Sushil Garg and the business of the unnoticed

The customer needed a name for the contract. Sushil Garg had made the sale; the business still needed something to call itself. In the company’s telling, he looked through his office window, spotted a street sign and supplied the answer: BirchStreet. A naming consultant might have required several workshops. The street was available immediately.

It is a pleasingly practical beginning for a company concerned with practical things. BirchStreet, established in 2002, would make its business in the less photographed parts of hospitality: purchasing, invoices, stockrooms and payments. The guest might remember the view. Garg’s software would help the hotel keep track of what it had bought to make the visit possible.

Garg came to this work as a software entrepreneur and enterprise software designer. He had founded, operated and sold software businesses before BirchStreet. By 2022, his career in software spanned four decades. Hospitality gave that experience a particular destination: a complicated industry whose purchasing processes offered plenty of room for improvement. The task suited someone willing to spend time with details that rarely make it into a hotel advertisement.

A second life for purchasing software

BirchStreet’s origins included technology from PurchasePro. Garg had been an investor in that company and received a code line following its bankruptcy. He saw an opening in hospitality and began a relationship with Hilton, which had been using the same code and needed a technology provider to manage it and eventually take it over.

That beginning matters because it places an existing customer problem near the center of the story. There was software, there was a hotel company using it, and there was work required to keep it useful. Garg’s opportunity depended on understanding that relationship. He also chose to work alongside group purchasing organizations rather than set out to compete with them.

A purchasing organization can negotiate terms. A software provider can help an operator follow those terms in daily work. The relationship makes more sense when the two jobs are considered together. Garg was building in a market with established participants, each with its own reason to exist. Finding a useful place among them was part of the business design.

The resulting product addressed a sequence with a wonderfully unglamorous name: procure-to-pay. Select a supplier, place an order, receive the goods, check the invoice, arrange payment. Each step is ordinary. Keeping the steps connected across multiple properties is where the ordinary becomes demanding. A missing link can leave someone reconciling the story by hand.

The invoice has a working life, too

By June 2011, BirchStreet had been selected to supply an eProcurement platform for the Asian American Hotel Owners Association. The proposed AAHOA eMarket would combine purchasing software with the association’s collective buying power. At the time, the association represented 10,000 members owning 20,000 hotels. Those were the association’s figures, rather than a count of BirchStreet installations.

The distinction helps explain the ambition. Garg’s company was supplying an operating layer through which hotel owners could reach negotiated supplier programs and see more of their purchasing activity. The announcement described a cooperative expected to become operational later that year. It put the software in the path between a buying agreement and an actual order.

Another milestone arrived with Starwood. By July 5, 2016, the hotel group had completed deployment of BirchStreet’s eProcurement and accounts payable automation across its managed North American properties. The rollout followed pilots in the United States and Canada, then successive waves of implementation. The modules connected with Starwood’s financial system.

The reported result was concrete: more than 14,000 invoices each week no longer needed manual entry, a reduction of 70%. That figure belongs to this particular deployment in 2016. It gives the story a useful human scale nevertheless. Every invoice removed from the entry queue represented one less repetition of a task that someone had previously needed to perform.

Garg’s response emphasized continuing to improve the functionality for Starwood and other customers. The work carried on after deployment. In enterprise software, signing the agreement provides a date worth celebrating; using the system provides a much longer examination.

What the numbers should tell you

Garg also wrote about the thinking behind such systems. In an essay on procurement data, he argued that automating operational processes comes before collecting useful business intelligence. An organization needs a reliable record of activity before a dashboard can offer much help. Attractive charts cannot rescue a purchasing trail that was never captured.

He described information that managers could examine by department, region, supplier or product category, then follow down to individual purchase orders and prices. Inventory information could help determine what needed replenishing. In his account, a useful system joined the daily transaction to the decision that followed it. The value lay in making purchasing information accessible enough to act on.

