In this episode of The Tech Chef Podcast, Skip Kimpel welcomes Chris Herd, co-founder and CEO of Olive, the AI-powered platform that’s redefining how businesses approach vendor selection, RFPs, and strategic sourcing. Chris shares his journey from tech sales to entrepreneurship, the pain points that inspired Olive’s creation, and why the traditional RFP process is fundamentally broken.

Together, they explore how Olive eliminates bias, accelerates decisions, and empowers consultants, operators, and vendors to collaborate more effectively. Whether you’re tired of bloated spreadsheets or questioning the future of your consulting model, this conversation offers a refreshing, forward-thinking take on how to evaluate and adopt technology in a smarter way.

Key Takeaways:

The RFP Is Broken: Traditional RFPs are slow, manual, and often biased. Olive offers a collaborative, agile alternative powered by AI.

AI as an Assistant, Not a Replacement: Rather than replacing consultants, Olive empowers them to work more efficiently, scale faster, and deliver more value by automating tedious tasks.

Vendor Fairness & Objectivity: Olive doesn’t accept vendor payments, reducing bias and ensuring a level playing field in the selection process.

Smarter, Faster Decisions: From consolidating stakeholder input to auto-analyzing vendor responses, Olive dramatically shortens timelines and improves project outcomes.

Beyond Hospitality: While widely used in restaurants and hotels, Olive’s platform is industry-agnostic and scalable across enterprise sectors.

The Future of RFPs? According to Chris, the term “RFP” might be obsolete in five years. Instead, decision-making platforms will lead the way

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Chris Hurd, CEO of Olive Technologies and you're listening to Skip on the Tech Chef Podcast.

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Welcome to the Tech Chef Podcast.

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Today's episode is a must listen for anyone who's ever felt the pain of a traditional RFP process.

I'm joined by Chris Hurd, CEO and co founder of Olive, a platform that's flipping the script on how businesses select technology.

Whether you're a consultant, operator or vendor, this conversation will challenge everything you thought you knew about vendor selection bias and the role of AI in strategic decision making.

From collapsing 12 month sales cycles to helping consultants scale smarter, Olive is making waves.

Let's dive into the future of RFPs and why it may be time to retire the old acronym altogether.

Today's guest is Chris Herd, the CEO and co founder of Olive.

It's a platform that's turning the traditional RFP process on its head.

Whether you're in hospitality consulting or an enterprise space, this conversation is going to reshape how you think about vendor selection and strategic projects.

Chris, welcome to the show.

Hi Skip.

I'm so excited to be here.

Well, I'm excited to have you.

And before we dive in, Olive, tell us a little bit about your background.

What really led you to recognize the problems in the RFP world?

Well, it depends how early you want me to go back.

I can go all the way back to England, but maybe we'll start in just tech sales.

I was selling technology for most of my career and within that I never really wanted to be a salesperson.

I was studied marine biology at school and that was my passion.

So it never really sat well with me the amount of convincing that you have to do as a salesperson.

So sometimes we would do this.

This was actually really common when we were with more enterprise and larger scale purchases Is there were RFPs and RFIs involved.

And basically my job as a salesperson was to either get ahead of it so that we could lead the buyer into writing the RFP that favors us, or fully write the RFP for them, which happened quite a bit where we would just have like pre templated RFPs for our solution and we would get to the champion in an account and say, hey, let me write this for you.

So that whole process and really sort of biasing those decisions while was pretty fruitful.

And a lot of people still do that and a lot of vendors still do that pretty effectively made a lot of money.

You would end up with these customers that would buy something that just was a terrible fit for their business and then they would end up implementing it and then there was a bunch of customization or it went wrong.

No one adopted it whatever reason.

So a lot of that bias didn't really sit very well with me.

And so I really wanted to kind of shift that and figure out a better way so that companies can make better decisions, hopefully cut down the time it takes to make them and really get better technology fits for their business.

I came across your product, I don't know how many years ago you were at Startup Alley at Mirtech.

And I remember you're probably the booth that had the least flashiest presentation, right?

Well, no, it's a compliment because you're the only product that I actually remember at that particular conference.

