Fairfield County Business Journal

Appetite for growth

It’s been said that an army runs on its stomach. The same can be said of companies.

December 26, 2005—Jason Finger, a former New York City law associate, was tired of eating pizza when he had to work late.

"I called a friend who had worked at another law firm and we talked about ordering food and not knowing who’s open, who delivers and things like that," the 33-year-old Finger said. "The more we started thinking about it, the more we saw an opportunity to use the Internet to save companies money and reduce inefficiencies when it came to food service."

Finger and partner Paul Appelbaum began work on a business plan and spent every spare moment working on the details of their venture. Sixteen- or 17-hour days were the norm and Finger even spent his honeymoon at a food service conference as they prepared to get things running for a December 1999 start date.

Finger, who had run a small business in college, never dreamed that one day he would be chief executive officer of a company that is changing the way corporate America eats; at least that’s the goal of SeamlessWeb.

When a customer logs on to the SeamlessWeb site, a page pops up with a list of restaurants that are open at that hour, along with reviews and menus that are sorted by cuisine type or price limit. A customer can then place their order and have it delivered to their business.

"We often negotiate discounts with providers who are on our system, so in terms of the time and productivity savings of not having employees get into a car and going to the local restaurants to pick up food or be sidetracked passing a menu around the office, clients have told us that their savings are between 10 to 30 percent of their food charges," Finger said. "So even though we charge money, theoretically there shouldn’t be an increase in costs, in fact food program costs should be reduced."

They also negotiate a marketing-based fee from the restaurants that are volume-dependant. The more money the restaurants make from orders placed on the site, the more they make from them.

The law firm that Finger had worked at was his first client and the business was off and running. To Finger, his pitch to companies was simple: Employees who eat at their desks spend more time on the job. He targeted law firms, investment banks, accounting businesses and ad agencies and saw his client roster expand quickly.

"About a year and a half into the business, things started to click on all cylinders," Finger said. "We grew revenue from roughly $400,000 in the first year to about $4 million in the second year and $16 million in the third year."

The company was still exclusively in Manhattan at the time since they didn’t want to expand prematurely if they couldn’t provide the same high level of service that they felt was important. SeamlessWeb expanded to Greenwich in September 2003. Today ,there are more than 75 clients in the area.

"When we first started in the Greenwich market there were very few restaurants who did any sort of delivery and we worked with a small select group of providers to actually do delivery on their own and things became successful for them," Finger said. "Other restaurants heard about the success they were having and they started contacting us and the network has grown. We have about 25 now in the area."

Sales in the Fairfield County region reach several million dollars, while overall the company did a little under $50 million in gross sales last year and business is up 60 percent this year.

Among the companies in Greenwich who utilize the services are Sagamore Hill Capital, Frontpoint Partners and the law firm Day Berry & Howard.

"We started using it in the fall of 2003 and it definitely made ordering lunch much easier," said Kristen Sawyer of Sagamore, which employs 45 people. "We used to have to do it manually, asking each person to do it by hand. This just streamlined the entire process and made it much easier."

Sawyer rotates the lunch place each day and then each employee has a password and they log in to order lunch. Once it goes into the system, each vendor brings it over and puts it in their kitchen and workers can take it at their own pace.

There’s no minimum requirement for the customers and the Web site is user-friendly. "We really tried to create a system that had virtually no down side," Finger said. "Applications are targeted primarily to companies interested in providing easier access to local restaurants. All that is required is for a company to contact us, provide basic information for people added to our system and the system runs itself."

"We are an outsource sales force for the restaurants and are an efficiency tool for the companies," Finger said. "We have been thrilled with its success."

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