Bryan Tepus, CMO of SmartTab, emphasizes the speed, stability and security of a POS system designed by a team experienced in the chaos of a club operation. To find out more about SmartTab, you just may have to catch Bryan on the slopes or on the golf course!
(NOTE: This story appears in the January 2024 issue of ED Magazine.)
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ryan Tepus, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of SmartTab & Director of SmartTab Partners, has been working closely with the SmartTab engineering team for over a decade.
Sober living in Vegas, an active recreational athlete and an avid traveler, Tepus shares that it was the sheer speed of the hospitality system’s operation which drew him onto SmartTab’s small team of three. Now, working in the Vegas office with twenty of what he believes are some of the brightest minds in hospitality technology, he enthuses that the company he’s tasked with expanding is the fastest system on the market for high volume, high velocity venues.
ED: What’s your role in your company?
TEPUS: I help create systems for recruiting, training and on-boarding new sales partners and technicians into SmartTab all across the country. I also manage the Las Vegas office and Deployment Center for SmartTab where we handle sales, support, logistics, deployment and pre-staging of our POS and networking equipment to venues and partners in all 50 states.
ED: What’s one trait about yourself that people you conduct business with wouldn’t know about you or would be surprised to find out?
TEPUS: Even though I spend most of my time working in nightclubs, bars and restaurants, I haven’t had a drink in over five years so I can always be the sober driver.
ED: When you’re not working on new installs or helping clients, how do you enjoy spending your time? What are your favorite hobbies?
TEPUS: I really enjoy traveling the world, especially anywhere that I can go golfing, hiking or snowboarding. However, living in Vegas I don’t have to travel far for either, with some of the best golf courses being in Las Vegas, Mesquite and St. George. Brianhead is less than three hours away and always packed with snow for the winter. Some of the best hiking trails are here in Red Rock Canyon and Mount Charleston.
ED: What are some of the things on your personal ‘bucket list’? Places you’d like to visit, things you’d like to do?
TEPUS: I still need to get out to Dubai and experience all the amazing projects they’ve helped bring to fruition. Snowboarding down an indoor ski resort and eating dinner in an underwater restaurant can be done all in the same day in Dubai. I definitely need to get out there soon!
ED: What attracted you to the POS industry in the first place, and why SmartTab?
TEPUS: I’ve been in payments and the POS industry long before I became aware of SmartTab. I was actually helping a DJ friend of mine with a gig in San Francisco a little over 12 years ago, and the gig just so happened to be in Daniel Baron’s Bar/Nightclub at the time called Noble, located in the tenderloin district of SF and home to some pretty wild nights. What attracted me to SmartTab almost instantly was its speed. I had already been selling POS systems for close to a decade, and I had never seen any bartender operate on a system as fast as I had witnessed that night. Fast forward to today, we are the fastest system on the market for high-volume, high-velocity venues.
ED: What’s one of the biggest issues clubs face with POS systems, and how does your company address this issue?
TEPUS: I’ll give you two big issues in most clubs: infrastructure stability and transaction security. Infrastructure stability — internet and power issues can cause disruption with any type of POS system and/or networking equipment. We install power conditioners, battery backups and 4G Internet backups as failsafes at all of our club locations so that if/when the club’s local infrastructure goes down, SmartTab is still operational. Transaction security — most venues don’t have a system that is capable of capturing customer information securely to help fight against fraud and chargebacks, or they’re still living in the past with antiquated hardware that is downgrading their transactions and forcing them to incur higher costs and chargebacks. SmartTab helps ensure that transactions are captured with additional chargeback protection tools including scanning a driver’s license and/or pictures of the customer as they are signing for the transaction.
ED: What’s your most memorable industry-related experience (either EXPO, or outside of EXPO)?
TEPUS: You always remember your ‘first,’ right? I would say that being a part of the build-out process and the grand opening of the Peppermint Hippo here in Las Vegas has always been one of my favorite experiences in general. We were put to the test as a team, because one of our competitors wasn’t going to be able to deliver on-time, so we only had a few weeks to make everything happen from menu build-out, to staff training, to a four-day, go-live weekend at a 24-hour venue on the Las Vegas strip. It was a tremendous amount of work, but when it’s for guys like Alan Chang and Charlie DeLaPaz, I can say that we truly enjoyed those 16-20 hour days to help them start off with a bang — which they did! I’ll always appreciate their group for helping us really break into this industry.
For more information, please visit smarttab.com.