Once you started the conversation and you really started to learn about what Olive did, it was like instant light bulb.

And at that point I was an operator and I was looking to do an rfp.

As a matter of fact, I think that was even before I was looking to do an rfp.

But when that came into my job duty of looking for a new POS at the company I was looking, I was working at, immediately I thought of you guys.

And I tell you what, it made the process so easy.

But I'm not here to talk about me.

I'm here to talk about you.

I'm just putting some validation on.

You know, I use it as an operator.

I used it as consultant, which we'll also dig into later.

But it's a very versatile product and from the get go, I saw the value in it.

So just saying, everybody out there that even listens to me, listen to this podcast, because this is some really, really cool stuff you're about to hear today.

Can you describe Chris for a moment or an event that really sparked the idea for Olive?

It's difficult to pick one event.

You know, there's a lot of things that went into this decision and this vision.

I have one that I kind of like, tie to.

You know, how you have a memory that is probably like 20 things, but there's one that I kind of use as my anchor where we had a really long sales cycle.

It was about 12, just over 12 months with a.

With a customer.

And I knew that we were a bad fit for that customer.

But we'd owned the rfp.

We got in early.

We actually had some consultants and resellers that were working with us to help convince the buyer to move forward.

And we knew that it was not going to be a great implementation, but we kind of went ahead with it anyway.

And it wasn't.

It was a bad implementation.

It was really that point that I was like, okay, this is gross.

I don't want to do this anymore.

I would love to be able to help companies make the right technology decision.

And actually, as a consultant, you get.

That's actually a really good benefit of being a consultant rather than a salesperson.

When you work for one vendor, you only have one solution, and you have to fit that to everybody else.

As a consultant, you can actually solve people's problems, which is great.

I wanted to be able to solve people's problems, but I also wanted to build my own tech company.

So rather than be a consultant, I said, let's try and fit it.

Fix it this way.

But that was that light bulb.

I sat at Calgary airport after a big meeting with that particular deal, and I called like four of my smartest friends and was like, do you want to start a company?

Do you want to start a company?

Do you want to start a company?

And all of them said, no.

But eventually I got one.

Eventually I got Dan Harrison to join me.

And that was great.

Interesting.

Dan's a great guy.

I like working with him.

A lot.

And today, today's conversation, just before we get too far into it and those that are listening, today's conversation is really intended for operators, vendors, consultants across the board.

I don't want this to be misconstrued as an operator only conversation, or a vendor only conversation, or even a consultant only conversation.

I know I talk quite a bit about Olive Online as almost as a replacement for consultants.

It's really an add on tool for consultants.

But we're going to talk about the power of each one of those areas here shortly.

Chris, what do you think is the biggest thing that's wrong with the way RFPs are typically done today?

And why is this a broken process?

I think there's a, there's a few things.

I think it's broken because it takes too long and it's a pain and no one wants to do it right.

That's, that's probably why they don't get done.

I think not doing them is probably one of the biggest issues.

So while they do take ages, if you skip it and don't do any sort of due diligence on your vendor decisions, that's where you really, really get into trouble.

So I think the biggest problem today with the way people do it is either they skip it and they just roughly go, okay, this is good, let's roll it out.

And then you get really bad user adoption, you get failed implementations, or what I was saying earlier, where they do it the wrong way around.

So rather than starting with a problem, what does my business need?

What do my stakeholders need?

Really fleshing out the challenge that you're trying to solve and then going out and sourcing solutions for that challenge.

It often happens backwards because you'll maybe go to a conference or you'll speak to a vendor, or you'll speak to one of your peers and you say, oh, this vendor is really cool, I love what they're doing.

And you try and backfill that solution into a problem, which happens a lot, where people will say, okay, I really want to work with a vendor in this space for whatever reason.

AI is a great example.

I've got to get AI for some reason.

And then you go out and you find the problem to solve that and it's just backwards, right?

So really flipping that and making sure that even if you're excited about a new technology, a new vendor or a new technology category, you've really got to stop and look at the challenges your business has first and then go out and try and find solutions to fit that rather than starting With a solution and then backfilling a problem.

