About EXPO

Raymond entered food and beverage in December 2020 — arguably the worst moment in the modern history of the industry. At Boxer Properties, a high-volume ski-in/ski-out restaurant in the Colorado mountains, he walked into a skeleton crew, shattered supply chains, rotating shutdowns, and a team cobbled together across languages, ages, and experience levels. There was no playbook for what the industry was facing. The only tools available were systems, process, leadership, and culture — so that's what he leaned on. Hard.

That baptism by fire shaped everything that followed. At The Resort at Paws Up, a Forbes 4-Star luxury resort, he managed fine dining service for up to 350 guests nightly, rebuilt the wine program from the ground up (driving monthly revenues from $55K to $350K), and executed marquee events including The French Laundry at Paws Up, Friends of James Beard, and Montana Master Chefs. He built the tracking spreadsheets, the training programs, the service standards. And every time, the same thing held the operation back: the tech was an afterthought. POS configurations nobody understood. Vendor spreadsheets held together with duct tape. Networks that hadn't been touched since install. The tools existed — but nobody on staff had the technical background to set them up right, and nobody in IT understood restaurant operations well enough to help.

At Hilton Garden Inn, as Director of Food & Beverage overseeing five venues and western Montana's largest banquet space (26,000 sq ft), the pattern repeated. He managed $150K+ in monthly revenue, recruited a new team from scratch, and built the standardized checklists and pre-shift rhythms that turned things around. But the hardest part was never the hospitality — it was bridging the gap between what the operation needed technically and what the team had capacity to build. Every shift, what you really needed was just one more person. Someone who could step in, see the whole picture, and build the system you'd been meaning to build for six months but couldn't because you were running service every night.

That's what EXPO is. The extra set of hands with the technical chops to match. Raymond paired his F&B leadership with CompTIA certifications, cybersecurity training, and hands-on infrastructure work — not because he wanted to leave hospitality, but because he saw that the biggest gaps in restaurant operations were never culinary or service problems. They were systems problems. Tech problems. Security problems that nobody on the floor had time or training to fix.

EXPO is the person you wished you had on your team — the one who understands Saturday night service and network segmentation, who can write an SOP and audit your POS security, who entered the industry when everything was on fire and learned that the only way out is better systems.