GTM clients we've worked with
+ many more
+ many more
+ many more
Industry recognition just landed. Restaurant ops scan that list when picking vendors. This is your warm-window to convert awareness into pipeline.
Pacific Catch just signed for their second location, 30 heaters. Largest install to date. Same architect and GC are now spec'ing 80 heaters at Disneyland. Multi-location buyers exist and they're already moving. The campaign is to find the next 10.
$0.30/hr vs $4–5/hr propane. 25% patio capacity gain. Plug-and-play 120V. If we can get in the room, the spreadsheet closes itself.
Long hours, low desk time, gmail-blocked. Generic outbound bounces. Requires SMS, LinkedIn, and timing windows tuned to service shifts.
Buyers default to propane because that's all they've known. We have to wake them up before we sell them. Content has to land before the cold open does.
Owner signs, GM specs, electrician installs. Real outbound has to land each one with the right angle. Not one email to one inbox.
"We're crushing it. Fast Company gave us that nod and clearly we're solving a pain that people know."
"You can't build a venture-backed business by relying on architect timelines. There's all these restaurants out there. How do we get people to replace what they have?"
"I want to have booked meetings. Calendars filling up. That's a really good outcome for us to drive towards."
Restaurants have a massive addressable market. The problem isn't TAM. It's reach. We treat outbound as a structured experiment to find which restaurant-operator personas wake up to Focal first.
Every two weeks, we launch 4 to 8 campaigns. Each a unique combo of cuisine vertical, region, persona (owner / GM / area manager), value angle (energy bill / patio capacity / install speed), and channel mix.
For independent restaurants we lead with the owner. For groups and chains, we hit the GM with the cost math and the area manager with the multi-location rollout angle. Same product, three completely different conversations.
This system produces more than leads. It reveals which segment closes fastest, at what price, and through which channel. By month 3, we know exactly where to pour the budget.
We could write the perfect email, but if it hits spam folders, game over. That's why we go heavy on infrastructure: 60 primary domains with 120 inboxes (split between Outlook and Gmail), plus 60 backup domains with another 120 inboxes for redundancy. ESP matching, spam avoidance, reputation management. We handle the technical work that keeps emails landing.
Boilerplate templates, custom messaging, industry-specific angles, persona-based copy. We use everything, then test all of it against the signals we're collecting. Maybe a proven template wins for funding signals, but custom copy converts on job-change triggers. Constant A/B tests reveal which approach works for which signal. It's not about one approach. It's about knowing which approach fits which moment.
Every restaurant patio with outdoor heat is photographed on Yelp, Google, and Instagram. We AI-tag those photos by heater type. By week 2 you have a US map of every restaurant currently running propane vs. electric tower vs. nothing. Then we layer the other signals: patio permits filed in the last 30 days, Michelin and Eater mentions, owner-operator LinkedIn signals, propane delivery contracts in public filings, liquor license expansions. ZoomInfo gets you a list. This gets you a list of buyers, sorted by how cold their patio is right now.
48-hr audit. Domains purchased. Clay tables live. Founder intake.
8,000 patio-equipped restaurants mapped across top-25 metros. First copy round drafted, QA'd against your voice.
Inboxes warmed. Soft-launch to a 250-restaurant holdout list. First GM demos on Raj/Rohan calendar.
Full send across owner + GM tracks. Weekly optimization cadence. First installs scheduled.
50 words. Bracketed variables get filled per-prospect by Clay: heater count from the Yelp photo scrape, proof numbers from your team. One observation, one comp, one binary question.
+ 2 more variants tested in parallel
Maria, counted {{visible_heater_count}} propane towers in your patio photos from Saturday.
Pacific Catch ran the same setup at their Embarcadero spot. Switched to plug-in last fall, winter propane line dropped {{pacific_catch_savings_pct}}.
Propane for this winter, locked in or still scoping?
Raj, co-CEO Focal
focalheat.co
Hit independent restaurant owners with patio seating. Open with the specific monthly cost we estimate from their patio size and heater count visible on Yelp photos. Wakes the buyer up to a category they've defaulted to without thinking.
Two-track: GM gets the revenue-lift math on covers per shift. Facilities or maintenance lead gets the 120V install simplicity in parallel, 5 days later. Same prospect, two angles, no thread collision.