Great answer.

And I think it kind of spawn the idea that I also need to mention what we're talking about here today isn't specific to the restaurant industry.

Olive is really for any type of business, correct?

Yeah, 100.

I mean, everybody needs to source technology at some point nowadays.

So.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm curious as we get into the conversation how you really, you know, I would think that you would have loaded up just POS vendors or back of house vendors for restaurants right now.

I'd be curious to see how you approach that with other.

With other industries.

But let's start off with a quick elevator pitch.

What is Olive and how does it work?

Okay, well, Olive, at its core, that's.

Not going to be quick, is it?

Well, we'll start with a quick one, which is Olive's a platform that helps you make the right technology decision as fast as possible.

That's.

That's really what Olive is.

The way we get about that is, is multiple.

So at the core of it, we started with this rfp, which means you're allowed, you know, it enables you to gather requirements, understand stakeholder needs, understand your business needs in a much more effective, scalable and rapid iteration kind of way.

It enables you to collaborate with suppliers and vendors much more agile than you would before.

Instead of building a document and sending it out and responding to this moment in time document, you can really collaborate with them on the solution and then ultimately get to a better decision.

Now, as we've grown, we're starting to fit into our actual vision.

So when we first started the company, we wanted to build an AI IT consultant.

That was our original vision.

Let's build an AI IT consultant.

Everybody laughed at us, said it was way too early to be honest.

Our first forays into AI a few years ago, before the new LLMs was pretty average or below average.

But now it's really, really come to fruition.

So really, when you look at Olive now, you can store your existing solutions in there, you can store files in there, you can store templates, libraries, whatever, within Olive and with the.

Not just an LLM, but these sub agents that can pull information from all areas, surveys, projects, whatever.

You really do have a little AI IT consultant, an analyst that can work for you on your specific business.

Now, as a consultant, what's amazing is a lot of consultants are concerned about what the future looks like.

And this is a pivotal moment for consultants.

I think the world of consulting is shifting dramatically.

Just the way that travel shifted dramatically in the Last revolution when we had Airbnb, Expedia, et cetera, et cetera, really transformed the way that people travel and consultants are in for the same thing.

So with, with Olive, what we enable, you know, 2, 3, 50, 100 even thousand person consulting firms to do is give them a base where they can now take all that information and data that they have and deliver in a much more efficient way.

They're being more profitable, they're giving a better service to their, their clients, and they're stepping into AI, which everybody wants to do.

So, you know, at its core, we help people make better decisions faster.

But there's just a lot of stuff going on behind the, behind the scenes.

We just took that elevator that is in Dubai, that the tallest building in the world.

That was your elevator pitch right there.

But there's a lot of information and there's a lot to Olive and there's a lot of stuff you haven't even touched on.

But since you brought up AI, how does Olive use AI or automation to actually accelerate decisions?

There's a lot of ways that we're leveraging AI today.

As I mentioned, there's a lot of agents behind the scenes that can do different things.

If you think of the sort of data that we have in Olive, and actually this is why RFPs were a really interesting use case for us to start with to build towards this AI IT consultant is because an RFP has stakeholder surveys, requirements, use cases, basically a real understanding of what the business needs are.

And it has 20 different vendors responses to all those needs.

So there's a lot of information there.

So now what we can do with sub agents is we can build agents that can read surveys, we can build agents that can read solution data, we can build agents that can read all different types of information within a project and then they can pull that out and they can do all sorts of creative stuff with it.

So they can write requirements, they can write surveys, they can create documentation, but they can also answer any questions you have, like, do I have any suppliers that can do vendor management?

Yes, it's this one, get a license.

So it really is putting that sort of AI IT consultant, AI business analyst at your fingertips is really the biggest value that we do today.

Where we're building to, and I think we can get there relatively quickly, is this idea of being able to say, I need a POS system and Olive, being able to actually go and do all of the work for you, come back with a package, you know, write your requirements, interview your stakeholders, analyze those responses, invite Vendors analyze their responses, even take demos and score them, and basically present you with, hey, here's the work I did to help you decide.

And then, of course, humans can review that at any stage.

