What if the key to better restaurant performance isn’t asking hourly employees to “think like owners,” but actually paying them like owners?

In this episode of the ChatGTM Podcast, Michael Beck and Chad Horn sit down with Peter Riggs, Founder of WaveWage, to explore what happens when frontline restaurant employees share in the upside they help create.

Peter’s idea started with a moment almost every operator will recognize. About 30 minutes before closing, he watched a restaurant employee turn away customers who were ready to spend money. For the employee, another table meant more work. For the operator, it meant lost revenue and potentially a lost customer.

Peter’s question was simple: What if the employee actually benefited from that sale?

That became the foundation for WaveWage, a performance-pay platform designed to connect hourly employees with measurable sales performance.

Peter shares how incentives can change frontline behavior, how restaurants can reward incremental revenue without destroying margins, and why the last hour of business could potentially become one of the most profitable hours of the day.

We also get into restaurant technology itself, including why great software still fails inside restaurants, how WaveWage approaches integrations and gamification, and what technology founders consistently misunderstand about operators.

One of Peter’s best observations:

“Just because your tech works doesn’t mean we can put it to work.”

CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome to ChatGTM
03:09 Meet Peter Riggs
04:28 From restaurant operator to technology founder
07:42 The truth about restaurant employee engagement
10:16 What is WaveWage?
11:01 The restaurant moment that sparked the idea
14:34 The dreaded last-minute customer
15:11 Incentivizing the entire restaurant team
17:03 Finding hidden performance gaps
19:07 Why nobody built WaveWage before
21:10 Making incentives visible and engaging
22:45 Employee badges, recognition and portable reputation
25:11 Avoiding unintended consequences
25:44 AI-generated incentive rules and confidence scores
28:36 Can employees change restaurant operating hours?
29:27 How do you prove an incentive actually works?
32:01 Can employees make more while restaurants make more?
35:13 POS, payroll and restaurant-tech integrations
36:58 What restaurant-tech companies misunderstand
40:06 What Peter now understands about tech founders
41:29 Selling WaveWage to his toughest critic: himself
42:27 Rapid Fire
43:20 Customers walking in two minutes before closing
44:08 The restaurant metric operators aren't measuring
44:33 What restaurant work needs to fix
45:31 Closing thoughts and what comes next

Learn more about WaveWage:
https://wavewage.com

Peter Riggs on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-riggs-495b274/

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What do you think: Should hourly restaurant employees share directly in the upside when they help generate incremental revenue?

#PayThemLikeOwners #PeterRiggs #WaveWage #RestaurantEmployees #RestaurantPerformance #RestaurantTechnology #ChatGTM