Toast runs your tickets. Resy runs your reservations. Strkr runs the pipeline that fills the private dining room, the catering tray, and the Tuesday night slow season. One CRM for private events, catering sales, lapsed-guest reactivation, and VIP recognition. The POS and reservation stack stays exactly where it is.
Independent restaurants and small groups have three CRM problems that the POS, the reservation platform, and the loyalty app were never designed to solve. Private events and catering live in email threads and a shared spreadsheet. Lapsed guests disappear in a 90-day silence that nobody is watching. The host stand sees a VIP walk in and treats them like a stranger because the guest history is stuck in three different systems. These are the pipeline problems. A CRM is the shape that solves them.
Buyouts, rehearsal dinners, corporate holiday parties, bar mitzvahs, pharma dinners. Every inquiry starts as an email to the events address and stays there. The event sales lead works out of their inbox and a Google Sheet, misses one of every ten inquiries, and cannot tell the owner on Monday morning what is in the pipeline for the next 90 days. The private events line is the single highest-margin revenue stream at most full-service restaurants, and most teams are running it with less structure than their beverage ordering.
Corporate lunch drops, holiday platters, wedding packages, drop-off vs full-service catering, invoiced vs card-on-file, repeat accounts vs one-time. The catering sale is a B2B motion with contracts, deposits, menu customization, and dietary notes. The POS was built for the ticket at the table, not the 40-person tray with a 2 week lead time and 50 percent deposit. Teams run catering out of a notebook, a shared drive, and a prayer.
A regular who used to come in every other week stops showing up. Nobody at the restaurant notices for 90 days because nobody is watching. By the time someone does notice, they have found a new favorite and the window to pull them back is mostly closed. Reactivation marketing is the highest-ROI channel at most independent restaurants, and most independent restaurants do not run it.
The regular who dropped 400 dollars at a four-top last Saturday walks in on a Tuesday and gets seated at the worst two-top in the room because nobody at the host stand knows them. The guest history lives in Resy, OpenTable, Toast, and the server's head. None of those surfaces push a VIP flag to the person opening the door. The result is a thousand missed recognition moments a month at a busy spot, and recognition is the single thing that converts a guest into a regular.
Google reviews drive 70 percent of discovery for a neighborhood restaurant. Most independents ask for reviews when a guest happens to compliment the meal, which is maybe 1 in 50 guests. A real review funnel captures the delighted guest while the dessert is still on the table and asks for the review while the memory is fresh. The gap between those two states is one text message and a tracked link, and it almost never gets built.
Toast Loyalty, Square Loyalty, Punchh, Thanx. Great at tracking points and tiers. Not built to run a reactivation campaign to a 90-day lapsed VIP, segment guests by average check and visit frequency, text the Tuesday-night regulars when a new menu drops, or trigger a flow when a private event lead has not been quoted in 48 hours. The loyalty platform stays. The marketing CRM is a different job.
Strkr is not trying to replace the POS. It is not trying to replace the reservation platform. The data model is explicit about this: Toast or Square owns tickets, Resy or OpenTable owns the reservation, Strkr owns the guest record, the pipeline, and the marketing. Each system does what it is best at, and they share the guest id through native integrations.
Inquiry forms on the website, email intake, phone inquiries all land as leads with event type, date, guest count, budget range, and dietary notes. Stages flow from Inquiry to Qualified to Proposal Sent to Contract Signed to Deposit Received to Event Confirmed to Executed to Follow-up. The events lead has a real forecast of what is on the books for the next 60 days instead of a mental tally.
The catering motion is a B2B motion. Strkr models the corporate account (law firm, hospital, tech office), the primary contact (office manager, EA, HR coordinator), the recurring order pattern (every Thursday, monthly all-hands, quarterly holiday), and the deposit terms. The catering lead sees who has not reordered in 30 days and runs a 10-minute Monday-morning win-back touch instead of waiting for the next inbound email.
Guest record pulls in reservation history from Resy or OpenTable, ticket history and average check from Toast or Square, email engagement, review activity, and loyalty tier from the loyalty platform. Visit frequency, average spend, favorite server, allergies, special occasion dates all surface in one view. The host stand opens the guest file at the podium before the walk-in reaches the hostess station.
