Member Info for ART123

It just surprises me that the new CEO hasn't done a Proactive podcast as yet. He's missed a chance to talk a load of b*llocks and attempt to justify his over-promotion - ie from telesales manager to CEO.

Maybe Sanj should do one too to let the shareholders know how excited he is about his demotion and new role as Head of Acquisition of Restaurant Groups - oh, sorry I forgot he seems to have left, resigned or been sacked from that job and he has now just got a Consultancy

What really needs updating is the Major Shareholders Holdings part on the website. The shareholders do not even know who the 10% investor was in June and if they are still holding. Also are the ex-shareholders of Table Pouncer still holding and also how many shares have the directors got.

Looks like the dream of having chains on board has gone for now as Sanj is now only advising on such matters rather than doing this.

Things are going from bad to worse with this share.

Sell gone through at 1.30p for e new year's low....

That nonsense RNS should push the SP to a new low today..............no-one knows what they are on about anymore,..........

Why refer to an earlier time they mentioned a funding update in today's RNS.

Why not just take on a non-exec director instead of talking about it!!!!

Doesn't sound like Sanj is having much success and is about to leave this sinking ship with no chains signed.

Does anyone know what they are doing or what is going on here? Obviously not. Now they think they need to find someone who does. Good luck with that.

In the meantime they could of brought out the Interim Results with that silly, waste of time RNS.

The Directors and tech team are ten thousand miles away and no-one in this country has a clue what is going on - I'm not sure if they even have an office in this country.

The directors here know the figures. They know that yield management for restaurants is a flawed concept because it doesn't bring in any revenue.

In the first year or two of Big Dish running a discount card scheme, the revenue was up to $250,000 per annum. Costs were roughly the same but the business was only in Manilla. Then when they converted to yield management, using the same restaurants, the revenue fell to less than $10,000 per annum but the costs were still roughly the same as before. That is ridiculous. This current concept just doesn't generate revenue.

You do not close down a concept that works. That just doesn't make sense.

Y

The concept is in reality far from 'proven' and I don't think that it works or is likely to work. We shall see more when the Interim Results come out soon with revenue figures for the 6 months from 1st April until 30th September 2019.

The two problems with this concept are that firstly it doesn't generate enough revenue and secondly there needs to be a way of getting the customers to pay for the opportunity to get the discounted meal.

It doesn't work for the restaurant to both give the discount and pay the App for the customer and while it looks great for the diners it just doesn't make business sense. Also the fee to the restaurant has gone down and down to end up as 0.50p per person which is way too low for Big Dish to make any money.

There has to be a way to make the customer pay a booking fee in the same way that Table Now are running their App. The customers pay either a £2.50p per person booking fee, or a monthly or yearly fee. That way round the revenue is much higher - £2.50 compared to 0.50p - and the restaurant is happier and better off with the customer paying for the booking rather than themselves.

No wonder they have just employed ex-Table Now management to work for Big Dish as the Table Now concept is light years ahead of the yield management concept.

The very fact that the management have closed Big Dish Asia, lock stock and barrel, speaks volumes.

Monty and a few others keep posting that the 'concept is proven'. That is total nonsense. The management would not have closed down their Asian business if it was revenue generating and showed any signs of at some stage becoming profitable. For goodness sake the tech team are all still in Asia. And to run two businesses with one tech team is always going to be cost effective.

It looks like Big Dish Asia was closed because the concept didn't work there and probably won't work anywhere.

I see that Table Now was started in 2017. This outfit (Big Dish) started dabbling in restaurant discounts in 2013. Table Now already have thousands of restaurants on their platform. Big Dish has 207. Thousands of restaurants stand some kind of a chance of making revenue, maybe even enough to completely cover costs. 200 restaurants will not make any kind of sizeable revenue. Table Now charge £2.50 per person per booking. Big Dish charge .50p per person per booking. That is 5 times less.

Big Dish decided to copy Eatigo and change to Yield Management in 2016. I first came across them when there was talk that they were going to RTO into a company called Nyota Minerals. This was first announced in November 2016 - see the link.

https://www.investegate.co.uk/nyota-minerals-ltd--nyo-/rns/funding--proposed-acquisition---suspension/201611150700061447P/

For those who can't be bothered to read the link I will copy some info:

"Further information on Bigdish

Bigdish owns and operates a yield management system for the restaurant sector (www.bigdish.com) that enables restaurants to offer varying discounts at different times of day with the objective of increasing the number of diners during off-peak times. Bigdish currently has a number of restaurant partners in Manila, Philippines and plans imminently to commence operations in several countries in the South East Asian region.

Bigdish has existing smartphone applications and owns its own proprietary software developed by its in-house development team. Bigdish plans to adopt an 'Uber style' expansion approach to business development with the aim of scaling up revenues and geographic spread.

Bigdish formally commenced in April 2013 by Aidan Bishop who co-founded the business and, on closing of the transaction, it is expected that Mr Bishop will join the Company's senior management team."

