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I've done plenty of sales jobs before.

If a TM is struggling to sign up restaurants in Birmingham then what do you do? You go and sign them up in places where the restaurants can afford to give out these discounts - Stratford-upon-Avon, Royal Leamington Spa, Worcester, Malvern, Stourbridge - there are dozens of places within easy driving distance where the restaurants can manage these discounts.

Also the "better-off" cities to target are Manchester and Edinburgh. Do them first rather than Leicester and Newcastle.

Simples.

I just wish the TM's and management could work it out a bit quicker. It's quite easy. They should have realised that the restaurants in the Midlands and North are going to struggle with the 25% and 50% discounts and adopted their strategy - or just miss them out altogether for now and concentrate on the "wealthy" south that includes London.

I think that the problem over the last month or so has been that the restaurants in the Midlands and North just have not got the concept and even if they did their margins are much too small to start offering 25% and 50% discounts on their menus.

This idea originated with eatigo operating in places like Hong Kong and Singapore which are quite expensive places to live in. Singapore has a higher cost of living than even London.

The restaurants in the south - Bournemouth, Southampton, etc - seemed to get the concept easily enough and were signing up quite quickly. However, since starting on the Midlands and Northern cities the rate of sign-ups has slowed considerably.

Of course it is still up to the management here to work things like this out and not leave it all up to the shareholders.

What they may need to do in the long run is to offer smaller discounts for the northern part of the country which fits more in with their comfort zone. Or they might want to avoid the big cities and target the smaller towns and rural areas where the standard of living is much higher. Again they need to work this out themselves.

Basically they need to use their heads. Newcastle - I don't think so. Anywhere south of Watford - get them signed up quick. I am a southerner and London is included in the south as far as I a concerned.

I suggest leave Sanj alone and in the job for now. Give his 3/6 months to see how London progresses and to get working on some chains.

Completely different ball game in London compared to Birmingham, Leicester, etc.

I have just checked and only 4 out of the 22 restaurants in Birmingham are offering discounts through to closing time today which is a Friday and a busy night for eating out (as is Saturday and Sunday).

Whereas in London 12 out of 16 restaurants are offering discounts through to closing. This on a Friday and Saturday will bring in a lot of bookings - probably more than the whole of the rest of the week put together.

Basically this means that the London restaurants will sign-up much quicker than the restaurants in the Midlands and North-East where they have been very slow and stubborn to commit.

No trades since 10.00am according to my live prices. Not sure if the selling is over at 2p and the rise back up can start.

I've changed my mind about Sanj now I see the attitude of the London restaurants and I think he is the best man for the job at the moment.

What he needs to do though is to get the South back up and running quickly with new restaurants added - Reading, Winchester, Guildford and dozens of similar towns and cities - plus really get 3 TM's working flat out in London. Then things will improve fast.

The big difference which is immediately noticeable is that the London restaurants appear to be quite happy to offer discounted seats on Fridays and Saturdays. We haven't got to Sundays yet but I expect this to be the same. This is something that only the Bournemouth restaurants have tended to do so far and was and is the main stumbling block in the Midlands and North-East.

This means that it is going to be considerably easier to sign up restaurants in London and the numbers there should rise quite rapidly.

Personally I would leave Sanj alone and see how he gets on with London for the next 3 - 6 months.

Maybe suggest to him that he gives up on any new recruiting in Newcastle and instead concentrates on the South/South-West and the South-East territories and London where the restaurants seem to be much happier with the discounts and are much keener to sign up to the platform. That way the numbers will increase very rapidly.

Just my thoughts.

Some idiot has deleted the "Reply from Aidan Bishop" thread for no reason at all. Don't be so stupid.

Has some ****** been deleting posts on here. For god's sake please grow up. Use the filter button and not the report button.

Podcasts aren't actually reassuring shareholders - they are just making things worse.

Aidan seems to have walked away from the business since the Annual Report came out and exposed the lack of success of both the Asian business and the UK start-up. I think he realises that he cannot get away with his lies anymore and has virtually disappeared.

As for his shareholding - easy come, easy go springs to mind. He and Boer gave themselves massive holding here on an IPO that was 3 or 4 times overpriced and on top of that they have big salaries (however they are paid) and massive options too.

25 days now since the last podcast when Manchester and London were "literally just days" from launch.

1 more restaurant added in Birmingham which I see hasn't been noticed.

In retrospect, and I know that hindsight is an easy thing in shares, maybe the whole nationwide roll-out was far too ambitious and far too difficult for just Sanj to oversee. Maybe they should have just kept signing up restaurants in T1 and T2 and then added the next territory - South-East - Brighton - when they were ready and then just added further adjacent territories whenever possible.