But that's really where we believe we can get to, you know, today we're building it as fast as we possibly can to get to that vision.

I guarantee I've got consultants listening to this podcast that I don't want to say they're freaked out, but they're a little concerned.

I used olive from some of the very beginning stages, so I've seen it progress, and I understand how it becomes a tool in the consultant's toolbox.

But I guarantee there's going to be consultants out there thinking, oh, my gosh, is this actually replacing me?

How would you respond to them?

I think every new technology replaces people that don't adopt it, is what I would say any major technology shift.

So marketing automation is a great example where marketing automation completely changed how software marketers do their job.

It was no longer building up a Rolodex, sending out emails manually, et cetera, et cetera.

We have these platforms that could automate so much of what a marketer did.

Do we have less marketers today than we did 15 years ago, or do we have more?

I mean, for me, it feels like we have a lot more.

Yeah.

And I can tell you, as someone that runs a software company, you have to hire a lot more.

So this is where what we're offering here, this is an industry that hasn't changed in many years.

The way that consultants operate is kind of the same.

So I think that for consultants, there's a huge opportunity now for particularly the smaller consultants to compete with the bigger consulting firms.

Now, where this shift is, if you ignore it and you try and do things the old way, you will get left behind.

I'm not going to try and sugarcoat that at all.

But if you adopt it, you actually have this potential to deliver your incredibly interesting niche information.

Like, let's say you are a restaurant consultant for burger restaurants in Texas, and that's your focus.

You have a lot of information about burger restaurants in Texas, more than I would argue the Big Four probably have and definitely have better relationships.

So now if we can take that information and leverage AI and automation to get that information out to all of the burger restaurants in Texas, no one's going to the Big Four because they have you.

You're faster, you're more efficient, and you have all of that information.

So that ability to not just scale faster, but to Own the niche versus the big teams and the big consultants.

I think there's a massive opportunity there.

Now, if you're looking at.

I do also think if you're a bigger firm, if you're a big consulting firm or the analysts in particular, the big analyst firms, I think they are in some serious trouble because the entire model of generating market research as an analyst firm, I think is going to just fall to the wayside.

It's expensive, it takes too much time.

And now we can enable companies like smaller consulting firms to generate market research on the fly.

Custom market research for customers.

A customer comes in, answers a few questions, and gets custom reporting, custom market research.

That area, I think is going to be very, very challenging.

So if you are a consulting firm that relies heavily on market research to drive most of your business, I think that's somewhere I would be concerned.

If you're a regular consultant that delivers services to customers, I think you're going to be more profitable, scale faster, and be able to compete with the big ones.

I'm not going to mention them, but we all know who they are.

Much better.

All right, Chris, I'm going to pause right there.

I have a lot more questions around this.

When we come back from this little break, we're going to talk about, you know, some of the questions that consultants might have going through their heads right now around, you know, fairness of vendor selection.

You know, what does that look like?

Can an operator do this without a consultant?

We'll get back to that in just a second.

Everybody, hold on.

This is going to be good.

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Chris, before we took a break, I started to go down the path of some questions that might be popping in the minds of consultants, of operators.

Let's talk about the consultant side real quick.

They're thinking, I'm sure, is an operator going to try to get rid of me and just use this olive tool to run their own RFP process?

What would you say to that?

I mean, some may for sure.

If you're.

I think if you're.

If you're that concerned as a consultant about your value to an operator, that an operator could just use an AI tool and do the same thing that you're offering, then maybe your service isn't as valuable as you might think and maybe you're overcharging for it.

Right.

But from all of my experience, when people are doing really in depth sourcing events, it's not just using AI or Olive.

There's almost always some sort of human element involved.

Now if it's a company that has a large internal procurement PMO team, maybe their team can do it internally anyway and the tool just helps accelerate that.

But if they've been relying on consultants before, they're going to continue with it.

What I would suggest is if you can take the sort of manual, almost not as valuable work of logistics managing vendors like sharing out your requirements for example, and put that like own that data and deliver that to operators in a much more efficient way, then you're adding even more value by leveraging a tool like Olive to your clients and do that collaboratively.

