The Loaded platform we have developed & our significant industry experience gives us an opportunity to help the hospitality industry make significant strides forward.
In 2004 at the age of 21 Richard Mcleod and James Arnott grabbed national headlines when they purchased New Zealand’s largest student pub, The Captain Cook Tavern in Dunedin from Dominion Breweries.
With 50 staff, capacity for more than 1,000 customers and turnover in excess of $3million per annum the hospitality ownership and management learning curve was steep.
Despite strong revenues the existing available systems to operate a hospitality business made the return on investment unsatisfactory and meant that significant stress and hours were required to deliver good results.
In 2006 a search was made globally for better systems to ensure revenue, labour and cost of goods could be monitored and managed seamlessly and in the most profitable and efficient way.
It became clear that all incumbent solutions were highly technical and not built with a hospitality end user in mind.
The decision was therefore made to build a reporting and operations system that integrated with existing point of sale to centralise reports and operations.
As the hospitality group grew to 13 outlets throughout New Zealand with revenues in excess of $20 million, the challenges evolved and the Loaded platform matured into a true solution for managing performance in a hospitality business.
The first customer Loaded was approached by was the Lone Star and Joe’s Garage group – New Zealand’s largest dine -in restaurant company in 2011
Despite the initial positive reaction from customers, the Loaded founders believed the hospitality industry would be slow to adopt cloud technology, so continued to work on enhancing their solutions with investment in product only.
In 2018 it was clear that a global opportunity existed and Richard McLeod was appointed CEO to chase this down.
The Loaded Platform and the existing real time POS integrations were built from the ground up to ensure global scale could be achieved as the long term growth strategy was developed.
2021 saw the completion of this project and the company is now implementing it’s plans to enter Australia and rapidly following this is the rest of world penetration plans.