User friendly
"I was impressed with the easiness of it, with the ability to easily train the staff," Lambrechts said. It takes about 20 minutes to train employees on the system, he said, compared with several hours on the older systems. And the exit41 technology addresses strategic problems: "I am kind of excited about it, because it offers us an opportunity to work on some things -- service, information gathering and the ability to reduce costs, and some of the language barriers we deal with."
Typical McDonald's restaurants experience turnover of 175 percent to 300 percent a year, manager say. Finding help is difficult, and kitchen employees in many areas do not read English well. The ability to take orders in English and send them back to the kitchen in another language is a huge breakthrough, McDonald's executives said.
In the race for McDonald's business, Lambrechts said, "These folks are a little more innovative, and more customer driven."
Venture capitalists' dream
This is a venture capitalist's dream, a start-up that has products that work and negotiations underway with Fortune 1,000 customers. But Jones doesn't want venture capital, and he's in no hurry to go public. Exit41's development has been funded so far by US$8 million in revenues from Elm Square's consulting and servicing projects.
Chalk it up to lessons learned at Epsilon. Jones has raised venture capital and taken a company public. He suffered through quarterly earnings reports and a slumping stock when the company couldn't deliver growth as fast as Wall Street demanded it. He finally sold the company to American Express Co in 1990 and stayed on for a year and a half before moving on.
Epsilon still exists. It's based in Burlington, has 700 employees, and has undergone several changes in strategy and ownership. In 1997, American Express spun Epsilon back out again, to a buyout group led by Boston's Bain Capital and Greylock Partners, for US$65 million. Now the company is about to change owners again, in a pending US$189 million purchase by the Carlyle Group, a private investment group that is merging its Relizon Co, a Dayton, Ohio-based marketing company, into Epsilon.
Jones has some regrets about the way things went for Epsilon. He thinks it should have been a bigger company by now. But he's determined not to make the same mistakes twice.
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