Most of our consulting customers, consultants make up nearly half of all of our customer base is actually consultants, not direct customers.

And what they're doing is they're essentially leveraging Olive to offer a better service to the clients.

They're able to skip a bunch of the manual stuff that they would normally do in spreadsheets, take hours and really isn't that high value.

And they can then focus on the actual strategic stuff.

So they're delivering way more value to the customer.

So my advice to somebody that thinks an operator can skip over this and not use us is lean into that leverage your data and tools like Olive doesn't have to be olive, but leverage tools like that to make sure that you're staying ahead, you're delivering value to the operator and then make sure that you double down on the strategic pieces, the things that can't be done with AI.

And that's where I think you're going to excel.

If you fight it just like people that fought the Internet for years and fought E commerce for years, and fought mobile for years, then you'll eventually get left behind.

I'm sure there's companies that fought doordash and delivery for years and years and years and they're finding out now maybe third party delivery is here to stay.

Yeah, it just might be.

By the way, I'm one of those consultants that you mentioned earlier that I leverage it to remove the process, the little steps, but it's time consuming steps and that allows me to reduce my overhead and my cost back to the customer.

So it's payback to the customer at the end of the day when, when they're going down the path with us.

You know, we're dealing with consulting in both the restaurant industry, the hotel industry, and also the XR industry, which is a perfect example if you can use it for any industry that you're in.

And it does not have to be just restaurants.

Just because the majority of the people listening to this podcast are restaurateurs, certainly does not need to be in that area.

Let's talk about vendors for a second.

Now, I'm sure vendors are wondering, hey, is this a pay to play scenario?

How do you ensure objectivity or fairness in the vendor selection process through Olive?

So, firstly, it's not.

We don't take any money from vendors.

Vendors can use Olive as much as they want and you can add as many vendors as you want into Olive.

And Olive doesn't take any money from the vendors.

So that's been the core of our business forever.

We believe that the traditional way of selecting vendors and even the market research firms, that they're driving a lot of their revenue from vendors, which is their prerogative.

And also conferences are driven by vendor money.

So I'm more than happy and I enjoy a lot of conferences.

So that's their choice.

But for us, we don't.

We believe that that introduces bias.

Regardless, no matter how you slice and dice it, if there are vendors, there's going to be bias.

If there's vendor money, there's going to be bias.

So we don't take any of that.

If you're an operator looking to leverage Olive, think of it as a CRM or a project management tool or any other piece of software.

The bias that comes into it is the bias you put into it.

You can bias your CRM by changing numbers within the CRM to make certain deals look bigger.

But that's not Salesforce's fault or HubSpot's fault.

It's a tool.

The tool itself doesn't have inherent bias.

The only area where, you know, you can, you can see bias coming into modern software, I think, is AI.

And this is an area where, you know, we've spent a lot of time being objective, doing zero knowledge AI.

So rather than training a model that can then kind of hallucinate and make things up, it's using zero knowledge, where it's actually pulling information directly from the source and then delivering that back.

So it's looking at existing data that's there, reading that, and then reporting that back to you rather than trying to come up with answers.

That I think people struggle with.

And that's something you should worry about.

Just anytime you use AI, if someone's training an AI model on some data and you're relying on it to answer everything for you, you've used ChatGPT, you've seen how wrong it can be sometimes, and then you say, oh, hang on a second, that's wrong.

And I go, yeah, you're right.

So I think there's a, a pinch of salt should be applied to all AI.

Right.

I don't just automatically trust all of it, but we're definitely, you know, we've done a lot to make sure that we're, we're using that zero knowledge as much as we can to make sure that the AI isn't biased.

But again, you know, I think the bias in any decision is going to come mostly from the human.

Sure.

And you know, for us, if we're worried, and we always were worried, like I said, you know, when we started this conversation, I used to actually work for vendors and we had to bias, that was our job, was to bias you towards certain vendors because that's all we had.

By separating this out and using a platform to run your decision rather than handshakes and demos, you're significantly reducing the likelihood of your own personal cognitive bias as well.

So obviously I'm biased, but a platform like Olive will significantly reduce any of that influence.