I'm not sure what London may bring but I'm not expecting too much and the rest is just a joke. The nationwide roll-out has been Birmingham with 22, Leicester with 9 and Newcastle with 4 - that's 35 in about 6 weeks. They were going faster than that in March and April with just 2 TM's on the payroll.

I've just been catching up on the posts here of the last couple of days and I'm surprised to see that both martbmth and monty5662 have sold out here altogether. They were probably the main rampers on this board and I thought they would have stayed loyal.

Strange how things change - and Applesauce seems to have given up too!!!

Just 1 restaurant added for the whole week!!!!!!!

Technically even the current £10M m/cap is based on speculation of future growth as Table Pouncer, which at the time of acquisition had 110 active restaurants, was acquired for a valuation of just £1M in shares. And that tiny valuation was based on the shares having a valuation of 4.5p so at today's shareprice Table Pouncer was worth even less.

With BigDish Asia just about valueless, the true valuation here with 126 active restaurants is just a tad higher than the Table Pouncer valuation without factoring in future growth and prospects.

Yeah, the group's will be arriving just like the 200 new restaurants in September.

I can't believe that the last podcast with Sanj was on 23rd September - the one where he said that Manchester and London were literally days from launch and that a new TM was joining in Brighton literally that day - that's 17 days ago.

It was all just more carrots for the donkeys.

If you follow the links I have put on my last post you will soon realise that the POS IS NOT GOING TO LEAD TO ANY SIGN-UPS . Please do not post such rubbish.

Just to set the record straight as some posters seem to have got completely carried away with the Point of Sale (POS) Technology tie-in and are leading people astray with their false conclusions and information.

In simple terms it's a bit like Big Dish deciding to use PayPal to take payments. If PayPal have 1000 other tech companies using their payments system then that does not mean that the other 1000 companies are going to bring business to Big Dish. They just use the same system.

Just because NFS Technology Group have 1500 clients doesn't mean that they are going to be bringing any new restaurants, clients or business to Big Dish. The other clients use the technology at their tills every time they take payment from a customer and Big Dish will be doing the same.

The links below explains what the POS will do and it is essential in all retail environments but the only thing it is not going to do is bring in any new restaurants. It is quite crazy how posters can misunderstand things and start posting such nonsense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTdk-GPN2mE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNpsZbgSS3Y

There is also a link to the NFS Technology website. They have 1500 clients in 35 countries and not one of them will be bringing any new customers (restaurants) to Big Dish - and you had better believe it.

https://www.nfstechnologygroup.com/

To tell the truth one of the video links explains how super expensive the POS systems are and it would be nice to know whose paying for it all.

The video with chef Marcus Guiliano is good viewing and explains a lot of what Big Dish can do with the data they will be accessing.

The point of my post was not to compare the new yield management system with the old discount card system. Obviously the newer idea should be better and it certainly is for the diners who don't have to pay anything to get their discounts.

My point was that when Big Dish Asia converted their restaurant database from discount card to yield management their revenue decreased by 10 times with exactly the same restaurants. Similarly in the UK when Table Pouncer converted their restaurant database revenue fell by more than 5 times.

The difference is BigDish not getting the card membership fee and so far the 50p/£1 per diner fee is not bringing in anywhere near this previous revenue.

Make of this what you want but in my eyes it is not looking good.

With the card system the diners paid for the app/website that linked the diners to the restaurants and the restaurants footed the bill for the discounts. With yield management the restaurants have to pay for the app/website that brings in the diners and also have to give the discounts.

Yield management is good for the diners but not so good for the restaurant owners - hence the pitifully slow sign-up rates and the high drop-offs.

To match the loss of revenue from card membership Big Dish will have to seat huge extra numbers of diners and as yet that is just not happening.

£6 Million of funding so far for about £50K per annum revenue.

If the promised 200 new restaurants in September had happened then that could have seen 900 restaurants live by Xmas. Instead there were just 31 less 4 drop-offs and at this rate they'll be lucky to have 250 by them. Costs will also be higher with the extra TM's.

All in all this is not looking very good.

You are missing the point. The revenue with a card scheme comes from the card holders and not the restaurants. 100,000 members at £50 per annum is £5M revenue. Say each member uses the card 5 times a year for 2 people which would probably cover the cost of the membership. That is 1 million meals which with yield management will bring in somewhere between £500K and £1Million at 50p to £1 per diner. Say £750k average compared to the card revenue of £5 Million. The figures don't even start to make sense.