What Makes A Great Restaurant Culture With Jordan Boesch (Ep 220) (2024)

A restaurant is not simply shaped by the food it serves but also by the efficiency of the team behind it. In this episode, Jaime Oikle sits down with Jordan Boesch, CEO of 7shifts, to discuss what it takes to build a great restaurant culture. He breaks down the most common pain points faced by both owners and employees in the hospitality industry and restaurant management, as well as the right ways to address them. Jaime also stresses the importance of making internal promotions, offering consistent employee feedback, and recognizing your most deserving team members.

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Coming up on this episode, I get with Jordan Boesch, CEO of7shifts, and we dive into what it takes to build a restaurant's culture and what restaurant employees are looking for in their jobs. It’s a great conversation. Stay tuned.

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First of all, Jordan, lots of folks know 7shifts, but let's start with an intro about who you guys are and what you do. We'll go from there.

Thanks for having me, Jaime. We're a team management platform geared toward the restaurant industry. What I mean by that is we started out, which is how most people know us, as scheduling. Where we've ventured into and broadened our horizons is in all aspects of this employee journey. It’s everything from the moment someone's hired, trained, and scheduled. They're paid after they work their shifts, and they're effectively retained.

That's where we tend to focus. It’s everything from scheduling to paying out your tips and running payroll. The company is used by about 1 in 10 restaurant workers across North America and about 50,000 restaurants. We are excited to serve such a great industry that many of us dine in and are a part of in everyday life.

Looking Back

Let's go back to the starting point because you mentioned you started differently from where you are now. How long have you guys been doing it? What was the let's do this in restaurants?

In the early days, it was me working for my dad, who ran some Quiznos locations where I'm from. As with most family businesses, you end up working in them. I got a little bit of experience doing that. I watched my dad struggle with managing some of the staff, their availability, and when they could work. A lot of folks were calling into the locations, asking when the schedule was out and if they could read it off to them.

I was getting into programming at the time. I was teaching myself some things. I thought, “Dad, why don't I try and build you something small and rudimentary to try and help you with this problem?” That's where it started. He was our first customer. We got some good feedback. The first days of 7shifts looked like a bunch of employees sharing the same username and password and downloading the Excel spreadsheet that my dad would post online. That was the most alpha of all alpha versions of software that I had been involved in building to date, but it’s exciting that it led to where we are now.

Pain Points

I want to talk about the journey because tech has changed. I don't know if when you started, the phones were as prevalent, I'm guessing not, and now everything can be quick and mobile. Talk about the pain points. You guys work with many restaurants. You already clarified some of those things that sucked before, like, “What's my schedule? I want to make a change. I'm not available. How do I do those things?” What derivation of questions did you guys go through to keep making it better? What were some of those early things?

Some of the pain points are what you talked about. Restaurant operators have many pain points and paper cuts that hurt every day. There's so much going on. We started servicing and meeting the needs of my dad, who is the reason we started this. When we grew 7shifts, which used to be a side project, into something more full-time, myself and my other co-founders were serving multiple industries with 7shifts. We were doing retail, construction, and medical.

It was a few years into our journey together that we felt like we'd all been part of building software at a bunch of different companies. One thing that we were always frustrated about or struggled with was that it was almost building whatever the sales team wanted, the flavor of the day, so that we could close this customer. The take that we had is we wanted to have a more refined vision of what we were working towards. We could take in feedback, but it didn't dictate where we were going. It informed the vision and the direction.

We made a hard call in 2013 to say, “We're not going to focus on retail anymore and all these other industries that we serve.” To put it into perspective, we stopped focusing on about two-thirds of our customers in 2013. That was challenging for all of us, especially my co-founders. We said, “We don't want to be the jack of all trades, master of none. We want to be the best at what we do. Let's focus on the hospitality industry.” It's an industry that we love to serve. We all love dining in these places. It's an industry that has not had a lot of innovation in it.

People have tended to avoid the SMB restaurant segment because margins are low, and they can't pay for software. All of these reasons why you wouldn’t target them don't make business sense. All of those reasons are what fueled us to say, “That sounds like an opportunity. That sounds like an underserved market, an industry that we all have an appreciation for. It's where 7shifts started. Why don't we focus our chips there?”

We did that. By making that stance, we attracted the right partnerships. People sought us out to say, “We want to integrate with 7shifts,” whether it was a restaurant-focused point of sale or an inventory management tool. Through these partnerships with other hospitality technology companies, we strengthened our position as a player in the market. From there, we kept riding that wave. At the time, there was investment being poured into restaurant technology companies. We picked hospitality, and timing helped us. We rode an innovation wave where a lot of folks were starting to invest in restaurant tech.

That's carried us to where we are now, but we haven't lost sight of trying to build great experiences for the operators that are simple, easy, and streamlined. That connects those parts of the employee journey from hiring, training, scheduling, paying, and retaining. There's still a gap in the industry that we're consistently chipping away at.