Scrape city and county patio expansion permits filed in last 30 days. Hit owner plus their general contractor with the 120V install play before they sink $40K into gas plumbing. Architect arm runs in parallel.
Leverage the Fast Company Most Innovative 2026 list as a warm-open. Targets multi-location operators where rollout economics matter most. The press cite earns the reply that a cold pitch wouldn't.
For each prospect, identify the nearest existing Focal-installed restaurant. Lead with hyper-local proximity proof. Restaurants buy from restaurants they know, especially the one they walk past every morning.
Personalized "Your patio · estimated propane bill · what Focal would cost" sheet. One physical envelope. Restaurants pin good mail on the wall.
Restaurant Unstoppable, The Garnish, FullComp, Bartender at Large. Each podcast = 50–100 warm operators. Charm handles outreach + booking.
focalheat.co/anchovy-bar shows their patio photo, their estimated bill, what Focal would cost. Cold email links there. Reply rate doubles when they see their own restaurant analyzed.
They spec the heating. We get a 5-year forward pipeline.
"The startup ending propane patios" pitched to SF, LA, NYC, Seattle, Chicago food writers. Inbound demand follows.
Slow traditional restaurant sales cycles, competing against well-funded ghost kitchen players. Operators hard to reach by phone or generic email.
Job-posting and review-data signals identified restaurants ready to expand delivery without overhead. Trigger-based campaigns on hiring and expansion signals, sent during the 2 to 5pm shoulder window between lunch and dinner.
Hello Hero needed to connect their teletherapy platform with decision-makers across thousands of school districts. Like restaurant operators, school admins live in meetings, not inboxes.
Dual-track strategy. Mapped every admin in every US public school, uncovered direct contacts, ran parallel campaigns recruiting licensed therapists. Same multi-stakeholder logic Focal needs across owner, GM, and electrician.
Local ISP competing against incumbents on the doorstep. Email and LinkedIn alone don't move the prospect. Needed a real dialing operation at scale, not just copy and sequencing.
Charm built and staffed the dialing teams. Layered email and LinkedIn around the call cadence on the same prospect. For Focal, the analog is SMS plus LinkedIn plus phone on the restaurant operator who never answers a generic inbox.
Restaurant operators are the same shape as ISP doorstep buyers. They don't reply to cold email alone. The dialing-team build at Highline is the template for the SMS, LinkedIn, and phone layer Focal needs on top of email.
Pulling verified metrics from Chris before this ships.
Saturated mid-market accounting software space. Sales team stretched thin on inbound. Needed signal-driven targeting to cut through the noise.
Intent-based outbound on firms hiring tech roles or engaging with cloud-accounting content. Multi-touch sequences combining email and LinkedIn. Direct analog to Focal's patio-permit trigger: scrape the signal, hit the prospect within 72 hours.
Strong newsletter brand awareness but no systematic outbound to reach Fortune 500 buyers investing in AI training. Awareness without pipeline. Sound familiar after Fast Company?
Multi-channel outbound. 40+ campaign types, A/B tested weekly. Email plus LinkedIn plus inbound-led targeting. The same "test every angle, double down on what closes" engine we'd run for Focal across cuisine, region, and persona.
At Focal's install ASP, the Growth plan pays for itself before the second install. Target cadence is 3 GM demos a week. At a 33% close rate that's roughly 10 installs a month. Past install number two, every dollar of Focal revenue is profit on the Charm invoice.
3 demos/wk × ~33% close ≈ 10 installs/mo · $10,000 ÷ install ASP < 1
If we don't generate ROI in the first 90 days, we'll work month 4 completely free. We're confident because we've done this dozens of times before.
Claim your guarantee →Deep-dive on restaurant segments (cuisine, region, size), your voice, and demo goals. Define success metrics: demos/week, install rate, $ pipeline.
Domains, inboxes, warming, tool configuration. We build everything you need to scale outbound.
Launch within 2–3 weeks of kickoff. Start generating pipeline with tested, optimized campaigns.
"You guys are going to crush it. You guys are going to become so indispensable to many early teams." Raj Tilwa · Co-CEO, Focal
Domains go on order Tuesday. Your first 250-restaurant test list lands Friday. Inboxes warming by week 2, soft launch week 3, first GM demos on your calendar by week 4.
Pick your kickoff date →
