The food service industry is a main artery in the U.S., pumping $800 billion through the economy every year and employing more than 15 million workers.
One of those was native Richmonder Duncan Parker, who is now the founder and CEO of Dine Inc., a technology startup aiming to improve the way restaurants operate.
While completing college degrees, Parker worked in the food service industry until he was 24. After graduation, he worked in the financial sector for Morgan Stanley and subsequently Merrill Lynch back in Virginia.
The origination of Dine Inc. (formerly DineGigs) began in 2014, when Parker broke from the corporate world and started working as the general manager of the American restaurant LuLu’s in Shockoe Bottom. LuLu’s, similar to seven out of 10 restaurants in the US, is not part of a corporate chain or public company but rather a local, independent restaurant.
When he joined LuLu’s, Parker said the 85-seat restaurant was “ripe for a turnaround.” Only 125-200 customers dined there on a weekend.
Over the next year, Parker hired a well-gelled team, stabilized the restaurant experience, and created an identity, focused especially around music and brunch. Ten months later, OpenTable named LuLu’s on its list of the top 100 brunches in the country.
“When that came out, the gravity [of the news] didn’t really register with me at first,” he said. “After work one night, a bunch of people came up to me and knew the restaurant and were asking for jobs. That had never happened before.”
Unlike big corporations and franchises, independent restaurants with 20-70 employees often don’t have the resources to set up custom software tools. Many of these restaurants, Parker says, are still offline and analog. Other than a modern point-of-sale system, they haven’t been brought into the digital age. That's where he says DineGigs comes in.
Parker’s prior food service jobs and experience at LuLu’s opened his eyes to gaping opportunities in the restaurant management space that technology could help solve.
“Most of the problems have to do with hiring, communicating with and managing employees,” he said. “It’s much more than a POS system; it’s all HR.”
Craigslist, the local restaurant’s go-to hiring tool, started charging $25 per job ad in 2015. So he tried Facebook. “A lot of restaurants try to retrofit Facebook for hiring employees, but that doesn’t work either,” he said.
Moonlighting while at LuLu’s, Parker sketched what would become DineGigs’ software ecosystem for restaurant management, starting with a free job board. Unlike other paid job board services like Snag, Indeed and Monster, DineGigs is designed specifically for the food service industry and it will always be free, says Parker.
As the DineGigs idea grew, Parker realized he had tools for the front of the house, but not for the back of the house. So in June 2016, he left LuLu’s and took a job as a grill cook at Kabana, a Richmond rooftop bar. After gleaning the final insights he needed there, Parker left in 2016 and dove headlong into developing DineGigs.
He officially launched the MVP of DineGigs on May 12, 2017 and the night the platform went live, he received an investment offer. In return for 1 percent of the company, the investor sent a check that arrived the following week. Parker cashed it. “That encouraged me to grow the pool, so I did.”
“I’m building Dine Inc. so that when I’m done I can operate a restaurant the way it should be run — from the beach on an iPad.”
In December 2017, DineGigs caught the eye of D.C. startup accelerator KiwiVenture Partners, which invested $500,000. KiwiTech infused Parker’s one-man company with a distributed team of 15 software engineers in India and a cadre of marketers in the Philippines.
“I thought it was going to take me 3-4 years to build all this,” said Parker. “Their CTO said, ‘Let’s build it all. We’ll fund you to get to all 20 modules.’ So we spent six to eight months designing the first prototype.”
With over 6,000 nationwide users on the MVP, Parker announced last year another fundraising campaign for $5 million to begin building version two of the DineGigs platform. But in the fall of 2018, he cancelled it. “I took feelers on that and realized we were ahead of our skis. I asked, what exactly do we need?”
By shifting to a subscription model and analyzing projections, he found the company needed significantly less. “We didn’t need to raise $5 million. We only needed $350,000.”
Now, the startup is considering equity crowdfunding for a smaller investment round.
Phase one of DineGigs V2 will be released July 22, said Parker. It’s the beginning of a suite of full-service management tools for restaurateurs to hire, manage and communicate with employees and for service workers to self-manage their employment, including background checks, tax forms, 401k, pay stubs, benefits and requesting time off.
“I love the restaurant business and I want to go back into it,” he said. “I’m building Dine Inc. so that when I’m done I can operate a restaurant the way it should be run — from the beach on an iPad.”