Survey Data

I'm glad that you guys and other folks are tackling restaurant tech and helping restaurants because, traditionally, it's been a tech-phobic industry. There are many ways to shrink costs and manage costs better. Let's switch to some other stuff. You guys do a great job creating content, reports, and case studies. I want to go into some of that for a while and how it relates to building culture and what we see in the marketplace. There's a quote somewhere on your site or in the PR stuff. It’s like, “People don't quit their jobs. They quit their manager.” If you're not leading well and managing well, people don't always leave for the pay. They leave for other reasons. What have you guys seen?

Long-Term Career

I'm going to ping you on some of that as we dig in. I scribbled down some notes, but I want to go back because you were there. I want to hammer the nail even harder on recognition and rewards. It's not done enough. People don't do it enough. We're all guilty in life, whether it's with your family, staff, or teammates. We don't thank people enough. We don't recognize them enough. Whoever's reading this, you're not doing it enough. Do it more.

Jordan and I both knowRoger from Restaurant Rockstars. I’ve interviewed Roger a lot. One of the points he always drove home when he was an operator was doing rewards and recognition, doing it publicly, doing it in a pre-shift setting or a team management meeting, calling out 1, 2, 3 people for something they did great that week in front of everybody. Publicly, it is great. You want to do it one-on-one, but when you recognize people in front of their peers, it is powerful.

A caveat to that is to criticize in private. Don't criticize somebody in front of the whole group. Do that in private. Criticize in private. Praise in public. One of the other things I saw is, whether it's that study or something else, it talked about people's length of stay in the industry. Interest in staying in the industry is a bit transient, but your study pointed out a lot of people look at it as potentially a long-term career. What have you seen?

This number is shocking for most people. Many of these employees see hospitality as a long-term career. They are looking for opportunities to grow. This ties in nicely with the feedback aspects, which are important. If you are looking to get better at something, you typically want feedback. When we looked at this type of question, 24% of these employees said they listed lacking opportunities as a reason they left a restaurant job. Around 75% said that a clear career path and growth opportunities are important to their job satisfaction.

There are some things that we can do better in providing these opportunities for growth, such as training them, helping them level up, and getting better if they see themselves there long-term. This comes down to having open conversations with some of these staff members. Some will be there more temporarily. They're in school or going to university, and this is a summer job for them. That may not be everyone.

Asking the question, “How long do I have you for?” would be a good one to try and probe into. If someone wants to be a manager, how are you supporting them on that path? If they want to be a cook, how are they being supported there? Can you give them other opportunities that would make them want to come to work where they are learning in their environment? There are tons of opportunities there from a learning perspective, especially for folks that see themselves there more long-term.

Promotion From Within

I don't think people use that question, “How long do I have you for?” enough. They might be moving on. When you ask that, it's okay to have somebody for a year. It's okay to train them. It's okay to prepare them for their next job. They may not have a future that is all the way with you. Let me go to something else that was in the report that talked about promotion from within. What have you seen in talking with your folks that they've successfully used that as a tool to bring people up? Big restaurants have more opportunities to do that and change. Promotion from within versus grabbing the new guy off the street, what do you think?

There's a healthy mix. In a lot of industries, I've heard the belief of 50-50 types of promotion within versus hiring externally. You have to figure out what makes the most sense for your business. There are some inherent risks to external hiring always. A lot of those inherent risks, to me, come down to culture. You can get someone skilled for that role, but if they don't mesh well with the team, you've got folks who want to leave because they quit their manager. That person may not be the best suited to be a manager from within the culture of that company and team.

When you promote from within, which I'm a big advocate of, you have the opportunity to see how that individual works within the broader team and the safety of knowing that this person is already maybe seen as a leader among their peers. When they are promoted into these roles, it's not a surprise, and people feel comfortable with that person being in that role.

I've seen it work in both cases. You have to figure out what that looks like in your business. There's so much good that comes out of promoting from within that you should err on that a lot more than you think you are and try to help get that person there. Not only does it help retain that person if they're a great performer and you want to keep them, but it shows everyone else in the organization that you care about the growth of the people at this organization.

Feedback helps retain a person if they are a great performer. It also shows you care about people’s growth within your organization.

7 Shifts Academy

Another thing you do content-wise that I saw and didn't know before is that I was poking around and found some more training on your site. There's a whole section. It's almost like restaurant management courses. I didn't click deep on that, but that's an investment to do some training around that. What do you guys think about that? What are you looking to create there?

You're referring to the 7shifts online restaurant management courses. A few years back, we put out something called our 7shifts Academy. What this did is it had a bunch of different types of courses for new managers where they can understand and get some training on how to create a staff training manual, ask better and more effective interview questions, and prep an employee handbook. There are some marketing and scheduling courses because we are, at our core, a scheduling software. What are the best practices? What are the tools and technology?

A big part of what we're trying to do with this is understand that there are many operators that are coming off pen and paper or Excel. They want to make things easier for themselves and their staff. They don't know what to choose, or they may need some training on how to think about evaluating software or the software itself.