That brings up an interesting thought.

Now vendors can obviously use this tool as well, and I'm thinking they could probably use it to do a gap analysis with their competitors.

They could use it for maybe some go to market strategy.

Correct.

Is there anything holding back a vendor from using this product?

So there's not.

I mean, we don't, you know, our customer is the buyer.

Right.

That's, that's what we focus on.

And as a company, we only have certain resources to focus on certain customers.

And that's mostly, you know, at the forefront it's consultants and then, and then direct customers like operators.

However, we have consultants who do leverage Olive for working with vendors and doing go to market analysis.

And that's kind of bled into vendors as well.

Definitely when we come to tools like Magic Fill.

Magic Fill is a sort of AI analyst that can search the Internet, search any existing documentation you have, and answer RFPs really, really quickly.

So if there's 100 questions, it can actually answer them for you.

And then as a vendor you can review it.

So then what you can do, if you are so inclined as a vendor, is add your competitors into that matrix and see what the AI would say about them.

It's all publicly available information.

It's only things that are public.

That's the only thing that's going to go on.

So really what it's doing is just doing a load of public research on your competitors for you in an instant.

And absolutely, that's a use case.

That's, that's often leveraged by vendors.

Oh, that's great.

And I think that's probably some fresh information for some vendors out there that have not thought about using this tool.

There used to be on the other side of an rfp, but certainly a great research tool for them to move forward with some of their decision making in maybe marketing or maybe even their, their, their IT strategy.

Roadmap for the future.

Let's talk for a second about, you know, the future of RFPs and vendor selection.

What kind of measurable results, whether that be time savings, cost savings, project outcomes, have companies seen by using Olive?

I mean there's a lot obviously across the board, there's various different depending on the company.

The one that really stands out to me is having a conversation with one of our customers.

They were planning on hiring five business analysts and they bought Olive to see if it could do the work and their one existing business analyst was able to do the work.

So that was probably the biggest one for us.

But generally you see a lot of time savings.

We just did a case study with Denison and Associates consulting firm outside of Seattle and they're seeing 50% reduction in the time it takes to do RFP events and sourcing events.

And what that means, I think for some consultants, they might think, oh, I'm going to lose 50% of the contract value because I've cut down on the hours that I can charge.

But it just means you can add more customers.

Right.

If you can do the same work at half the speed or twice the speed rather, you're able to add more customers.

So I think a lot of it is time consuming time savings and resource savings, which to me is a little frustrating to be honest, because the actual ROI in using something like Olive, and this is what we started with and where we see the biggest value long term is that it's getting it right.

Yeah.

And it's really hard to define that if you're, you know, with Olive, you've made the right decision, you don't really, can't really compare it to a failure.

But really I think 70 something percent of all ERP implementations fail.

There's something like that.

There's some stat BCG puts out every year, something like that.

There is a huge amount of implementation failure, poor user adoption, customization that has to happen.

And a lot of that is because you're not doing enough due diligence upfront.

Olive, by enabling you to do three times the due diligence in a third or half the time, you're now able to get a much better decision.

You engage more stakeholders upfront so you end up getting the decision right the first time so you don't have to redo it in a year or two.

You don't have all these extra customization spend, you don't have poor user adoption.

So really the biggest value for our long term customers is just getting the right decision first time.

Yeah, that makes total sense.

There's nothing more costly than having to repeat this process because you made a bad decision in the beginning.

Chris, where do you see the future of RFPS heading in the next three to five years?

I don't think there will be RFPs in five years, to be honest.

We, as a tool, we say we're an RFP tool because it's what people understand, but in actual fact we are really dismantling what RFPS mean.

An RFP is create a document that's a request for proposal as a document that you would send out and get responses to.

Olive is not that Olive is a collaborative platform that you work on a decision, right.

So you're gathering requirements, you're interviewing stakeholders, you're interviewing vendors on a really agile way and putting together a decision.

It's not creating a document you send out.

So I think the idea of creating this RFP document, particularly for businesses, maybe government will be slower, but for businesses and enterprises and restaurants in particular, I think have an opportunity because they don't do that many very well RFPS anyway.

