which is interesting because the UK is actually going towards tips right now. So go figure on that. The other thing is that you do find that people are a little more predictable and much more interested in showing up in their jobs more consistently with a higher minimum wage and a less tip driven sort of variable aspect. It's a less feast and famine, if you will. I don't know. I'm obviously an advocate of probably eliminating the tip portion of the minimum wage in the US and moving more in the direction of a stabilized income.

Arun Upneja: It's very interesting. I really appreciate this perspective that there is a difference in how people behave whether they are receiving a fistful of cash, like you said, or the money is going into their check and is going into their bank account as part of their regular budget. So going back to that question, so does everyone in the restaurant front and back share equally or do you have differential?

Tim McLaughlin: Yeah, it's not equally. So typically they will pull tips over the duration you worked, so half days depending on how they allocate them. And then they will tip backs to the bar or whatever the bar staff and then likewise tip backs to the kitchen staff. There's a lot of different ways you can do it. With GoTab, we work with a bunch of different tip management systems. It's really up to the operators to what they think is fair and equitable for the team. You can also do what I said, which was attribute some portion of the tip to the server who handled those guests. So if you wanted to give an over allocation to them, if it's their table, you could certainly do that, but it depends on what you think is the right model. You could also just, I would probably err on the other side, which is just keep it even, but then look at the metrics of sales by server. Not necessarily tabs by server, because that actually, if you're doing a shared model, tabs don’t indicate anything. Tabs just means they owned, in the old sense, they owned that table. But if you go to France, for example, you're going to have three different servers approach your table at different times. They don't assign a server to a table.

Arun Upneja: What I did find, another comment that you made, I found very interesting, is that since there is the shared tipping model, that the employees are pushing out non-performers. So it's not left up to the owner or the restaurant manager to say you're not performing. While the employees are doing it, can you sort of expand on that a little bit?

Tim McLaughlin: Yeah, I mean, it's any time you get a team model where the team's dependent on each other. And if my take-home pay is based on you contributing on the floor, and I don't see you on the floor, and I don't see you selling product or I don't see you supporting me in some way, I'm probably going to complain, right? And those complaints eventually bubble up until there's some examination into why is everybody complaining about this person? Well, the reality is the statistics don't support that they're selling. The other staff's not supporting their contributions in other ways. Maybe you're doing something else. So it's sort of become self-regulating in the sense that the other, assuming you have some good employees, then they will naturally push out or identify. The next question is, do you act on that, right? They voice all those complaints. That person either has to be pushed out by management or they're going to quit. So I know, at least from my management career, that good people will push out bad people. But if you don't escort those underperformers out, the good people will also quit. So they really aren't super compatible. You have to make sure you're listening.

Arun Upneja: No, I just love it. And the kind of data that is being generated by GoTab, it's just unprecedented. I mean, we didn't have access to that data. So you talked about how the tab is following the person, and regardless of where you are. That's the kind of level of detail that we've never had passed in the other POS system. So we're fantastic. Where do you go from here? I mean, you're already doing so much, so much detail. So what do you have in mind to see an area of growth?

Tim McLaughlin: Well, there's some really cool possibilities that arise when you move to QRs. Not to say that everybody should move to QRs, but there are some really cool things that become possible because my prior life was e-commerce. And in e-commerce, you don't just track what people buy, you actually track what they look at. You track who they're with. You track time of day. You track every single movement, so what we call behavioral data. So that behavioral data is maybe not, you know, maybe you looked at the burger, but you didn't buy the burger. So the question is, why didn't you buy the burger? Did you not like some ingredient on it? Was there something else? What did you look at? How long did you linger on that? There's a lot of data that we can use to educate ourselves on what guests like and what they don't like. One really simple example is, let's say you and I go to a restaurant and say you pay because I paid last time. In a normal restaurant, I'm invisible, because all they see is your data from your credit card. I'm sitting in their restaurant, yet they don't know that Tim McLaughlin ever even came there. Whereas in a QR model, both of our phones are there, they know both of us are there. They know what we each separately ate. Maybe you're a vegetarian, maybe I'm not. But you paid for my hamburger, so they think you're a hamburger eater. In the old model, in the new model, I know which person prefers what. I know which person looked at what and which one they didn't. So there's a lot more data than people even realize. And I will actually say there's almost no operators even know how to take advantage of it, which is I'm hoping eventually we'll get to the point where people start understanding, hey, this is important data. Another piece of data that I think is really intriguing and we're trying to expose more easily or readily is what are basically your winners and your losers on your menu? Especially if you're like a farm-to-table place, you're rolling out new product all the time, and people will come in and they'll try something. And one of the things I think about in hospitality is you have novelty, and you have nostalgia. And they're two very different characteristics. Most people, like me, they'll try anything once. That doesn't mean they like it. That just means they'll try it. So you can give me some terrible beer, for example. There was a trend in beer where they would make breakfast cereal beers. It's a terrible idea. Nobody should ever pursue this. But they did it. And of course, then everybody went out and bought it because, hey, it's super novel. And guess what? It tasted terrible. So they never bought it again. But you could take that same signal to mean, oh, this is an amazing beer, Fruit Loops beer. Everybody wants that every day. The reality is that was just a misguided novelty. Fun for a quick one hit, but never going to go far. So that kind of data is there. But separating out the signal from the noise is not something everybody's doing just yet. 

