For Bill Boone, there was never a doubt of the success Foodservice Management Systems (FMS) would experience – it was simply a matter of when. Bill established FMS to meet a need – he was opening restaurants across the country and needed a support center, a home base of sorts. You see, Bill founded Foodservice Management Systems to allow his General Managers to focus on providing an excellent service and dining experience for guests. While the restaurants were busy focusing on service, the support center was processing payroll, invoices, marketing support, operational reporting and more. Although this need was specific to Bill’s restaurants, he had a gut feeling that other restaurateurs would benefit from his company as well, again it was just a matter of when.
As Bill’s restaurant count continued to grow, he worked to build a support team that was hungry for growth and that knew the restaurant business. Bill recruited Nick Moore to lead Operations and restaurant expansion. Nick was a restauranteur himself and had extensive experience with new openings. Nick soon became an integral part of FMS and a true partner to Bill.
Bill remembers the first call from a perspective client – it was a friend in the pizza business “Hey Bill, seems like you’ve got a pretty good setup – think you can help us out? We opened two new stores and we just don’t have the time to do everything.” With that one call, FMS was off to the races.
Over the next twenty years, Bill continued to get phone calls from friends in the industry looking for support. During this time, he recruited another partner to oversee the consulting business, his daughter Jenny. The pair decided to purchase a couple of accounting firms to add another layer of service to FMS. Bill found his niche and was ready to make it the forefront of his business.
With Jenny’s leadership, the FMS consulting business grew to 50% of the company’s revenue and all signs were pointing to continued growth. With a hungry team in place and a mission in mind, Bill and Jenny found it necessary to update the company name – a name that would speak to the all-encompassing service capabilities. In launching Balanced, Bill said “Our leadership team is young but has moxie – they are the future of this company and will take it to the next level. They needed a modern name, something that didn’t take five minutes to say.”
The Balanced team has recently doubled its client count and is on pace to double in size again by 2020. Speaking to the future of Balanced, Bill said “The restaurant industry is tough, the big names have big budgets to spend on talent. The smaller guys can’t compete with salary, but they need the experience. That’s where Balanced comes in. Our team has the experience and as consultants are affordable for the smaller single or multi-unit owners. Everything is being outsourced now and it makes sense. Find what you’re good at and do it. That’s Balanced.”