A recap of Decision Logic’s Keegan Conrey in conversation with Cali BBQ Media.
Ask any multi-unit operator what keeps them up at night, and you’ll hear a familiar list: food cost, labor cost, turnover, and the growing pile of software their teams are supposed to be using but aren’t.
In a recent conversation with Cali BBQ Media, Keegan Conrey, CEO of Decision Logic, argued that the last item on that list is quietly making the first three worse. His thesis is simple: restaurant technology only works if the people on the floor actually use it.
Here are three ideas from the interview that are worth every operator’s attention.
- The best restaurant technology solves people problems
The restaurant software category is crowded with tools that demo beautifully and get shelved within a quarter. Keegan’s read on why: they were designed for a buyer, not a user.
The systems that restaurants rely on and keep long term are the ones that make every shift go more smoothly. They make the next decision easier for a general manager who is also running a line, coaching a new hire, and answering a guest’s complaint at the same time.
Flashy features don’t drive adoption. Fit does.
- AI is only as good as the data you feed it
Every operator wants AI in the stack. Very few have the operational data hygiene to make it useful.
Keegan’s point is unglamorous but important: before AI can forecast demand, or flag a variance; the sales data, the recipes, and the invoice detail must be clean and consistent first. Without that foundation, AI just automates the noise that was already there.
Get the fundamentals right first. Then let the models do their thing.
- Small habits create big financial results
The most memorable stat from the conversation: restaurants that simply standardize how and when they count inventory unlock $15,000 to $30,000 in additional profit per location, per year.
No new hardware. No new headcount. Just consistency in the 60% of the cost base that is food and labor.
It’s a reminder that operational excellence rarely comes from a breakthrough. It comes from a hundred small habits, executed the same way, every day, across every location.
The bigger picture
Decision Logic focuses on the back of the house because that’s where margin is won or lost. But the philosophy Keegan describes applies to the whole tech stack: technology should quietly help operators run better restaurants, not create more work.
Success isn’t measured in adoption of dashboards. It’s measured whether restaurants become more profitable.