FROM THE FOUNDER
1985 / THE BEGINNING
We sold an extraordinary number of Commodore 64s. I was fascinated by what computers could do. It was fun. And I’ve been an early adopter of technology ever since.
But I made my career in hospitality.
I’ve launched a five-star hotel in Singapore. I’ve sat on the executive committee of a major pub group, where I learnt just how much money can disappear through shrinkage, theft and poor operational controls.
At Hilton, I led the introduction of electronic rostering for functions and events. For the first time, employee availability could actually feed into a roster.
It was revolutionary. It also still took hours to build the roster — and when you finally finished, it came rattling out of a dot-matrix printer.
THE LESSON
Later, I ran a multimillion-dollar regional burger business selling around four million burgers a year. That experience fundamentally changed the way I thought about labour.
Cutting another person from a shift might make your labour percentage look better. But if it slows service, reduces throughput and costs you sales, what have you actually achieved?
The right roster puts the right people, with the right capabilities, in the right place at the right time — against the demand you expect to walk through the door.
A great roster doesn’t just save money. It helps make money.
THE MOMENT
Then I became an owner myself. For 13 years I owned and operated my own bar and pub group, running six businesses spread across Australia.
And I was running them on Excel spreadsheets. Sales in one place. Labour somewhere else. Recipes somewhere else. Stock somewhere else. Forecasts in my head, spreadsheets or another system entirely.
Like operators everywhere, we made it work. But I kept thinking: surely the technology should be doing more of this for us.
Over nearly four decades I’ve worked across hotels, pubs, restaurants, QSR, retail and my own businesses. I’ve operated in Australia and Asia and sold into the United States. I’ve worked with all manner of major software platforms.
The software was almost right. But it didn’t quite understand how the business actually worked.
It could store a recipe without understanding everything that recipe affected. It could build a roster without really understanding whether it was the right roster. It could count stock without understanding why stock was disappearing. It could tell me what we sold yesterday without helping me decide what we should do tomorrow.
Most recently, while implementing Square in one of my own Australian businesses, I found myself confronting those frustrations all over again. Except something had changed.
For the first time, the technology existed to build something fundamentally different. Not another piece of hospitality software. Not another dashboard. Not another system requiring an operator to take information from five different places and work out what it all means. Something that could connect it.
So I started building it.
ZAURAK is a star. Gamma Eridani. And a star became the perfect metaphor for what I wanted this platform to be. For centuries, stars have given people a point of reference for navigation. That’s what an operator needs.
Because every day, everything is moving. Sales. Customers. Demand. Employees. Availability. Wages. Stock. Suppliers. Costs. Recipes. Production. Margin.
ZAURAK is being built to connect those signals. Sales inform demand. Demand informs the schedule. Capability helps determine who should work it. Recipes inform production, purchasing and inventory. Inventory helps expose waste and shrinkage. And all of those decisions ultimately flow through to profitability.
That’s where AI changes the game. It allows us to move beyond software that simply records what happened and towards software that can understand the relationships across the business — and help an operator decide what to do next.
In many ways, ZAURAK is the platform I’ve wanted since that first electronic roster came off the dot-matrix printer. It just took technology 40 years to make it possible.