His casino work expressed a similar concern with visibility and control. BirchStreet offered purchasing, accounting, inventory, recipe and capital budget functions, with connections to other business systems. A casino’s public spaces provided the spectacle; the operation behind them still needed to account for its spending. Garg’s contribution belonged to that quieter calculation.

The focus gives his career a recognizable shape. He repeatedly returned to what operators could see, measure and manage. There is a certain restraint in choosing that kind of problem. The software earns its place when the people responsible for the business can get through the working day with fewer uncertainties.

“The key to running successful, efficient and profitable operations is having accurate and accessible data.”Sushil Garg · on procurement intelligence

The virtue of a customer who stays

In 2016, BirchStreet bought G4 Technologies, whose AccuBar product handled beverage inventory. The acquisition extended the company’s access to restaurants and country clubs while adding a way to measure the contents of partially used bottles. A user could adjust the level of an on-screen bottle to match the real one. Even software eventually has to answer the question of how much wine is left.

Garg’s pricing comments were equally down to earth. He wanted to reduce AccuBar’s initial charges in line with BirchStreet’s approach. “I don’t believe in a lot of upfront fees,” he said. He favored earning ongoing subscription revenue and keeping customers satisfied over time.

That preference sets up a straightforward commercial discipline. A large initial fee pays the seller before the customer has lived very long with the product. A continuing subscription gives the relationship more occasions to be judged. Garg’s argument accepted the wait. His company would recover its money over time, provided customers had reasons to remain.

The bottle example also makes the acquisition easier to understand. Purchasing and inventory are connected activities. An operator deciding what to order benefits from knowing what is already there. Adding a more precise inventory tool brought another piece of the customer’s working day into the same conversation.

Making room at the top

Growth changed the company around its founder. Serent Capital announced a minority investment in January 2018. Garg said he had looked for a partner with knowledge of procurement software and hospitality technology, along with resources to help carry out the growth strategy. Capital came with an expectation of relevant experience.

In July 2018, BirchStreet promoted its chief operating officer, Stephen Markle, to CEO. Garg remained chairman, with a continuing brief covering technology innovation and major enterprise customers. Markle had joined as COO two years earlier. The announcement divided responsibilities as the business prepared for its next phase.

For Garg, the defined role kept him close to product and customer work. Those were the same concerns visible in the company’s beginnings and in his writing about purchasing data. A founder’s title can change while the subject of his attention remains quite familiar. Here, the announcement spelled out where that attention would go.

The company’s 2019 fact sheet recorded a wider operation: software available in 11 languages and more than 69 currencies, serving businesses in over 100 countries. These were company figures at that time. They describe the practical consequences of selling internationally: purchasing software has to accommodate the languages and money in which its customers actually work.

Las Vegas, behind the lights

In February 2021, BirchStreet announced its headquarters move from Newport Beach to Las Vegas. Garg, identified in that announcement as chairman and CEO, was already a Las Vegas resident. The company presented the move as a way to be closer to gaming and hospitality customers and to recruit from the city’s talent pool.

The location suited the business. Las Vegas offers hospitality at a scale that makes its supporting operations hard to overlook once one starts looking. For a founder whose company handled buying and operating decisions, proximity to customers had an evident practical purpose. The headquarters move made that purpose geographical.

In January 2022, Parthenon Capital invested alongside Serent. The announcement identified Garg as founder and board member, while executive chairman Brendan Reidy took on the CEO role. At that point, BirchStreet reported approximately 100,000 users at more than 13,000 customer locations. The transaction terms were undisclosed.

Garg described a plan for continued organic growth and acquisitions, focused on customer problems across sourcing, procurement and supplier payments. Twenty years after the founding, the vocabulary had stayed close to the work. There were more users, investors and leadership roles, but the underlying sequence still began with something an operator needed to buy.

Return to the naming story and its hurried glance through a window. A street sign supplied a usable answer at the moment a customer needed one. Much of Garg’s BirchStreet career follows that practical rhythm: find the operational question, give it a workable answer, then stay around to improve it. The hotel guest can enjoy the room. Someone has taken an interest in the paperwork.