For restaurants like Davio’s Italian steakhouse, getting events right means gaining and retaining customers.
“If you mess up someone’s wedding, they’re not coming back. If you mess up a business dinner, they’re not coming back, and they’re going to tell other people," said Davio’s CEO, Steve DiFillippo.
Private parties, business meetings, weddings, and other events make up about a quarter of Davio's business, said DiFillippo, who's planning to open the restaurant's 10th location this summer. That's why Davio's relies not only on sharp sales managers to make sure parties go as planned, it relies on technology, specifically, software made by Tripleseat.
Headquartered in Concord, Mass., Tripleseat is a 10-year-old company providing web-based event planning software for restaurants, as well as for hotels and caterers.
“We manage all the logistics,” said Jonathan Morse, Tripleseat’s chief executive, and founder. “We get down to the fork. What sized tables you should have... where it’s going to be, the timing of it … all that information is what we help the restaurants manage.”
Davio's, Grill 23 & Bar, City Winery and Barbara Lynch – are among some of the familiar Hub restaurant operations working with the late-stage startup, which has built up its customer base to 4,000.
Now, after nearly a decade of being self-funded, the company raised $7 million from private investor Level Equity last june and added 15 employees – mainly in sales and marketing – to boost its headcount to 52.
“We had bootstrapped the company,” said Morse, when asked how Tripleseat ran since late 2008 to 2017 with only an early raise of well under a million dollars.
Explaining that the business became profitable about five years ago, and that the first seed raise of about $500,000 was “paid back,” Morse said the goal now is building up its core market in the U.S., while also continuing growth in other areas such as Australia, Europe and Canada.
Morse declined to elaborate on the details of Tripleseat’s plans to expand or its subscription prices and plans. He also wouldn’t discuss whether the company would eye an exit anytime soon.
But DiFillippo, who signed on with Tripleseat early on when it had only a handful of customers, said the software is critical for his business.
"It really keeps our sales managers organized," said DiFillippo. "All our managers can look at each others' restaurants -- we can all look into the program and see what’s going on and communicate with the guest. A sales manager can be in Italy, and see what’s going. All our restaurants are now on the same page."
Before joining onto Tripleseat a decade ago, said DiFillippo, record-keeping for event planning at Davio's was mostly on email and pen and paper, and it was hard to keep consistency among restaurants, maintain information if a staffer quit, and coordinate parties.
Morse, who says Tripleseat "streamlines" these processes, knows a thing or two about the food service business, and the challenges of event planning. The CEO got his start in restaurants in his teens, working as a busboy at the now-shuttered Abbadessa’s on the South Shore.
After years of hustle-and-bustle, he moved up to become the Boston regional catering sales manager at Starwood Hotels & Resorts in the 1990s before getting into software sales, becoming in the 2000s director of sales for Avero, a business intelligence provider for the hospitality industry.
The idea for Tripleseat came after a botched company event at a restaurant Morse attended in Chicago. When he looked into why the plans fell apart, he said, he found out the restaurant’s planner lost her paperwork.
“She just winged it,” he said.