The RTO never happened and Big Dish finally IPO'd, vastly overpriced, in August 2018. (Just another 21 months wasted). They have since wasted another 15 months since the IPO dithering around not too sure how to go about the business they have been running for 6 years.

What's my point? I'm not sure. Maybe it's all a bit pointless. We shall see.

Yes, I was the one, and the only one, who was ranting on about that on this board saying that Big Dish needs to offer a full range of discounts and a longer booking window.

The RNS was dated 12th November. That was more than 3 weeks ago. These changes should have been done straight away not more than 3 weeks later. No restaurants should be bullied into giving away 50% discounts. Takeaway Apps give ZERO discounts and yet these Apps still turn over hundreds of millions of revenue every year from people ordering zero discounted takeaways. Open Table offer no discounts and yet their App was recently sold for $2.6Billion.

These restaurants should tell Big Dish to p*ss off until they offer a feasible range of discounts.

To me it's quite alarming that some of these restaurants are offering 50% discounts all day long. Then on top of saying goodbye to half of their revenue - and the part of their revenue that is pure profit as well - they have to pay Big Dish for sending them the customer. This cannot be a sustainable way of running a business.

Compare this to Just Eat and the other food delivery takeaway Apps where generally there are no discounts at all and the customer still has to pay a delivery charge.

Added to the fact that these extreme discounts are mostly on Mondays to Thursdays, when not many people bother to eat out anyway, I cannot see this lasting very long. In fact, unless this 50% all day discount was going to bring in a huge increase in business it cannot be a profitable and long-term option.

Obviously the model doesn't work. That is why they have only managed to sign 200 restaurants in 16 months since listing.

All we ever hear from the management is how much Tastecard was sold for, how many restaurants Sanj added for another company, how many restaurants the new CEO added for another company, etc. but none of this means anything to Big Dish.

All Big Dish have done is get rid of 7 out of the 9 TM's that were recruited in less than 3 months, plus the TM that used to work in the Bristol area, while insinuating they were not up to the job. Though maybe they were just faced with an impossible job because the restaurants just don't want to sign up to an App that is going to cost them more than 50% of their revenue.

And even if they ever do manage to sign up a sizeable amount of restaurants they still won't be making much in the way of revenue with this flawed model, especially if all they are doing is filling empty tables during the Monday to Thursday quiet periods.

This is probably why the Nationwide roll-out failed and this will probably be the death of the telesales roll-out too.

As for filling empty tables at quiet times - nice idea but no money in it though as can be seen by the results.

Revenue for the period 1st April to 30th September are due out soon. That will be an indication of the way this is going.

Oh, and don't tell me they would have closed down Big Dish Asia if it was making money or even likely to in the future. Big Dish Asia was finished when the management changed from being a discount card scheme to yield management. The revenue all but disappeared.

What Big Dish need to do is work out how to get the diners paying the fee rather than the restaurants. That is the only way this will ever work - and looking at Table Now the fee needs to be a lot higher than 50p per diner. Table Now charge £2.50 per person - that is 5 times as much and therefore 5 times more revenue. The restaurants are not going to put up with the Big Dish model for very long. Table Now do much the same discounts anyway. Why should the restaurants have to drop their prices to get on the Big Dish App and then have to pay Big Dish for bringing the customers to them. Bonkers.

So what. " As Head of B2B Marketing and Sales Enablement, Sanj helped The Fork grow from three to twelve countries and increased the client base using its online reservation software from 11,000 to over 36,000 restaurants in under two years."

Sanj was appointed CEO in mid-February. There were 75 restaurants live on the platform as of 1st March 2019 and roughly 200 on 1st December 2019. So Sanj, who added 25,000 restaurants in one job in less than 2 years, added 125 restaurants in 9 months in another job. Over 2 years that would be about 330. Spot the difference.

I am beginning to think that this is a flawed business model and is not going to work in this industry.

Why else would this company have struggled through all this time to sign up 200 restaurants? Why would so many restaurants be happy to leave the app/website after only a few months? Why would they keep changing the way they sign up restaurants? Why would 7 out of 9 TM's either have left or were sacked after only a few weeks from a £35K per annum job?

Is it that difficult to sign-up restaurants - and the Birmingham restaurants look about as fragile as Bristol where the numbers went from 0 to 40 in 3 months and then from 40 to 11 in the same period of time.

I posted some while ago comparing the revenue figures for both Big Dish Asia and Table Pouncer when they converted from discount card to yield management and while the discount card scheme brought in revenue of between £150K and £250K when they converted to yield management the revenue plummeted to £6K in Asia and £24K in Bournemouth with exactly the same restaurants.

There is also the major problem that with this system the restaurants are both giving the large discounts as well as paying Big Dish for providing the customer. With the discount card scheme or with the system that Table Now uses the customer pays the app/website provider and not the restaurant.

No, I am definitely beginning to think that this yield management idea is not going to be a success. Chances are that they may have to go back to a discount card scheme and drop this idea altogether.