Aug 11, 2026 · 44 min · 12 segments
He doesn't golf... but he rebuilt the tech behind Topgolf! Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends I sit down with Ted Hardy, Senior Director of Technology Transformation at Topgolf - the entertainment…
Ted HardyGuestJustinHostOkay, well, let's talk a bit about the problems.
When you walked in, what problems did you see? How did you prioritize like where to start? What did you fix first? Give us the lay of the land back then.
So I was hired to do a point of sale project, but that kind of undersells it a little bit of like, you know, the company had realized that their legacy partners just weren't getting it done.
And they had tried to think about how they redid everything from a point of sale standpoint.
They very much wanted to move to ordering in the bays, both from a server standpoint and from a customer standpoint and realized that the tech they had just couldn't do it.
What the reality was though, I walked in and went, that's cool, we can solve that.
What they had built in the past really was trying to put a lot of things in point of sale that shouldn't have been there.
And some of the processes on how to execute these things, especially when you got into the event side of the business, just didn't work.
And they were either highly unreliable or when they did work, the data was always wrong and required a ton of manual intervention.
But everything that touches all the way through the kitchen, the event ordering flow or the event planning flow, all the checkout, all of the flows all the way back into the financial systems.
Everything had to get rethought because none of it was working in a very optimal way.
has
got to be a better, faster, easier way to do this that's more reliable, that doesn't require people just to brute force this thing across the line.
So let's dive into that a little bit more.
Okay, well, let's talk a bit about the problems.
When you walked in, what problems did you see? How did you prioritize like where to start? What did you fix first? Give us the lay of the land back then.
So I was hired to do a point of sale project, but that kind of undersells it a little bit of like, you know, the company had realized that their legacy partners just weren't getting it done.
And they had tried to think about how they redid everything from a point of sale standpoint.
They very much wanted to move to ordering in the bays, both from a server standpoint and from a customer standpoint and realized that the tech they had just couldn't do it.
What the reality was though, I walked in and went, that's cool, we can solve that.
What they had built in the past really was trying to put a lot of things in point of sale that shouldn't have been there.
And some of the processes on how to execute these things, especially when you got into the event side of the business, just didn't work.
And they were either highly unreliable or when they did work, the data was always wrong and required a ton of manual intervention.
But everything that touches all the way through the kitchen, the event ordering flow or the event planning flow, all the checkout, all of the flows all the way back into the financial systems.
Everything had to get rethought because none of it was working in a very optimal way.
has
got to be a better, faster, easier way to do this that's more reliable, that doesn't require people just to brute force this thing across the line.
So let's dive into that a little bit more.
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