So I think they could almost skip over it.

But yeah, I think in five years you'll be a, have a lot more sourcing events and evaluations going on because it'd be a lot easier to do it and technology obviously will keep growing, but the actual process of the traditional rfp, I think it's going to be, yeah, go the way of the dodo.

Yeah, I would, I would agree with you on that.

And I'm sure Olive's going to be helping to, to drive that.

You're kind of very unique in the place right now.

A couple years ago we were searching around for, you know, what exists out in the RFP market space for helping us to run a process and Olive was the only tool out there that not only accomplished what we needed to do it to do, but also had the foresight to see where the process was heading.

And I think you're way ahead of the game on that, and I love that fact.

You're small, you're nimble, and you're able to adapt pretty quickly.

All right, some quick questions for you.

What's the biggest misconception people have about RFPs?

What's the biggest misconception people have about RFPs?

That you should start them after you've spoken to a vendor.

Love it.

Okay, one word to describe the traditional RFP process.

Slow.

That didn't take you very much time to figure that one out.

Favorite piece of advice you've received as a founder?

Focus.

We get really distracted as a founder because we're all excited and we have this brain that's just constantly trying to solve every problem.

And you just have to keep reminding yourself.

It's one of those pieces of advice that every stage, you have to keep reminding yourself to stop chasing the shiny object and just focus, focus, focus.

Agreed.

One technology trend that you're most excited about outside of Olive.

Outside of Olive.

Can I say the one that I'm most intrigued about?

Even though it scares me and I hate it?

Yes.

It's VR and all the stuff I do.

So I scare the heck out of you.

Yeah.

I think it's incredible what you can do.

It's really, really, like, phenomenal, the stuff that's coming out of AR and VR.

But I'm, like, really scared about the future.

I watched a lot of sci fi when I was younger.

Yes.

And, yeah, I think it's just scared me.

I love it.

I love the fact that I scare you.

So, yeah.

Anybody listening to the show, if they want to connect with Chris and any of the Olive team, ping him or ping me.

I'll make sure you guys get connected.

It's a product you need to see or at least hear about or at least go hang out with Chris.

He's a.

He's a cool dude to hang out with.

Final takeaway, Chris.

For anybody listening, whether they're operators, consultants, or tech vendors, what's the best first step they can take to rethink their approach to RFPs?

Call me.

Probably.

I just.

I think rethinking RFPS is number one.

Stop calling an RFP and.

And being so scared of it as this big, like, laborious process you have to do, and just think of it as any decision.

We're constantly making decisions in life every day, and buying a house is difficult.

Buying a car is difficult, but sometimes you just got to rip the band aid off and if you think of it as an rfp, you're going to be put off.

Just think of it as a vital part of your decision making process and it's due diligence.

It's an rfp.

You just have to do your due diligence to make sure it works.

Love it.

Chris, thank you so much for joining us today.

Olive is truly changing the game and for anybody tired of the old school RFP nightmare, this conversation was definitely a breath of fresh air for everybody listening.

Check out Olive app and get ready to work smarter, not harder.

Thanks Chris.

Thanks Gib.

Wow.

A huge thanks to Chris Hurd for pulling back the curtain on how Olive is transforming the way we approach RFPS and tech decision making.

Whether you're a consultant, operator or vendor, it's clear the old way of doing things is on its way out and smarter, faster AI powered tools are taking the lead.

If you have any questions for Chris or myself, you can reach out to me.

On social media, I Skip Kimple and Magic 8 Tech.

We're on X, Facebook, Instagram and of course LinkedIn.

For past episodes and show notes, head over to skipkimple.com and to catch all the latest episodes, visit magic8.com youm can always reach out to me directly via email@Skipagic8.com Mark your calendars for next Tuesday.

I am welcoming back a great friend and industry powerhouse, Sterling Douglas from Chowley to dive into something big, the all new Chowley platform.

What's new?

What's improved?

What does it mean for the future of restaurant tech?

Well, you're going to have to tune in to get the inside scoop.

Trust me, you don't want to miss this one.

So until then, stay safe, stay healthy and stay hungry.

My friends.