A nightly flow scans the guest base for anyone who used to visit at a cadence (every 2 weeks, every month) and has gone quiet for 1.5 times their usual gap. The system segments by VIP tier, average check, and preferred channel, then triggers a reactivation touch. Could be a text with a limited-time offer, an email with a new menu drop, a server-level outreach for a high-value lapsed regular. The 90-day silence is now a tracked event with a scripted response.
When a VIP tagged guest books on Resy or OpenTable, Strkr fires a prep notification to the GM and the hostess an hour before service: who is coming, their preferences, their anniversary if that is the occasion, their last visit, the server who knows them. The recognition moment at the door turns from accidental to engineered, which is how a one-visit guest becomes a regular.
A post-visit flow fires a text 90 minutes after the ticket closes, asking a one-tap sentiment check. Delighted guests route to a Google review link; mixed sentiment routes to a private feedback form that notifies the GM. The split catches the review before the moment fades and the complaint before it hits a 1-star public post. Review volume at participating locations typically climbs 3 to 6x inside the first 60 days.
Toast and Square sync tickets, average check, visit frequency. Resy and OpenTable sync reservations, cover counts, show rate. Mailchimp or Klaviyo stays as the email send engine if that is where your audience lives, with Strkr pushing segments. Stripe handles catering deposits and private event prepayments. QuickBooks and Xero sync invoices for the catering side.
A 4-location group sees the private events pipeline rolled up at the group level, with filters by location, event type, and sales rep. The group operator asks on Monday "what does the private events book look like for Thanksgiving week" and gets a real answer in 30 seconds, not three separate emails to three GMs.
Strkr AI drafts the private event proposal from the inquiry details and your menu library. It writes the reactivation text for a lapsed VIP in your brand voice. It composes the holiday catering outreach to the top 20 corporate accounts. The events lead edits and sends in 15 minutes what used to take an hour. The marketing lead ships 10 campaigns a quarter instead of 2.
Private events and buyouts are the highest-margin line on a full-service restaurant P&L. A 40-person buyout at 150 per guest clears a Tuesday night that would otherwise cover 60 covers at an 80 average check. The math is obvious. The pipeline discipline required to actually book that buyout is not, and most restaurants run the motion the same way they ran it in 2008.
Private events inquiries arrive through the website form, direct email to events@, inbound phone, and sometimes DM. Strkr unifies all four into a single lead inbox with source tracking. Nothing sits in a shared Gmail label waiting to be seen. The target is a sub-2-hour first response, which is the window where close rate on event inquiries drops off a cliff.
A flow routes every inquiry to the events lead with a task due in 2 business hours. If the task slips, the GM is notified at 4 hours and the owner at 24. The pattern that drives event bookings is well documented: the first restaurant to reply with a credible proposal wins the booking 60 to 70 percent of the time, regardless of pricing differences inside a 15 percent band.
Strkr AI drafts the proposal from the inquiry details: event type, guest count, date, budget, dietary notes, F&B minimum, deposit terms, menu tier. The events lead edits, adds photos, sends via a trackable link. The team sees exactly when the proposal was opened and for how long, which is the signal that drives the follow-up timing.
The contract integrates with DocuSign or PandaDoc for signature. The deposit is a Stripe payment link sent with the contract. Once both are complete, the flow books the private dining room on the restaurant calendar, notifies the kitchen manager, blocks the floor plan, and schedules the pre-event walkthrough. The handoff from sales to operations is a flow, not a Monday morning conversation.
Three days before the event, Strkr auto-generates the prep packet for the kitchen and FOH: final head count, menu selections, dietary callouts, timing of courses, VIP flags on the guest list, special requests. The chef gets it on paper and in the app. The expo station has the dietary callouts printed. Nothing lives only in the events lead's notes.
The day after the event, a flow sends a thank-you from the GM with a feedback link and the next-booking inquiry (if the event was annual or recurring). The host of the event becomes a tagged VIP in the system with their event preferences on file. The next inquiry from the same company starts with the full history visible, not a cold email.
Catering sales is a B2B motion dressed in restaurant clothing. The buyer is an office manager, an HR coordinator, a wedding planner, a pharma rep, a hospital events team. They buy on repeat. They pay on net terms sometimes. They want a dedicated contact, not a random server. The restaurants that figure out catering as a sales motion unlock a revenue line that often matches or exceeds the dining room by year three.
Strkr models catering buyers as accounts (the company) with linked contacts (the office manager, the EA, the backup contact). When the office manager leaves and the new one takes over, the account history survives. The ordering patterns, menu preferences, dietary rules of the office, and preferred delivery windows persist. The replacement office manager calls once and the entire history is on the record.
