Why Revenue Integration Matters More Than Ops Integration

From the Desk of Jonathan Lim, Founder & CEO, Oddle

Walk into any restaurant tech pitch today and you’ll hear the same playbook:

“Let’s integrate with your POS. Sync your inventory. Automate the kitchen flow.”

That’s important.

But it’s not where the money is made.

At Oddle, we made a different bet.

Instead of chasing operational integration first, we doubled down on revenue integration—because that’s where restaurants win or lose.

And after working with thousands of restaurants across Asia, here’s what we’ve learned:

Most restaurants are under-leveraging the revenue they could already be making.

They’ve got tools, but not outcomes. Systems, but not sales.

We’re here to change that.

The Default State: Optimized Ops, Flat Revenue

Most restaurants are already good at what they do.

They care about ingredients. They’ve streamlined kitchen workflows. Their staff are trained. Their POS prints receipts.

But here’s the contradiction:

Their front-of-house is digital—but their revenue operations are stuck in the past.

We see this over and over again:

• Peak hours aren’t fully maximized—tables are packed at 1pm or 7:30pm, but early lunch and early dinner slots are underutilized
• Walk-in customers never get captured into a CRM
• Delivery traffic converts at just 2–3%, with most potential customers lost
• First-time diners are never invited back
• Email marketing, if it exists, is manual or sporadic

Restaurants today are running high-efficiency kitchens attached to low-efficiency sales machines.

That’s the gap we saw. And that’s the gap we decided to fill.

Why We Didn’t Start With POS Integration

Every country in Southeast Asia has a different set of POS winners—which means there are no true winners.

Each system is tailored to local languages, tax codes, workflows, and payment preferences. The US has one major advantage: it can scale on a single language with a large homogenous market. We don’t have that luxury.

Trying to integrate deeply with every POS across the region would’ve made us just another middleware company.

We’re not here to sync receipts. We’re here to drive revenue.

That said—we’re not POS-averse.

We’re already working on POS integrations that add value.

But we’re clear on this: integration should serve sales, not complexity.

Start With Revenue. Then Integrate.

We’ve never met a restaurant owner who said they didn’t want more sales.

Even the best restaurants deal with last-minute cancellations or off-peak slumps.

And restaurants, by nature, run on a fixed cost base:

• Rent is fixed.
• Manpower is fixed.
• COGS is variable—usually around 30%.

If you want to grow profit, you don’t just cut costs.

You increase sales per square foot.

That’s what governments mean when they talk about productivity: using the same headcount to produce more.

In restaurants, more often than not, that means growing revenue.

The Revenue Flywheel: 4 Pillars of Growth

We broke down restaurant revenue into four key levers:

1. Delivery

Sales beyond your four walls. Unlocks occasions you’re not physically present for.

Birthday dinner at home. Lunch during a busy workday. A craving at 10pm.

Most restaurants are barely scratching the surface of their delivery potential.

2. Reservations

24/7 availability = more bookings.

Even when no one picks up the phone, your calendar can fill itself.

But it’s not just about capturing demand. It's about managing it:

Visualizing peak periods, spreading traffic, maximizing covers.

3. Terminal

The payment terminal is the last and most critical customer touchpoint.

It’s where the transaction happens—and where data can begin.

With fingerprint tokenization, we can recognize first-time vs repeat customers without storing personal info, enabling return incentives and loyalty triggers.

4. Loyalty

This is your long-term moat.

Not points. Not discounts.

But a system to capture, engage, and reactivate your customer base.

Most restaurants don’t even know who their top 10% of customers are.

That’s the part we fix.

From Tools to Outcomes

Let’s be honest: most tech providers hand restaurants tools and leave it there.

That’s like handing me a $30,000 combi oven and expecting me to cook a 10-course meal.

We saw this repeatedly.

Merchants had platforms but no results.

Campaign tools but no strategy.

A database but no engagement.

So we changed our model.

We moved to a value-based partnership: we only win when you do.

We built the campaigns, wrote the playbooks, and automated the work.

One of our merchants saw their return visit rate jump from 10% to 30%—just by activating basic flows like welcome vouchers and reminder nudges.

The insight?

It’s not about having more features.

It’s about making the right ones actually work.

The Oddle Model: Channels, Conversion, Continuity

At Oddle, we think of growth in three layers:

Most restaurants stop at Channel.

They list themselves on marketplaces, accept walk-ins, and hope for the best.

But the real upside lies in Conversion and Continuity.

That’s where revenue integration—and revenue operations integration—comes in.

Revenue Integration vs Revenue Ops Integration

Let’s break this down:

These aren’t just concepts—they’re playbooks we’ve implemented thousands of times.

We’ve built:

• Abandoned cart templates
• Offline-to-online migration flows
• Lapsed customer reactivation campaigns
• Win-back vouchers triggered automatically

And the best part?

The restaurant doesn’t have to lift a finger.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Let’s flip the frame.

Here’s what happens when you don’t integrate your revenue ops:

• Your Google reviews stagnate
• Your database stops growing
• First-time diners vanish after one meal
• Delivery customers never discover your dine-in experience
• You spend more on ads to replace customers you already had

You’re leaking revenue daily—and you may not even know it.

In contrast, when your channels and ops are connected:

• Your CRM grows with every visit
• You know who your best customers are
• You re-engage diners before they churn
• You maximize each square foot and each hour of service

We’re Not Anti-Integration—We’re Just Focused

To be clear:

We’re already integrating with POS systems where it adds value.

And we know ops matter.

But our belief is simple:

Integration should be a means to more revenue—not an end in itself.

Restaurants don’t fail because their POS wasn’t synced perfectly.

They fail because tables were empty, orders didn’t come in, and customers never came back.

Revenue is the oxygen.

Integration is the piping.

And we’re here to help restaurants breathe better.

Closing Thought

You can’t cut your way to growth.

You can streamline operations all day—but if the orders aren’t coming in, the business won’t survive.

What restaurants really need isn’t just smarter kitchens.

They need smarter systems that drive revenue, retain customers, and multiply every customer interaction.

That’s what we build at Oddle.

And that’s why revenue integration will always come first.

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