Robert McHugh speaks to James Lenehan, founder of Early Table, on his plans to triple membership of the platform by March 2025.
Early Table was launched in 2023, to give diners a chance to try new restaurants at affordable prices while helping restaurants to fill empty tables during the early part of the evening. Restaurants using Early Table’s service nationwide include Asador Barbecue and Grill, Shaku Maku, Hyde Dublin, Bloom Brasserie, Brother Hubbard, Paulies Pizza, and more. Dine-at-home options include BASE Pizza, Saba and Bombay Pantry.
With 34,000 active members, Early Table plans to triple its user base to over 100,000 by March 2025. James Lenehan, founder of Early Table, spoke to Hospitality Ireland recently about the company’s remarkable journey.
What inspired you to open Early Table?
It’s a ‘restaurant discovery platform’ – that’s how we describe it – ultimately, the idea being that it brings new people into your restaurant, really.
We are providing a saving, whether that’s 30% or 50%, for customers, while helping restaurants to fill their empty tables. That is how we position it. It makes sense for consumers and restaurants.
I had started a business called WIN|WIN in 1998, and I had been in the customer and employee rewards and engagement space for many years. We have a lot of big clients who we work with, whether it’s the utility, the insurance, or the telco space. They would come to us looking for reward ideas, whether as a way to say thank you, to gesture kindness to customers or employees, or sometimes to motivate people to renew the policy or sign up to a new account. So, our incentives are well known. We deliver them digitally to tens of thousands of people every month.
One of the things that we were asked regularly was, could we get a dining product together? A lot of companies, particularly employers, were keen to give it out as a perk to their employees. Really, that was the foundation stone, and that is when we started talking to restaurants to see what might be possible.
Can you explain how the platform works, for our readers?
When you log on to Early Table, you can sign up free of charge. You can browse the restaurants once you have signed in. To book, you need a thing called credits. That’s how we make our money – we don’t charge any restaurants to use our platform. We charge as little as a euro or €2.50 if you just buy a couple of credits. A table of two might cost you €2, or it could cost you €5. When you go in, you will typically get 30-50% off.
A lot of restaurants will give you 50% off at 5pm, 5.30pm or 6pm, and then they might move it down to 30% at 6.30pm. You still get a very deep discount on your food. People are saving as much as €150 on their bill.
When customers come in, they are urged to register initially, and they can then browse whatever restaurants are available, or indeed takeaways are a recent feature. You choose your date, just as you would with OpenTable, [the] number of people, and then you get your availability.
If you search our database for restaurants in Dublin, for example, there might be the best part of 100 restaurants that come up. You choose your restaurant and, depending on how many diners you have, we charge you one credit per diner.
On the dashboard, you can choose to buy four credits for €10, which is €2.50 per credit, or indeed you can go up to higher levels. So, if you want to go all the way up to €60, you’ll get actually 60 credits for €60. So, in that case, you’re actually only paying €1 per credit. So, if you are dining out, a table for two might cost you as little as €2 in credits, and you will be enjoying 50% off your food at that restaurant when you go.
As you arrive, you can show your QR code on arrival, and they will then automatically discount the food off when you order your bill. There is no having to present cards or coupons or anything like that. It’s automatically done for you when you want to request your bill.
What would you say directly to restaurants that are considering using your platform?
The problem that we are solving for restaurants is filling tables at off-peak times. That is the key message that we want to get across.
There are five main reasons to partner with us. Firstly, we make you more money. You make money using Early Table. This is not about us taking money out of your pocket – it is us putting money into your till.
Typically, an average spend of restaurants that we work with would be about €45 on food and €30 on drinks. For €75 per head, we are probably able to do maybe 20 diners for you every week. On a monthly basis, you are up at around €5,500 worth of extra money, even after giving a discount to the Early Table customers. That is the type of money we can put in people’s tills. You are looking at a €60,000-€65,000 opportunity here without any money investment.
The restaurant does not pay anything to get involved. There is no customer acquisition cost. It is a risk-free partnership for the restaurant. There are no fees. They have absolute control over availability and days of the week for the service.