Strkr learns the ordering cadence of a repeat corporate account: every Thursday 11am delivery, 25 lunches, allergen-safe tray, invoice at month-end. When the pattern breaks (missed order, longer gap than usual), the system flags the account for a check-in. The office manager usually did not fire you; they got busy, forgot to order, and would be delighted by the call.
The menu library stores catering menus by season (fall drop-off lunches, holiday platters, summer wedding packages) and by package (drop-off, full-service, bar inclusive). A catering lead builds a proposal by picking the menu and the package; pricing populates automatically with current pricing. No stale PDFs floating in a shared drive.
A deposit link goes with every proposal. The booked order creates a Stripe payment for the deposit and a QuickBooks invoice for the balance on standard net-15 or net-30 terms. The owner sees the receivables aging report on Monday morning without exporting from three systems.
Each catering order has a delivery window, a driver assigned, a point of contact at the delivery address with phone number, and a photo of the setup for the first-time account. The driver gets a mobile card. The office manager gets a text when the driver is 10 minutes out. The reorder next week starts with a known-good delivery experience.
Strkr ranks catering accounts by lifetime spend, order frequency, average order size, and growth trajectory. The top 20 by lifetime value get a Thursday afternoon check-in call from the catering lead every quarter. The next 100 get a seasonal menu drop email. The long tail gets the holiday promo. The outreach budget maps to account value, which is a thing most restaurants have never had the data to do.
Marketing at an independent restaurant should run on three motions: catch the lapse before it hardens, segment the base by visit value and preference, and route the delighted guest to a public review while the moment is fresh. The POS has none of this. The reservation platform has none of this. The loyalty app tracks points, which is not a marketing engine. This is the empty slot Strkr fills.
Strkr segments the guest base by actual visit cadence pulled from the POS. Weekly regulars get a different communication (new menu drop, chef's night) than monthly regulars (seasonal event, holiday reservations), than lapsed guests (reactivation offer), than one-time visitors (soft follow-up to drive a second visit). One blast email to the whole list is a 2024 playbook.
When a VIP tagged guest hits the lapse threshold, Strkr routes a task to the GM or the specific server who knows them. The task reads: "Call Linda. Hasn't been in since July. Her anniversary is in 2 weeks." The GM makes the call personally. The response rate on this motion vs a mass "we miss you" email is a different order of magnitude.
Chef's table night, wine dinner, pop-up collaboration. Strkr builds the invite list from guests who have attended similar events, high average check guests who have not been in 60 days, and the top 50 wine club. The GM reviews the list in 5 minutes, hits send, fills the room without posting a public link. The exclusive feel is real because the list is real.
Strkr captures birthdays and anniversaries at the point of reservation or guest file update. Two weeks out, a flow sends a personalized "book your birthday dinner with us" with a complimentary bottle offer. The occasion booking has a 3 to 4x higher close rate than cold outreach and lifts the average check meaningfully because the guest came for the celebration.
Ninety minutes after the ticket closes, Strkr fires a one-tap text: "How was tonight?" Positive routes to a Google review link with the guest's name and a smart deep link. Negative routes to a private feedback form that notifies the GM in real time, which is a service recovery window that mostly saves the review from going public. Volume on positive reviews climbs 3 to 6x, which is the primary discovery lever on Google.
Strkr respects channel preference. Some guests open email, some open SMS, some respond to a mailed postcard from the GM. The guest record carries channel preference and consent per channel. SMS is sent through BYO Twilio with explicit opt-in captured at reservation or walk-in. Email syncs with Mailchimp or Klaviyo. Direct mail integrates with Lob for the small, high-value VIP touches.
Most "best restaurant CRM" lists compare feature matrices that overlap by 80 percent across the top ten tools. The real evaluation sits on four or five axes that nobody prints in the brochure. Here they are.
The CRM that tries to replace your POS is asking you to replatform your transactions, your kitchen printers, your tax reporting, your tip-share, and your end-of-day. That is a 6-month project with real risk. Strkr integrates with Toast and Square natively. Keep the POS. Keep the staff training. Add the pipeline layer on top.
Strkr: 3 to 10 days to a working private events pipeline and catering CRM, including Toast and Resy sync. Most generic hospitality CRMs: 4 to 12 weeks with onboarding partner and template setup. The time cost compounds for a restaurant that is turning over inquiries daily and needs the pipeline running yesterday.
