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Interview: Jeane and Reinier Venekamp of People Serving People 

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Nate Lozier
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Jeane & Reinier Venekamp

Founder & CDO

People Serving People

Jeane Venekamp started her accounting career when she moved to the United States two decades ago. With a passion for helping small businesses she decided to open her own firm. In 2016, fascinated by the restaurant industry and its challenges, she chose to specialize in restaurants.

Reinier Venekamp started his career as a data analyst for a Dutch market research firm after which he took on a global analyst role for a 4 Billion dollar public traded manufacturing company, responsible for data and insights on revenue, cost and margins across all regions and global key accounts. He has extensive hands-on experience with Restaurant365 since 2017, has led several Restaurant365 implementations on behalf of PSP as well as Restaurant365.

Pinar Alptunaer

Partner Marketing Manager

Restaurant365

Pinar Alptunaer is Partner Marketing Manager at Restaurant365, managing relationships with accounting channel and strategic partners. Pinar also manages sponsorships for R365 events like the Restaurant Transformation Tour. With over 20 years of experience working in the hospitality industry, she continues to keep her finger on the pulse by working The Masters Golf Tournament for the past 11 years. A New Orleans native, Pinar grew up between the United States and Istanbul, engraining her love of all things food and hospitality.

pinar
One of the key advantages of outsourcing to PSP is the ability to free up time and resources for business owners to focus on hospitality, food, and service. Can you explain how PSP enables this and what impact it has on your clients’ businesses? 
jean-reneire

Operators have to focus on day-to-day needs of their business. PSP handles everything no one has time to do during the day, but that’s imperative to making the machine run smoothly (pay bills, manage invoices, cost control, analysis, and POV on what the next move might be). By taking the entire backoffice of their plate, provide real-time quality business information that allows business owners to run their business.

pinar
Becoming more cost-effective and efficient is a significant aspect of partnering with PSP. Could you explain how you are helping smaller restaurant groups see the cost-effectiveness typically associated with larger chains?
jean-reneire

The smaller business owner is the one that cannot afford to not know their numbers. 

PSP brings opportunities to reduce costs to the surface on an item level, which for smaller restaurant groups is even more important as larger chains tend to have more purchasing power. 

Billy Beane, one of the best-known data analytics case studies, that set about mining decades of data on hundreds of individual baseball players in order to figure out the best strategy for recruiting good players (when they had no money). Beane bet big time on analytics and his efforts paid off. The Oakland A’s started to win, even against baseball teams that had much larger budgets. The team became the first team in over 100 years of American League baseball to win 20 consecutive games. 

PSP can help smaller groups focus on where the majority of their money goes by identifying key items, eliminating ambient noise and focusing on what makes the biggest difference to their bottom-line.

pinar
Implementing new systems or software can be challenging for any business. How is PSP making the implementation a smooth and painless process for your restaurant clients? 
jean-reneire

PSP takes the burdens of technology implementation and integration off our client’s hands. We allow them to focus on how they want to run their business while PSP makes the system design decisions to support their needs. PSP has a best-practice, step-by-step approach which allows the client to get onto the platform quickly and expand into other areas at a pace that the client’s team can support.

PSP only asks clients to provide information; the heavy lifting of implementation is all done by us in-house. This erases that initial “Where- and HOW – do we start’  that happens when beginning to learn a new technology.

pinar
Can you highlight some specific features or functionality of R365 that has been particularly beneficial for your clients and has set them up for success? 
jean-reneire

Reporting! Not just as a tool to see sales results (also useful!), but also to spot positive/negative changes or fluctuations in COGS, inventory, or other sectors of the business. Reporting takes a complicated mass of information and allows processing it in smaller bites/bytes.

Example: Usage of key items to focus on the 80% of items that truly move the needle. Lots of these are known to the operators, some of them turn to be a surprise.

pinar

If you could have a celebrity chef as a spokesperson for PSP Now, who would you choose and why?

jean-reneire

Jacques Pepin. As one of the French masters, he is not only a celebrated chef, he’s skilled as a businessman and understands those are two different capacities. In the same vein, PSP does not pretend to advise our clients on how to run their business, but we are experts at revealing the true status of the company so that the experts can make the right choices at opportune times.