How Resilience Defines the Restaurant Industry

The Playbook With David Meltzer

David Meltzer, Entrepreneur.com

Entrepreneurship, Business, Careers

4.9 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today’s episode, I sit down with Tony Smith, CEO and Co-founder of Restaurant365, to talk about the Restaurant Transformation Festival and the community it’s bringing together. Tony shares how years of building software solutions for the restaurant industry led him to create an event that blends connection, innovation, and personal growth. We discuss why hospitality professionals operate with a different energy, how resilience shaped the industry during the pandemic, and why AI is set to redefine everything from training to scheduling. Tony also reflects on his company’s core value—love good food—and how it fuels both his vision and the festival’s spirit.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Entrepreneurs the Playbook. I have a treat for you. This guy has an amazing community
0:06.5	he's built around through his experience, a situational knowledge. He's paid the dummy tax as well,
0:12.1	as have I, but he's created an amazing transformative event specific to a niche. He is the
0:18.8	CEO and the founder of the Incredible Restaurant 365.
0:23.6	Welcome, Tony Smith to The Playbook. Oh, thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to chat.
0:28.9	So it's interesting because as a CEO, there's a whole other realm of putting on an event, a transformational event in your community. And the greatest
0:39.5	analogy that I have is that the most difficult part of my job of being CEO of Lee Steinberg
0:46.4	Sports and Entertainment was that we had the oldest and biggest Super Bowl party. And I used to tell
0:51.7	Lee, man, if I didn't do this party, I could be 80% more productive,
0:59.6	although the party itself created a whole year or more worth of greater experience business
1:05.0	development and today post-production content. For you, how have you been able to reconcile the extraordinary investment,
1:14.6	time, emotion, and value that has to be put into your event, which is September, because I'm
1:20.4	going to be there, September 21st through 23rd at the Marriott Marquis right there in the
1:24.9	marina in downtown San Diego. Yeah, we're really excited about this.
1:28.8	So the event's called the Restaurant Transformation Festival.
1:32.0	RTF.
1:33.0	Yeah, RCF.
1:34.5	And so something that's helped us is over the years, we've done small, regional events that we
1:40.2	called the restaurant transformation tour.
1:42.3	You know, the vibe is kind of like a band going on tour, right?
1:45.6	Like, we're going to take some of this knowledge on tour around America. And so because we exist to
1:51.3	help restaurants thrive, I mean, everything we're doing from the software we provide, making them
	...

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