A restaurant GM has 20 minutes between lunch and dinner to review the pipeline, reply to inquiries, text a lapsed VIP, and approve a catering proposal. Strkr mobile is a first-class surface with offline queue, voice-note capture for guest notes, and the full pipeline view. Many hospitality tools are desktop-first with a mobile wrapper that nobody actually uses.
Group operators need a roll-up: pipeline across all locations, catering accounts shared across the group, VIP guest file that follows the diner from location to location. Strkr handles this natively. Single-location independents can stay single-location without the complexity, and the group upgrade is a config change, not a migration.
Strkr pricing is per staff seat, flat. A guest database of 20,000 or 200,000 is the same price. The restaurants with the biggest marketing opportunity (the ones with a decade-long guest history) are not punished with a contact-tier escalator the way email marketing platforms do it. Pay for the people using the tool, not the records in the tool.
Every CRM promises data portability. In practice, moving guest records, event history, catering accounts, and automations takes months. Strkr exports to CSV and JSON cleanly, logs every automation as structured data, keeps formula logic in readable expressions. The exit is a day of work, not a quarter. That is a healthy sign for a tool a restaurant plans to run for a decade.
Most independent restaurants run a stack of Toast gaps, Mailchimp blasts, and a shared Google Sheet for events. Here is the honest side-by-side between that stack and Strkr. Toast and Resy stay in the picture; Strkr fills the slots those tools were never built for.
| Feature | Strkr | Toast gaps + Mailchimp + spreadsheets |
|---|---|---|
| Private events pipeline | Dedicated pipeline with stages, SLAs, and proposal automation | Shared email inbox and a Google Sheet |
| Catering sales CRM | Corporate accounts, contacts, recurring order tracking, invoicing | One-off orders through the POS or over phone |
| Lapsed-guest reactivation | Nightly flow detects lapse and triggers tiered outreach | Occasional "we miss you" blast when someone remembers |
| VIP recognition at host stand | Pre-service alert to GM and hostess with guest history | Server has to remember or notice in the moment |
| Review funnel | Post-visit sentiment text with sentiment-based routing | Printed card asking for a review on the receipt |
| Guest segmentation | Visit cadence, average check, preferred server, event history | One list, one blast, hope for the best |
| Toast and Resy integration | Native, two-way sync of guest, ticket, reservation | Manual exports, CSV uploads to Mailchimp |
| Multi-location roll-up | Group pipeline view with per-location filters | Three separate systems with no roll-up |
| Birthday and anniversary flows | Automated 2-week-out personalized touch | Nothing, or an annual email |
| E-signature on event contracts | DocuSign or PandaDoc integration from the proposal flow | PDF emailed back and forth, deposits chased by phone |
| Pricing basis | Per staff seat, flat regardless of guest database size | Mailchimp contact-tier bills escalate with guest growth |
| AI drafting | Strkr AI drafts proposals, reactivation copy, catering outreach | Every email written from scratch |
The patterns below show up across neighborhood independents, chef-driven concepts, and small groups. Each one is a motion that was sitting as a gap in the Toast and Resy stack, and each one maps to a revenue line that most restaurants know they are leaving on the table.
A 90-seat neighborhood spot was running private events out of a shared Gmail label and losing one in every three inquiries to slow response. Strkr unified the inquiry channels, set a 2-hour reply SLA, and automated the proposal draft. Inside 90 days the events line booked a quarter it had never seen before, and the owner can tell you on Monday what is on the books for the next 60 days.
A chef-driven concept with a cult following tagged its top 200 regulars as VIPs in Strkr. Resy bookings now trigger a pre-service alert to the GM and the floor captain with the guest's preferences and last visit. The chef sends out a personal amuse to the right table without being asked. The repeat rate on tagged VIPs climbed noticeably inside the first quarter.
A deli-style independent with a strong corporate lunch business modeled its top 40 corporate accounts in Strkr with the office manager, the ordering pattern, and the dietary rules of the office. The catering lead runs a Monday-morning account check-in on anyone who missed their usual pattern. Catering revenue climbed in year one and the lead no longer works nights chasing POs.
A 3-location group was running three separate events inboxes and had no roll-up view. Strkr unified the pipeline at the group level with per-location filters. The group operator opens one dashboard Monday morning instead of asking three GMs for an update. Cross-location event referrals (location A full, book at location B) went from rare to regular.