We set them up on the system – they don’t have to worry about all that hassle of installing it. What we found to date is that 87% of Early Table customers spend more on wine and other drinks. They are saving on food, so they might be able to splash out on a more expensive wine. We can see that in the data. The brand exposure alone – we have 36,000 members – is worth €600 every month if you were looking at the norm of social-media costs. That’s a perk for them.
We are now introducing a lot of high-spending corporate customers. It won’t tarnish your brand if you come on board as a restaurant. We are introducing you to higher spenders who are coming in with teams and so on. It is all about getting money in the tills and footfall through the door if you have got empty tables.
One thing that has come back to us again and again is that restaurants love getting somebody into the window of a restaurant at 5pm in the evening. If you pass a restaurant and it’s empty, you are just going to keep on walking. It is critical that you get somebody in early, even if you have to give them a bit of a deal. It gives the chef a chance to spark up the kitchen. You are paying your staff anyway, so you might as well have them motivated by serving a few customers. There are lots of really good reasons for restaurants to come in and give us a try.
One concern restaurants have is that they can’t afford the discount. Any chef that is running a good kitchen can afford to give a discount. Think about it. You buy a steak for €5, you are selling it for €35. If you can’t discount that steak and still make some money, you are sourcing from the wrong place. There is enough margin in food to be able to afford a deal to fill tables when the restaurant is empty. You have to take a different vision of this. You need to get people into an empty restaurant – I need bums on seats, I need footfall through the door at 5pm in the evening. This is the solution that delivers that without restaurant owners putting their hand in their pocket.
The big opportunity for restaurants is that we have got so many B2B clients who are very interested in using Early Table as a reward for their employees. That is an important part of what we are about.
I mentioned earlier that my background is in large B2B award programmes for very big businesses. We have a direct channel there, and I think that is going to be exciting for restaurants. It brings in the high-spenders from multinationals and other big employers. Their customers are well paid, have more to spend, and will fill your tables at 5pm for you. It’s incremental spend – we are not trying to run your business for you. This is for when restaurants have got empty tables – it will give you that incremental spend. If you’re getting €5-6000 extra revenue into your till every month, after you’ve given the discount, that is going to start paying your rent, it will take a chunk off wage costs, etc.
This is a tough time for restaurants. You need to look for every single channel in order to increase revenue. This is a fantastic channel to increase monthly income. It’s incremental. It incentivises people who are sitting at home who cannot afford the full price. A restaurant that is smart about this can increase sales because we will be getting customers through the door for them.
Tell us about the new dine-at-home offering.
We are testing it out at the moment, with three excellent partners. We have got BASE Pizza, who are offering 40% off. We have Saba, and they’re giving 30%, and we’ve got Bombay Pantry, who are also offering 30%. They can, again, dictate the terms, which is the wonderful thing about Early Table.
People obviously don’t book a table for a takeaway. What they do is, they go in and essentially download a discount code. So, when you go into, say, BASE Pizza, you click on ‘guest code now’, and it will ask you to pay two credits to get your code. It might cost you €2, but you’ll be getting 40% off your takeaway.
Please tell me a little bit about your own background – where you grew up and studied.
I grew up in Dublin, around Dalkey. I went to UCD and studied law. I qualified as a lawyer and practised as a solicitor for a short while.
All the way through university, I had a small business selling roses within pubs and nightclubs, which was a lot of fun, and we made some money out of it. I always had the appetite to go into business.
My father and five generations before him were in the hardware trade – Lenehan’s Hardware was the business. It was multigenerational. At the dinner table, we would always talk business. I found myself in law, but I thought maybe I should really be going down the business route, so I started researching some ideas.
The first idea I had was for WIN|WIN, back in 1998, and our first product was a WIN|WIN chequebook [and] consumer discount club targeting the female market, geared towards salons, boutiques and hotels, where you could get yourself 25% off. That was the very first product that we launched with WIN|WIN, and the business started to build.
We started working with the corporate sector very soon after that. Bank of Ireland gave us a contract to run their student discount programme – they were impressed by the chequebook product that we had developed. It really took off from there, and we went into the direct consumer space. Pretty much everything we have done over the last 20 years has been B2B.
