The Secret Sauce to Growing Restaurant Locations—Without Growing Your Workload: 7shifts

The second location. It’s supposed to be the victory lap, the proof that you’ve made it. But for many operators, it’s the breaking point.

Between juggling more schedules to create and more employees to pay—along with all the day-to-day chaos in between—things can get messy fast. 

That’s where 7shifts comes in.

Multi-location features to keep everything in control

We spoke with a few multi-unit operators to hear about how 7shifts keeps their stores running smoothly. Here’s what they had to say:

Slash admin time—while you scale

After opening a second location, the time it takes to create schedules and run payroll can easily double—and with a third, it might even triple. With 7shifts, however, you can handle scheduling and payroll as efficiently as possible.

Kevin Yu from 2d Restaurant uses 7shifts for his flagship location, and the time he saves lets him focus on other priorities—like his market location and pop-up exhibits. With 7shifts, he can create a schedule in as little as 5 minutes and run payroll in just 20. He also highlights tip pooling as his favorite feature, saving him 3 to 4 hours per pay cycle. 

“Whenever I talk to my fellow business operators, I often recommend 7shifts—being a solution that’s not only efficient but trustworthy. It really saves operators and entrepreneurs time, focusing on key issues that can drive success to our business.”

Also read: How 2d restaurant maximizes efficiency with 7shifts

 

 

One platform for scheduling, communication, and payroll

Instead of bouncing between different apps, 7shifts lets you run everything—scheduling, communication, time tracking, payroll, and more—from a single platform. For multi-location operators, that means overseeing every store in one place—no logging in and out or piecing together data from multiple sources.

Adrie Groeneweg, President of Pizza Ranch, says, “7shifts is just a very easy-to-use platform […] It’s very easy to follow through on it— it’s easy to understand. It’s also using, in a sense, one platform. So there aren’t as many platforms for those to use, so there’s value in that.”

Also read: How Pizza Ranch improved employee turnover across 150+ locations

The same benefit extends to operators managing multiple restaurant concepts. Trevor Guy, IT Manager for both Frank & Andrea and Tono Pizzera, appreciates the simplicity of the toggle feature: “Multiple restaurant brands—it’s really nice because I have one login. I can just go to the top and switch between the two. It’s super simple.” 

Your best team at any location

Sharing staff across locations is a popular and smart move for multi-unit operators—less hiring, less training, and more flexibility. Leslie Broadland, Franchisee of two Jamba Juice stores, loves the visibility between locations when scheduling: “We have several employees who work at both locations, and I like how we can see that they’re scheduled, but they’re grayed out—which means they’re at the other store. And that has really helped us share employees and not double-schedule them.”

On the employee side, having one platform for all restaurants makes it easier when it comes to managing their own information, too. Josh Bishop, Owner of Fork & Fire and Wildfire, explains, “If I do move people between restaurants, they’re using the same system. Their information’s the same. They can toggle between the two like I do, and they can see both. So, that’s a benefit for them.”

He also points out that there’s no need to retrain staff on a whole different platform: “It just makes things easier, especially when you have one person operating and overseeing both restaurants. I can teach people the things I learn at both restaurants. I don’t have to learn two different things so that I can teach two different things.”

Also read: How 7shifts helps Wildfire and Fork & Fire do it all

One message, total team alignment

With 7shifts, announcements—like corporate policies or menu changes—can be sent across all locations with ease. Messages can also be customized for each location as needed. Connie Walker, Regional Manager of five Jeremiah’s Italian Ice locations, highlights this feature as a major plus:

“The messaging feature has been extremely beneficial with us having multiple locations […] Being able to message out the same message to everyone definitely helps us all stay on the same page.” Year-to-date, Jeremiah’s Italian Ice stores have sent over 1,000 announcements and 150,000 chats with 7shifts.

Also read: 70% of Jeremiah’s Italian Ice locations use 7shifts—Here’s why

 

 

Creating consistency across franchises

For larger multi-location brands, one big challenge corporate often faces is the lack of standardized processes with technology. That’s exactly what Julianna Blackhurst, Senior Director of Franchising & Operations at Jeremiah’s Italian Ice, identified as a major pain point:

“We didn’t have a system that integrated with all our technologies as a preferred system yet. So, if franchisees were signing on, we would get questions: ‘How do I do scheduling based off sales? How do I enter all of my employees into the system?’ And you just have to do it all individually for every store.”

As franchisees kept recommending the platform to others, Julianna listened to the owners—and the brand adopted 7shifts as a preferred vendor for scheduling. Today, about 120 locations use 7shifts for scheduling, making everything more standard from store to store, especially when it comes to onboarding new owners. 

“Having that preferred vendor setup where they don’t have to do anything for the integrations—it’s a lot easier when you’re onboarded through Jeremiah’s. The 7shifts onboarding team already knows how to get your system up and running.”

 

@7shifts.com 70% of Jeremiah’s Italian Ice locations use 7shifts to schedule smarter and here’s why. 👀 🍨 #JeremiahsItalianIce #SoftIcecream #Jelati #SchedulingApp #LabourCosts #7shifts ♬ original sound – 7shifts

Simplify multi-entity payroll without the headaches

Many restaurant owners with multiple locations set up separate Employer Identification Numbers (EINs) for each business. This can be for tax purposes, compliance, or financial flexibility—but it often creates extra complexity when it comes to payroll.

7shifts’ new multi-EIN payroll feature makes managing that setup a whole lot easier. Unlike some other payroll providers, you’ll be able to:

• Run payroll for each EIN separately
• Handle tax and reporting separately for each EIN
• Pay from different bank accounts for each EIN

Even with those separate operations, you can use a single login to manage payroll across all entities. That means one centralized platform for your operations—and an easier path to add new locations without any extra headaches.

After adopting 7shifts Payroll at Fork & Fire, Josh decided to bring it to his second location too: “To get things a little bit more linear and have less logins, we jumped to 7shifts Payroll at Wildfire as well […] The integration from time punching to time clocks to payroll, all in one place—one login—is a huge win.”

A single source of truth for reporting

Which location is most profitable? Where are your labor costs creeping up? For many multi-unit operators, answering these basic questions requires digging through a mountain of spreadsheets and POS reports.

Operators can view all the data they need—across multiple locations—in one place with 7shifts. The Operations Overview Dashboard lets you track key performance metrics like total sales, total labor, and labor cost percentages, making it easy to compare performance from store to store. 

 

 

From a corporate perspective, 7shifts also provides an accurate comparison across different franchises. David Nehme, Business Systems Consultant to Chatime, says that before adopting the platform, “It was just a spreadsheet mountain. Everyone had their own version of the truth […] We took a lot of guesses to work out where we needed to be.”

Recognizing the need for a centralized tool, the bubble tea chain found success with 7shifts: “It gave us the visibility and the confidence to say that we can actually make our schedules dynamic and a lot more reactive to the forecast that the system was producing.”

 

 

“The rewards are returning back time to the manager, giving them greater transparency, giving the head office greater transparency, and then if all goes well, the financial results are just an outcome.”

Also read: How Chatime Canada conquered spreadsheet mountain with 7shifts

Grow your business, not your workload

You didn’t get into this business to become a professional admin. You did it to feed people, create amazing experiences, and grow.

Managing multiple restaurants doesn’t have to be as overwhelming as it is. With 7shifts, you can handle scheduling, payroll, communication, reporting, and more for every location—all from one platform.