A 2-location group identified 800 lapsed VIPs across its guest base using Strkr's cadence analysis. A quarterly reactivation flow routes GM-level outreach to the top 100 and a personalized SMS to the next 700. Response rate on the top-100 personal outreach is high enough that it funds the next quarter's marketing spend on its own.
Keep Toast and Resy. Add the pipeline that fills the private dining room, the catering tray, and the Tuesday night slow season. Start a trial and have your private events pipeline live inside a week.
No. Toast and Square stay as your POS. Resy and OpenTable stay as your reservation platform. Strkr is explicit about this: the POS runs tickets and the reservation platform runs the floor plan. Strkr sits next to them as the guest-growth and marketing CRM layer, pulling guest, ticket, and reservation data through native integrations and owning the pipelines those tools were never built for. Private events, catering, lapsed-guest reactivation, VIP recognition, review funnels. Replatforming your POS is a 6-month risk project. Adding Strkr is a configuration change on top of what you already run.
Independent full-service restaurants and small groups from 1 to 10 locations. Neighborhood independents, chef-driven concepts, destination restaurants, and emerging small groups. Strkr is not built for QSR fast-casual chains with 50-plus locations where the operating model is point-of-sale throughput and franchisee reporting. Below 10 locations in a full-service or chef-driven model, Strkr is designed for exactly this operating shape. The sweet spot is a 1 to 4 location independent with a serious private events program or catering line, and a group operator who wants a real pipeline view on Monday morning.
Private events inquiries land in Strkr from three channels: the website inquiry form, direct email to your events address, and inbound phone calls logged by the host stand or events lead. Each becomes a lead with event type, date, guest count, budget, and dietary notes. A flow routes to the events lead with a 2-business-hour reply SLA. Strkr AI drafts the proposal from the inquiry details and your menu library. E-signature and deposit payment happen in the same flow via DocuSign or PandaDoc and Stripe. Once the contract is signed and deposit received, the system books the private dining room, notifies the kitchen, blocks the floor plan, and generates the prep packet 3 days before the event. Post-event, a thank-you and feedback flow runs the next morning.
Strkr scans the guest base nightly, pulling visit data from Toast or Square, and identifies guests whose cadence has broken. A guest who used to come in every other week and has not been in for 6 weeks hits the lapse threshold. The system segments the lapsed cohort by VIP tier, average check, and preferred channel. Top-tier lapsed VIPs route to the GM or the server who knows them for a personal call or text. Mid-tier gets a personalized SMS with an offer. Long tail gets a seasonal email with a new menu drop. The whole motion runs on its own with a weekly report to the owner on reactivation revenue. The 90-day silence becomes a tracked event with a scripted response.
When a guest is tagged as a VIP in Strkr, any future reservation on Resy or OpenTable triggers a pre-service alert at the appropriate time: an hour before service, a cue card lands on the GM's and hostess's mobile with the guest's name, visit history, preferences, favorite server, and occasion if any (anniversary, birthday, business dinner follow-up). The chef sees the dietary callouts on the kitchen printout. The result is that the VIP walks in and the staff knows them before they reach the podium. For walk-ins, the host stand can search a guest in Strkr by name or phone and the full guest file surfaces instantly.
Strkr pricing is per staff seat with the full product on every paid tier. A single-location independent typically runs 3 to 6 seats: the owner, the GM, the events lead or catering coordinator, and sometimes the marketing lead or a sous chef involved in menu prep for events. Pricing is published on the pricing page and does not escalate with guest database size, which is the opposite of how most email marketing platforms meter. A 20,000-guest base and a 200,000-guest base are the same price. The investment is in the people using the tool, not the records in it.
Toast, Square, Resy, OpenTable, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Stripe, QuickBooks, Xero, DocuSign, PandaDoc, Google Business Profile, and BYO Twilio for SMS send. Guest data syncs two-way with the POS and reservation platforms. The email marketing stack stays as the send engine with Strkr pushing segments. SMS runs through your own Twilio account with explicit opt-in captured at reservation or walk-in. Private event contracts and deposits run through DocuSign or PandaDoc for signature and Stripe for payment. Review requests push to Google Business Profile. The stack is set up for an independent restaurant's realistic tool list, not a theoretical enterprise suite.
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