What drew you towards the hospitality industry?
One of the products that we had developed in 2008 was a hotel promotion offering. DID Electrical came to us at the time, and they wanted to find a way to reward customers when they spent over €50 in the shop. We looked around and saw there was a product that SuperValu were running at the time, which allowed people to book at a discounted hotel, and the money generated from the booking created a revenue stream.
We built a similar product, and Heatons department store came to us at the same time, looking to use the product as well. Before we knew it, we were distributing vouchers for discounted hotels right across Ireland.
In 2015, we won the contract to take over the SuperValu Getaway Break[s] programme, which was the incumbent programme at the time. That really showed our hospitality potential because we contracted about 300 hotels, offering incredibly low-cost stays. I guess, once we were down that hospitality route, we realised there is actually more we can do in this space.
We acquired Loyaltybuild in 2018. They had been running the SuperValu breaks programme, and we won that contract, with an opportunity to take over the rest of the business, which is based in the Nordic region. We opened an office in Stockholm and started selling hotel breaks through various retailers across Norway, Sweden and Denmark. That was the first step into the hospitality space.
After that, with some of the technology we had developed, we realised we could do something similar in the restaurant space, so that opened up a whole new opportunity. Post-Covid, we really explored that potential, and, ultimately, this ended up being the development of the Early Table platform.
Early Table plans to triple membership on the platform by March 2025. How will this be achieved?
We have a few different channel plans in place. Today, we have 36,000 active members, and there a number of different things we need to do for that number to treble.
There are two primary channels that we want to focus on. One is our own direct-to-consumer channel. We have earmarked a budget for collaborating with influencers and other media sources. We want to build the profile and build our brand directly with consumers, so that’s going to require maybe a €100,000 worth of investment between now and March.
On the other side is the corporate channel. That’s a big, big opportunity for us. We have already worked with a huge number of different corporates, all of whom have shown interest in the Early Table platform. In fact, to date, we have done two corporate deals for around 15,000 people, which is going to bring a high volume of users onto the platform.
What has surprised you most about how the customers have engaged with the platform up to now?
The organic uptake on the platform is the biggest surprise for me. We have spent almost nothing to date to promote to the 36,000 people on it over the last 12 months. The word of mouth around the platform has been extraordinary. It has been incredibly well received.
The fact that we continue to add 1,000 new members every week without putting our hand in our pockets is probably the greatest surprise and upside that we have had.
What challenges do you expect to encounter with your plan?
The industry itself is struggling at the moment. Ultimately, they are going to have to address how to re-engage with consumers who have suffered over the last number of years substantially, through the cost-of-living crisis, increasing interest rates, and so on.
The discretionary spend simply isn’t there, and I think that’s a huge challenge for the hospitality sector and the restaurant sector.
I think technology and innovation are two things that they need to start to embrace, in order to overcome that issue. I don’t think it is going to go away any time soon. I’m not sure the government are going to change their mind on the VAT issue.
As far as I’m concerned, the industry is going to have to look to partner with innovative companies who can bring solutions. I guess that is where we step in. We don’t charge restaurants anything to get involved, and yet, we can solve a significant problem for them, which is increasing footfall and getting bums on seats!
What role will AI play in the future of platforms like Early Table?
Firstly, offering tailored rewards to our members will be easier. You can use AI to discover what people’s preferences are, what restaurants they like, their spend, how often they go for a takeaway. If you can run that though AI, you are going to start becoming much more productive because you are going to be presenting customers a far more tailored offering using AI. It improves personalisation.
Secondly, it involves customer care. People coming onto the platform who have issues with bookings or any other customer service query – a lot of that can now be handled with AI.
Those are two immediate opportunities for us.
What do you like to do when you are not working?
I’ve got four young kids aged between four and 12. We live in Dublin, and so kids’ activities are always going on.
I play golf at the weekends. My greatest passion would be rugby. Following Ireland and Leinster, and trying to get down to the RDS and the Aviva as much as possible is always a treat.
As well as this, I like running and going to the gym. If I’m not playing tennis, I would be out for a run. I like to exercise four days a week.
