Anyone who has worked in a restaurant or watched a few episodes of "Kitchen Nightmares" knows how hectic the food and beverage business can be. Chon Nguyen wants to help calm the chaos.
Nguyen is a co-founder of FusionPrep and Newgentek, two Tampa-based businesses that provide solutions for restaurants.
FusionPrep is a digital app that helps kitchens keep track of things like recipes, line checks, food safety labeling and training. Launched seven years old, the platform currently supports more than 2,000 restaurants across the globe. Some of FusionPrep’s local and high-profile clients include World of Beer, First Watch, PDQ and Ciccio’s Restaurant Group. The company has three employees.
Nguyen’s other venture, Newgentek, is an audio-visual and IT integrator focusing primarily on restaurant retail. The company helps design, install and manage the technical components that go into making a modern restaurant run, including low-voltage cabling, networking, point of sale and telephone and wireless infrastructure. Since Nguyen founded Newgentek in 2017, the company has experienced rapid growth. Newgentek currently has 40 employees, supports 400 restaurants around the country and is on pace to do $11 million in revenue in 2019, according to Nguyen.
“Year-over-year growth has been tremendous,” he said. “We'll almost quadruple our revenue [this year].”
Nguyen attributes that growth to the partnerships Newgentek has made with expanding brands. The company sticks to a formula that allows it to quickly build out the AV and IT infrastructure of each of its client’s new locations.
“We try to align ourselves with fast-growing restaurant brands that are building multiple restaurants a year,” he said. “We’ll build out a sort of playbook for them, and then we'll go to each individual new site and rinse-and-repeat the build."
One of Newgentek’s biggest challenges has been to keep up with its clients’ tight construction timelines. To solve that problem, the company builds and tests most of its equipment in its Tampa facility, before palletizing and shipping the equipment to the new restaurant. That allows Newgentek to offer “plug and play” installation.
Scaling has been another challenge for the young company.
“As an entrepreneur, managing rapid growth while making sure we grow thoughtfully and can support our growth with talent has been challenging at times,” Nguyen said.
Newgentek recently started fitting conference rooms, huddle space and offices with AV and IT infrastructure.
“A lot of new companies are moving in to Tampa,” Nguyen said. “There are a lot of folks expanding locally. I think the market overall is kind of just hot right now.”
