Eric Knott believes great restaurant companies are built long before customers ever notice them.
Inside the dining room, guests see tacos, hospitality, music, and culture. Behind the scenes, Knott sees systems, training, communication, and operational consistency.
That mindset shapes what he has spent the last two years building at Tiki Taco.
Building With KNOW
When Knott joined the company, the brand operated with only two technologies: Toast and QuickBooks. Today it runs on eighteen, including KNOW, the restaurant operations and learning management platform founded by Krish Sridhar.
For Knott, the goal was never simply adding more software.
It was building infrastructure capable of supporting growth without overwhelming operators.
During his conversation with Shawn Walchef on Digital Hospitality, recorded at the Restaurant Leadership Conference in Phoenix, Knott discussed how Tiki Taco has approached operational growth differently from many emerging restaurant brands.
KNOW quickly became a major part of that strategy.
“What they were able to do right out of the gate was build out a learning management system where all of our videos and training automatically uploaded,” Knott said.
The platform helped Tiki Taco digitize SOPs, line checks, opening procedures, operational checklists, and training workflows while giving leadership visibility into how consistently those systems were actually being executed across locations.
Faster Communication With KNOW
But Knott became especially interested in one feature many operators overlook: communication.
“The most slept-on feature is the chat feature built inside the platform,” he explained.
Instead of forcing employees to bounce between separate apps for communication, training, and operations, much of that interaction now happens inside one centralized system.
For Knott, engagement drives adoption.
“The more engagement you have inside the app, the more chance they’re actually going to use it,” he said.
The platform’s AI functionality also helped reduce administrative work by automatically generating quizzes and training support from uploaded restaurant videos, saving time for Tiki Taco lean corporate team.
That operational focus reflects Knott’s larger background in hospitality.
Love For Hospitality
He started working at nine years old alongside his grandfather at a Knights of Columbus social club before later spending twelve years with Outback during what he described as the company’s “magical” years.
Then he found Tiki Taco at the Restaurant Leadership Conference itself.
“I was looking for a founder-led startup,” Knott said.
The company’s founders came from creative backgrounds working with brands like Nike, Under Armour, and PlayStation. They had already built strong culture, hospitality, and community around the business. Knott came in to help build the operational foundation underneath it.
Today Tiki Taco’s operates five restaurants, twenty-five off-premise locations, and a food truck while preparing to double its restaurant footprint again this year.
Still, throughout the conversation, Knott repeatedly returned to a larger philosophy.
Technology should support hospitality, not distract from it.
That same thinking shapes how Tiki Taco approaches storytelling and community involvement.
“We do a ton in the community,” Knott said. “I’d rival what we do with any big chain.”
Be Our Neighbor
One example is the company’s “Be Our Neighbor” content series, where Tiki Taco highlights local businesses surrounding each new restaurant opening. Instead of focusing solely on promoting itself, the company uses the series to spotlight other operators and businesses inside the neighborhood.
Knott believes more restaurant operators should tell those stories publicly instead of waiting for perfection.
“People don’t have the courage to look stupid,” he said.
Inside Tiki Taco, he has pushed his team to stop overthinking content creation and simply document the work already happening inside the business.
“Let’s just do it,” Knott said.
For him, that mentality applies to restaurant growth too.
Build the foundation first. Then scale from there.