Arun Upneja: I think my data analytics faculty are going to love this. Separating the signal from the noise and all the data that you generate. So for a bit of fun, we wrap up each podcast with a quick round of questions. As a technologist, what are you still analog on?

Tim McLaughlin: Humorously, in my household, we still read the printed newspaper. I still get The Economist in print. I try to minimize my screen time, although I don't always succeed after certain hours. We play analog instruments. I have chickens in my backyard, if that gives you any ideas.

Arun Upneja: Yes, it does give me a very clear picture. I'm not going to tell you what my daily screen time is on average.

Tim McLaughlin: Well, I didn't say I succeeded.

Arun Upneja: But still, to be able to handle the chickens, you necessarily have to get off your phone. There are no screens involved with chickens. Exactly. Where did you go on your last vacation?

Tim McLaughlin: I'd say the most recent one of notice was Greece. We really enjoyed it. As I was mentioning earlier, it was fun watching how they do hospitality there. Food is amazing, of course. But I think I told you earlier, my observation is that all the servers and all the restaurants are running the point of sale on their own personal phones. So there's no dedicated devices. It's just their own hand-held phone taking orders. It's kind of funny to see because I know that wouldn't fly in the United States.

Arun Upneja: But you're going to change our practice in the United States by having dedicated phones or dedicated instruments that restaurants can purchase at a very cheap cost. 

Tim McLaughlin: Yeah. I mean, you can do that. You could also run if you're a family-owned restaurant. There's no reason you can't run on your own phones. In fact, one of the things we do is we have the managers, because I wouldn't ask my rank-and-file staff maybe to install it on their personal phone. But a lot of managers don't want to be carrying around two devices, right? They've got their phone in their pocket, and they've got a mobile POS. If given the choice, they'd rather just install the POS on their personal phone so that they walk up to a guest and like, oh, I want to comp this. They can just do it on their iPhone. Just less stuff to carry and they can get notifications on their Apple Watch. Also, who wants to wear two Apple Watches? So it'd be much nicer to know that there's bad feedback on Table 33 because your Apple Watch just says, oh, a guest at Table 33 said they had a bad experience.

Arun Upneja: My goodness, this is an incredible amount of detail and technology. So let's talk about a recent TV series or movie that you've enjoyed recently.

Tim McLaughlin: I'll go with Only Murders in the Building. It's a family-friendly-Ish show.

Arun Upneja: Except for the name, of course.

Tim McLaughlin: Except for the name, yeah. And there is some murdering, but it's mostly pretty mundane. It's hysterical and great people.

Arun Upneja: I did have another question for you, but I think I already have the answer. The promise of technology was it would save us time. If we go with that notion, what's your favorite way to spend leisure time? I'm assuming it's taking care of the chickens or something else. That's good. Let's go with that.

Tim McLaughlin: No, I'll go with hiking. I was just hiking yesterday. So if there's anything that gets me into the mountains somewhere, I'm happy. So it could be skiing, it could be hiking, running, any of the above.

Arun Upneja: We will go with that answer. Thank you, Tim. It was a pleasure to talk with you today. And thank you, everyone, for listening today to our Distinguished podcast. If you want to join the conversation and share your thoughts and suggestions, email me at shadean@bu.edu. Special thanks to the team who produced this podcast. Mara Littman, Andy Hallock and the entire team at Boston University School of Hospitality Administration. To keep up with Distinguished podcasts, be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. You can also learn more about our undergraduate and graduate programs at Boston University School of Hospitality Administration by visiting bu.edu/hospitality. Thank you. Thank you.