In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “ The Finance Guy” chat with Taj Adhav, chief executive officer at Leasecake, a platform that lets tenants, brokers and landlords manage location-related services, ranging from lease management to lease accounting to insurance agreements.
Adhav shares his background and says, “So you know, first generation kid, youngest son of an immigrant family. My parents said hey you better get into business so I was a CPA for fifteen years, big four, spent a decade at Disney as an imagineer being involved in lots of large scale commercial projects, hotels, restaurants and business launches. One of them was the Disney Cruise line billion dollar project and launching a couple of cruise ships with that business. A phenomenal kind of experience and I decided I needed to repot myself so I joined a small tech company.”
Leasecake was started over a cup of coffee at a diner, says Adhav. “After a great ride of successes and failures in life I met a gentleman in the commercial real estate space and he looks at me and he’s managing this really large commercial real estate portfolio $50 million probably 50 tenants and nine buildings and he said to me, he’s like listen you’re a business guy and you’re a tech guy, I’m losing track of things. I’m losing track of rent increases and lease expirations renewals and month-to-month rents. And he’s like we should build an app,” Adhav shares. Jim Banks, the co-founder and Adhav’s idea while meeting over coffee created Leasecake, an operating system for location management and the reason it’s called Leasecake is because it is so easy.
Frischling says, what they love so much about Leasecake is that Adhav was highlighting the fact that they have applied a tech solution to an otherwise antiquated model. He adds, “So many small and mid-sized property owners for all intensive purposes forgotten about when it comes to creating a solution to organize tenant leases and get ready folks. Nearly 80% of the one trillion dollar global rental market falls into that category.”
Adhav is asked about how Leasecake is truly a solution for the multi-unit restaurant and food service operator. He says, “It’s having the most accurate accessible answers in something that’s easy to use and that allows them to stay focused on running an amazing restaurant experience not to be sidetracked by some time wasting effort because some permits have not been established or understanding.”
To hear more about managing your commercial lease portfolio, learn about the other tools Leasecake offers and winning Techstars, check out this episode of Hospitality Hangout.
