Call Happy

Call Happy

For one entrepreneur, proving his

product can work has been easy. The challenge is getting people to buy into it.

By Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

Anyone who has been to a restaurant knows the problem all too well: Your knife fell on the floor and you need a new one. Or your soup is too cold.

Whatever the gripe might be, it usually follows that a waiter isn't at the ready to remedy the situation.

Not anymore, at least not for restaurants or service businesses that use Guest Com, a wireless call service product created by a Sarasota entrepreneur.

Originally known as the "happy button," the device works pretty much like a nurse call button in a hospital or a flight attendant switch on an airplane. Indeed, the product is so simple on its face that its owner's biggest challenge now is convincing other businesses how useful it actually is.

"The number one problem in restaurants isn't the food," says Bart Leereveld, who owns a Denny's in Sarasota and is now a majority investor in Guest Com, after buying the system for his restaurant. "It's being able to get a hold of a server."

Kalu Watanabe, a Sarasota-based commercial and occasional residential real estate developer, set out to solve that problem with Guest Com. Watanabe, a Texas native born to Japanese parents, first saw a variation of the device at a restaurant in his parent's homeland in late 2006.

Halfway through 2007, Watanabe began selling his own version of it stateside. "It was one of those things I felt would be a really big hit."

One of his first clients was Leereveld, who has partnered with Watanabe on a few office projects in Sarasota. Watanabe soon expanded the reach of the product to hotel pools, comedy clubs and cruise ships - any wait-on customer service venue with a 'need it now' atmosphere.

Since then, some industry buzz has followed the device. First, Watanabe secured a spot in a prime location at the National Restaurant Association trade show in Chicago last year. Features followed on news programs, including one on Good Morning America and another on National Public Radio.

And Watanabe, using a six-person nationwide sales force, has landed a few buzz-worthy clients recently, too. The Ritz-Carlton, Key Biscayne bought a device, as did the Daytona Hilton, for example.

Meanwhile, Leereveld has sold Guest Com devices to about 10 Denny's nationwide, including five on the Gulf Coast - three in Fort Myers and one each in a New Port Richey store and another Sarasota store. He's also in the process of trying to get Denny's corporate office to buy Guest Coms for the entire chain.

Finally, Watanabe recently returned from a trip to California, where he pitched Guest Com to Loewe's Hotel executives.

Now comes the hard part: Turning the happy button into a happy business. Because while the buzz and individual sales are nice, Watanabe has yet to connect with a mass-market audience. So far, he's sold about 100 Guest Com systems - at a price of $1,200 per 32-table setup, that's clearly not enough revenues to quit his other interests.

Nonetheless, Watanabe and Leereveld are holding out hope that the next 12 months will be Guest Com's time to shine. Watanabe, who so far has put about $50,000 of family money into the business, hopes to eventually sell 500,000 Guest Com devices a year, either through his own operation or through eventually starting a nationwide distribution system.

Watanabe and Leereveld hope to reach such lofty calls by putting stock in what they say is actual proof that the system does exactly what it's supposed to do.

Leereveld's Sarasota Denny's, which runs about $2 million a year in revenues, has served as something of a Guest Com laboratory over the past year. The experiments have been successful: Leereveld says the number of walkouts, where frustrated customers just get up and leave, has been cut in half since he started using Guest Com.

Down as well are customer complaints, both the internal kind and ones to the corporate office, as well as promotions - the amount of times a manager gives customers a coupon or free food due to service problems.

Customers like the feeling of empowerment they get from having easy access to a waiter with the call button. Says Leereveld: "I know when a new customer comes into my restaurant they are astonished with it."