About
Operator to Innovator
Nothing Shocking Labs is a restaurant technology consultancy based in Connecticut, working with restaurant operators of every size, the consulting firms that serve them, and the technology vendors that sell to them.
Why Nothing Shocking Labs
Life can be shocking enough. Your numbers shouldn't be.
Most restaurants run on a mix of systems from different vendors, each sold separately but expected to work together. When they do not work together, the cost shows up during service, often long before anyone traces the problem to a setting or a broken connection.
Nothing Shocking Labs exists to find those problems, fix the ones it can, and give operators a straight answer about the ones only the vendor can solve.
Russ Champlin
Founder & CEO
- Based in Connecticut
- University of Connecticut, Psychology and Business Management
Russ came up through restaurant operations. He spent more than a decade as a restaurant general manager, responsible for profit and loss, staffing, vendor relationships and the guest experience, including at a high-volume location.
He then moved from operations into technology. He built a multi-unit restaurant group's technology, training and quality assurance departments from the ground up, and has led its technology ever since: setting up, launching and connecting point-of-sale, online ordering, loyalty, delivery, back-office, scheduling and guest feedback systems, and supporting them after launch.
That combination is what the company is built on. Russ has been both the operator who has to live with a system after the vendor leaves and the technology lead who has to make it work. He knows what a bad menu sync does to a kitchen, and what a vendor demo leaves out.
Every Nothing Shocking Labs engagement is scoped and delivered by Russ personally. The person you talk to at the start is the person doing the work.
Hands-on experience
Work Russ has done himself, inside restaurant operations, before founding Nothing Shocking Labs.
- Programmed point-of-sale systems: menus, kitchen display routing, payments and role-based access
- Built online ordering from the ground up: menu structure, pricing rules, modifiers and channel settings
- Designed and tested integrations between online ordering, point of sale, loyalty, back office, text messaging and guest feedback systems
- Launched a loyalty program end to end: program design, offers, point-of-sale integration, guest sign-up and staff training
- Led the technology for new openings, remodels and closures: network, hardware, configuration, training and go-live
- Vetted and managed more than ten technology vendors, and held them to their service commitments
- Built live reporting across online ordering, point of sale and back office, so leadership could see what each platform returned
- Trained everyone from executives to general managers and frontline staff
How that background shapes the work
Tested the way service really runs
Testing covers the real orders, modifiers, discounts and ordering channels a busy location sees, not just the path shown in the vendor's demo.
Launches planned around the restaurant
Timing, training and support are planned around your calendar and staffing, and agreed before work starts.
Written for the people who run it
Procedures and training are written for managers and staff, so the knowledge stays with your team after the engagement ends.
Discuss a project
A few sentences are enough: tell us which platforms you use, how many locations you have, what is going wrong, and whether there is a launch date.
Send an email contact@nothingshockinglabs.com