Where $10 million in restaurant technology funding will take us in 2019
Recently, our company 7shifts — a restaurant scheduling and labor management platform — raised $10 million in Series A funding to accelerate our business and products forward in 2019.
The 7shifts funding was not gifted us on a silver platter, and it was not achieved overnight. What got us to where we are today was our deep and constant focus on our mission — to improve happiness and efficiency in the workplace.
[Read about the $10 million funding and what it means for 7shifts clients]
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.
7shifts is your classic tech startup. The idea was conceived through the effort to solve a problem I witnessed in my life as a teen. Let’s jump back in time 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.
Based on the way I see the industry moving, here’s what the restaurant technology industry can expect in the next few years.
In an industry where restaurant managers still spend hours managing labor, the best operators will turn to technology to help streamline their entire scheduling process.
Machine learning isn’t a term everyone is familiar with and can sound scary, so let’s take the term “machine learning” out of it for a second. All a restaurant operator really cares about is if scheduling is going to be automated, it needs to ensure there is no over/under-staffing, it should help you achieve your ideal labor target and factors in variables like weather, availability, who works well together and why. It needs to balance both the gut of a manager and the revenue drivers of the restaurant for it to be truly successful.
Predicting labor needs in the restaurant space is more complex than any other industry. You’re dealing with an industry that employs the highest number of teenagers than any other industry, meaning you’re not just predicting sales, weather blips, but you also have to think about who works well together and how to manage their frequently changing availability needs with school and other activities. Historically, the software businesses utilize hasn’t done a good job at understanding this — particularly for restaurants.
For 7shifts: We believe we can 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.
As the restaurant industry rapidly evolves, I believe we’ll see more players entering the game and automating and improving on operational processes. Check out Toast’s post on AI for Restaurants to read more about these innovations.
The importance of labor compliance is going to have a massive impact on restaurants in 2019. Because of the nuances for compliance by state, it makes it nearly impossible to track violations by hand or by any paper method. If restaurants don’t adopt technology solutions, they could be facing some hefty fines ranging from hundreds to thousands per violation. Following the introduction of New York Fair Workweek, Oregon passed their version of Fair Workweek legislation in July, 2018 and we can only anticipate other states will follow suit.
For 7shifts: 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.
Restaurant operators need reporting that goes beyond just a dump of data, they should be looking at tools that give them actionable insights. It’s not enough to show actual vs. projected labor and sales anymore, restaurant operators should try to understand why the variance occurred in the first place. What series of events affected how your manager scheduled vs. what actually happened and what can technology do to help them identify and improve their future scheduling habits
Restaurant operators and managers need to be able to make data-based decisions on the fly for the health of their business. Yet when it comes to reporting on your restaurant, it can be challenging to get a report that’s tailored specifically to your needs.
For 7shifts: The kinds of reports required depend on the type of restaurant — whether you’re a multi-unit franchise or a mom-and pop shop. Beyond our enterprise dashboard reporting, 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.
Related: The 5 Restaurant Reports You Actually Need
Integrating restaurant technology used to be a want, but it’s now becoming a need since the benefits of integrated solutions far outweigh non-integrated solutions. Sales, labor and employee data should be flowing between whatever systems you decide to put in your restaurant — after all, nobody wants to enter the same information in 3 systems when you’re on-boarding a new staff member. If you’re entering that data into your on-boarding payroll product, it should sync over to your POS and to your scheduling app for a seamless experience.
The same thing should occur if you decide to terminate a staff member. Without tight integrations, steps get missed and the data becomes inconsistent and cumbersome to manage.
For 7shifts: We plan to expand 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.
If there’s one thing that restaurant owners and operators lack, it’s time. That means they don’t have the bandwidth to repair and bug-fix clunky tech systems. That’s why it’s integral that having on-demand access to support for restaurant tech solutions is vital, and will only increase in importance in 2019 as the tech adopted in restaurants advances in complexity.
The hospitality industry doesn’t sleep, so why should the support? Technology solutions providers need to ensure they’re available to provide hands-on support for clients, or suffer churn. In order to be properly adopted and integrated into restaurants wolrdwide, technology has to be easy-to-use and turnkey.
For 7shifts: We know that our hands-on, friendly and accessible customer service is one of our strong suits. In 2019, we will be expanding our support team to ensure we’re there to help our clients, no matter the time of day.
The restaurant industry has undergone an incredible shift in the past years with new technology innovating every part of the workplace. The investment in 7shifts is just one sign that we’re on the right path, and the future for restaurant technology is bright. We’re only getting started…
Cheers to helping restaurants succeed 🍻
Where $10 million in restaurant technology funding will take us in 2019
Research & References of Where $10 million in restaurant technology funding will take us in 2019|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
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