Member Info for ART123

Wakefield added now - are they in the Premier League?

This is just getting a bit silly now. All of these 1's actually look very silly and give the wrong impression. Plus if the list gets any longer on the website it'll be coming off the page which will look daft, especially when it turns out most of only got 1 restaurant onboard.

Maybe the team needs to swot up on their geography and populations. I can think of lots of better places than Wakefield - how about Cardiff, Swansea, Edinburgh, Blackpool, Portsmouth, Plymouth, etc, etc.

This is also where management should come in as we all know that it has been a lot easier to sign up restaurants in the south of the country than the north. Look at what happened in Newcastle a few months ago compared with Brighton.

I see Livingston is near Edinburgh. Edinburgh might be a better idea.

This is still all a bit pedestrian and that is not just my opinion but is the way the market is viewing this at the moment. From very high volumes on 7th and 9th January trades have now all but dried up as the restaurant numbers still trickle onto the platform.

We are waiting for take-off. All the checks and groundwork and preparations are being done but we are still on the ground.

We know Tom and his team can get these restaurants signed up and we have a timeframe within which to expect it to be done. Big Dish needs this now after all the false starts and the 18 months of shareholder pain and suffering. It's payback time.

2 more in Manchester for 7 and 1 in London for 39 plus 1 in Livingston wherever that may be.

We now have all of the largest cities on the platform except Edinburgh and Cardiff which are also important regional hubs.

This is a useful link for populations of towns and cities:
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-kingdom-population/cities/
scroll down past the pictures for a full list.

There are 50 towns and cities with bigger populations than Brighton and Bournemouth so that should be an easy 2000 restaurants - 50 X 40.

Cambridgeshire is a great idea for areas that don't have any large cities but are popular with visitors and tourists. I can think of several - Cornwall, Cumbria (The Lake District), Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, etc, etc.

Looks like the App has been updated. I see Google ratings plus it is all a lot quicker and sharper.

Everyone is obviously sitting tight, fingers crossed hoping things are going to work out this time around. I'm the same. Roll on 3000 restaurants. Roll on the 20p/30p share price. Let's hope it happens.

By the way, don't get me wrong here. If Big Dish on with it and sign circa 3000 restaurants in 6 months I don't really give a f*ck if they have a CEO or not.

Aidan - Chairman - then a new CEO in this country accountable to Aidan - then Tom and his telesales team accountable to the CEO plus any media, marketing, chain acquisition, etc people also accountable to the CEO.

Also get the CEO a permanent office, preferably in London.

So, in brief, there should be a new CEO who's job is to be the CEO and who doesn't only oversee the restaurant acquisitions but also Sanj and his chains, the media side, the marketing side, in fact everything that needs to be done to get this company up and running.

While Aidan is 6500 miles away in Manilla there needs to be someone running the show on a daily basis in the UK.

The problem here, and with Aidan and his approach, is that the company should have a separate CEO in this country who is not solely acquiring restaurants. They RNS's recently about getting an independent board member but rather missed the point. They need someone who can run all aspects of the company and not just restaurant acquisitions.

Sanj was made CEO when his job was really to get the restaurants on board and then nothing was achieved because he was too busy being the CEO to acquire the restaurants and too busy heading the acquisitions team to be the CEO.

Now Tom Sumner has been recruited to head a telesales team to get the restaurants on the platform but he has also been made the CEO. It was probably his decision to let the 2 TM's go as he couldn't be bothered with them. They would have had to be accountable to him in the absence of Sanj and he probably just couldn't see the point of keeping them on the payroll but that really is a very poor decision.

Also, there was a media girl here a while ago. Has she been let go too? And what about the guy who used to be a senior marketing manager with yahoo. Is he still here?

There needs to be a CEO in charge of all aspects of the business and not just the head of acquisitions promoted to CEO.

spero

If you email Aidan then you might like to also suggest that he should have kept the 2 successful TM's on the payroll as they were doing a great job and as you said the other day they would "complement the telesales". I doubt they have found themselves other jobs by now so he could re-recruit them both. Along with Brighton there are many, many other towns in the south-east that would appreciate the personal touch. The same goes for the Midlands. They were both doing so well.

