With 7shifts’ recent funding announcement, designed to accelerate our business and products forward, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on all of the passion and hard work put in by our team into achieving 300% year-over-year user growth, scheduling nearly 100 million shifts and solving labor management issues for over 10,000 restaurant locations.
This was not achieved overnight, but through our deep and constant focus on our mission here at 7shifts—to improve happiness and efficiency in the workplace.
For context, let’s go back to when 7shifts was first conceived—all the way back to when I was a teenager working for my dad. He owned several Quiznos locations and would spend countless hours building staff schedules manually in excel, fumbling with time-off sticky notes and having staff phone in non-stop to get their shifts covered. It was witnessing my dad struggle through all of this that inspired me to teach myself to code and make it my mission to help solve his scheduling problem.
Flash forward to today, and the 7shifts team is now comprised of 80 ambitious people—both in Saskatoon and Toronto—competing in a global market.
We know that every business, especially technology-focused ones like ours, need to continue to innovate in order to provide best-in-class solutions to their clients. In light of this raise, I want to talk about the 5 key things that we’re going to do to stay ahead of the curve, and how we’re going to continue to provide more value to restaurant operators everywhere.
1. Doubling down on machine learning for restaurants
Given what we’ve learned around the finicky-nature of scheduling for restaurants, we’ve spent a great deal of time building an understanding of all the factors that play into it.
When building a schedule, restaurant managers factor in things like historical sales, weather/seasonality, and employee skill levels, but they also factor in more emotional and intuitive factors—things like who works well together and why. Historically, software hasn’t done a good job at understanding this—particularly for restaurants.
At 7shifts, we believe we have a solution that will change the industry when it comes to building intelligent schedules for restaurants that keep labor costs down, while keeping employee happiness, customer satisfaction, and labor productivity high.
2.Increase labor compliance support
Today, 7shifts has compliance support for some of the biggest states and cities (i.e. New York, California, San Francisco, Oregon) and we’re seeing a number of states quickly follow suit in the complexity of their compliance regulations. This means we need to keep pace with supporting these ever-changing labor laws, so restaurant operators can focus on other major initiatives, like driving revenue for their business.
3. Introduce more reporting options
When it comes to reporting on your restaurant, we know it can be challenging to get a report that’s tailored specifically to your needs. We’ve heard a great deal of feedback on what reports are most valuable for restaurant operators to be successful, whether it be variance reporting or deeper labor reporting, so we plan on adding more robust reporting capabilities into the 7shifts dashboard.
4. Go deeper on integrations
Given the feedback we’ve received from new and existing 7shifts users, we will be expanding our integrations to not only include more POS integrations, but also payroll to help provide restaurants with a fully-integrated restaurant technology stack. We truly believe that restaurants win when all of the systems they use can work together.
5. Expand our Client Success team
For a long time, we’ve know one of our biggest strengths has been our prompt, friendly and helpful customer support. We’re in the hospitality industry, and this industry doesn’t sleep, so why should we? 7shifts will be expanding our support team to ensure we’re there to help our clients, no matter the time of day.
There are many more things we are working on in addition to what’s listed above, but I just wanted to highlight a few of the major changes you will notice in
All in all, it’s been an incredible journey to get to where we are, so thank you to our team, our customers and those that have supported us since day one. We’re only getting started…
Cheers to helping restaurants succeed ?
If you have any questions, reach out to support@7shifts.com
Jordan Boesch, CEO
Jordan Boesch
CEO
Jordan is the CEO @ 7shifts. Jordan grew up working in his dad’s restaurant and fell in love with the industry–the rest is history.