Also maybe ask him to make sure the full team of 10 telesales agents are on board. No point in stringing this out for the sake of it, especially if he hasn't and won't keep the 2 TM's employed.

I feel Aidan gets his full quota of salary (whether in shares, cash or expenses) without necessarily doing his full quota of work. You don't need to tell him that though!

There are quite simply dozens and dozens of locations that can be added here.

Apart from all the big cities which will all be good for 50 to 100 each, there are tourist areas such as The Lake District and Cornwall and towns such as Blackpool and Torquay, and lots of Home County towns such as Reading, Guildford, Winchester, etc not to mention Essex and Norfolk, Kent and lots and lots more.

This should be a piece of p*ss.

The restaurant list is clearly visible in the drop-down box right in the middle of the home page on the website - where it says "Search your town or city - Find Tables".

Once you have selected one of the available locations it will bring up the relevant restaurants and then all of the locations are also available in another drop-down box at the top of the webpage where it says "Change Location".

You obviously cannot count as I have just done a count and there are 239 restaurants on the platform. I was expecting 238 going from Alan Partridge's last count where he was 1 out anyway but there is another restaurant in Leicester for 12 now which I missed earlier. That means there were 9 extra today.

My research, thanks to Alan Partridge's spreadsheet, tells me that there were 6 new restaurants added last Tuesday. There were 8 added today so the figures are on the up. That is very positive.

There were also 8 added last Thursday, with 1 more as an afterthought on Friday. If the figures are still on the up by the end of the week, then we can hopefully expect as many as 10 or more to be added.

London should be an easy target with anywhere between 300 and 600 restaurants easily achievable. Not sure what has happened to Manchester though. It seems to be stuck on 5 at the moment.

8 new restaurants is very pedestrian.

The TM's were capable of doing 20 a month so with 10 telesales persons that should be an absolute minimum of 200 per month. They are currently hitting about 60 per month so maybe there are still only 3 of them at it. In which case the sooner they get the full team of 10 up and running the better.

iceman

Scroll back through the posts here until you find the post by Alexpartridge100 on Thurs at 15.20. He has a spreadsheet going.

I make it 8 - London 4, Newport 1, Aberdeen 1, Sheffield 2.

Still rather pedestrian and I'm not sure if this is the work of 1, 3 or 10 telesales persons. Not sure why they didn't keep the TM'S on the payroll for now as at least they managed more than 1 or 2 per town/city.

One has to believe that they will scale this up at some stage though I'm not what they are waiting for.

I think the share price held up quite well today all things considered - probably helped by some positive posts.

Without tempting fate, restaurants were added on Tuesday and Thursday last week so let's see what tomorrow brings. 15 last week so that is the new target to beat.

A long time ago - about a year ago that is - I put a proposed valuation of between £200M and £250Million for Big Dish for 6000 restaurants. My valuation was based on Just Eat's valuation, taking into account their take away numbers and revenue. I think it was £226 Million exactly. That was before the recent merger when Just Eat's share price was about £6 - so far lower than the eventual merger share price of nearly £9.

So for 3000 restaurants somewhere around half that would be fine. This would still be a high spikey price as they would have to put a lot of work into getting customers to use the App and building up revenue before such a valuation would be sustainable but the stock market tends to operate on speculation and future value a lot and such spikes are common. It is certainly a guideline though and at the high end of possibilities but who hasn't seen a share go through the roof on speculation alone.

But Big Dish still need to get the restaurants signed up first so the need is for this telesales team to get a move on

We used to go through this with the TM's. They used to be employed and then nothing happened for days and even weeks on end. Then they got the hang of the job and worked out what they were meant to be doing and how to do it and the restaurants started turning up quite quickly.

I would have thought that the telesales team, having done this before, would know exactly what they were doing and how to do it and get off to a flying start.

Restaurants should be added daily - and not one here and one there but in numbers. Try 10 or 20 in Liverpool, Nottingham and Glasgow and not one in each please. And there are hundreds of cities and towns waiting to be targetted.

Please do not complicate matters by posting about chains. They are best forgotten about for now.

This company needs to get on and do one thing at a time - and that one thing is to get these restaurants signed up to the platform.