We wanted to remove the barriers of friction that may be self-imposed from not understanding some of these tools well enough. We went outside scheduling with the other types of courses. There are daily checklists and all of that stuff. Our society is successful if restaurateurs are successful. We're successful if our restaurateurs are successful. We want to build a community of hospitality operators who want to learn and seek out what others are doing. We want to share the best practices of what other operators in our industry are doing to allow others to look at that and take what they want from that to help their own operation.

Current Strategies

I applaud your investment in time and resources to do that because there's not necessarily a restaurant operations 101 in college and high school on how to do this stuff. Folks get thrown in, and they learn it on the fly. That's great. We look to do a lot of that education, keep it out there, what's working, and what's successful. I applaud that effort. Let's recircle to the things that you guys do. You've already listed them off. Scheduling, time clock, communication, engagement, and tip management. When your sales team is selling to folks, what does the commercial look like? What's hitting these days?

In some aspects, it's the same as what's always landed with people, which is that they want a simpler, easier way to build schedules and communicate with their staff online, especially with the generation that's largely mobile. They want to do things on their phones and communicate that way. What we are seeing, and it's timed appropriately, is the unification of some of these systems such that it ties together more parts in the journey than just scheduling.

When we talk about hiring, training, scheduling, paying, and retaining, in some cases, people refer to that as an HR workflow. We call that the employee journey. People are seeking out more ways to connect parts of that journey, mainly payroll and tip management. I’m excited to say that we're the only streamlined end-to-end solution connecting those pieces in a seamless way in the hospitality space. Everything from managing and scheduling your staff to calculating the tips automatically, paying out the tips directly to the bank accounts if they want, and having that all be deducted and run through payroll effectively at the end of the day.

We're trying to build more one-click seamless flows for these operators because they don't want to spend time on any piece of software. We see that in our app. We're like, “If you can spend the least amount of time in 7shifts doing what you need to do, that's a win.” We don't want you in there, as opposed to other products like Facebook. They care about eyeballs. They want you in there scrolling. We want you in and out in minutes, if not seconds.

Latest Trends

The headaches that you're solving, calculating tip management and doing all that stuff, nobody wants to sit down and take the time to do that. Making it easy is a big deal. As we start to wrap up, I know you go to some shows and talk with other industry folks. What are some trends you're seeing generally or specifically out there that you'd want to share in the last little bit?

I alluded to some of the trends from the independent operator perspective, evaluating more all-in-one solutions. There’s depth to that. If you're trying to do 100 products all in one, that's challenging to be good at, but more than a point solution. We're seeing more people that are like, “What are the best of the three things that I need to do that are all in one?” That convergence is taking place. There's a move to evaluate tools more thoroughly, which is exciting.

We see more people asking how things integrate versus taking things at face value for X integrating with Y. Curiosity is there. In large part, COVID pushed many operators to get a tool that they didn't want. It was like a third-party food delivery tool. They had to adopt a bunch of this stuff, or they'd go out of business. We're still seeing almost the aftereffects of how people were forced into learning how to evaluate software.

Availability And Flexibility

There is one thing I want to circle back to because you joined a program of ours a couple of years back. We were talking about the availability of staff. Availability isn't as big an issue as wages. Wages have gone rampant throughout our economy. Are there any trends you're seeing on how folks are dealing with that big increase, shrinking the number of people that they have? This is what you guys do. You help folks use people more efficiently. What do you think?

It came out in our study. Availability and flexibility are the number one things that employees care about. It's been a challenge for operators for a long time to marry the business needs with the worker needs perfectly. There's still tension around that. We're trying to get to it as it relates to our product specifically and maybe others. It is how to best predict your needs such that you can staff more appropriately during those specific times. If you don't use software and you're relying on your finger in the wind, everyone likes to think that they have the best gut around trends to the degree that there is some truth to that, but there are a lot of things they're missing.

Availability and flexibility are the primary things that employees care about.

As it relates to wages, there is a lot of pressure in certain states with some of the laws that have been changing around how people think about staffing and are forcing operators to look at technology to replace some staff in some cases. There are certain places that are more acceptable in a quick-service world where you want something quick and fast.

In full-service hospitality, there is always going to be a natural tension between a great customer experience and what technology can augment within that world because there is something still sacred about people and service in that industry that we as humans crave and yearn for. There's always going to be some natural tension there. It's a natural thing that we need to be mindful of.

If you want to go on a date night to a nice restaurant, do you want to be served by robots or a person? How does that impact your experience? Are you staring at your phone ordering off a QR code? Are you looking at a menu? There are many small things that people are thinking through, and some have made decisions on, some haven't. In certain segments, they have, but not in other segments. We're going to continue to see more tension around that.

Get In Touch

The next couple of years are going to be interesting for a lot of the stuff you pointed out there. As we wrap up, I wanted you to hit on your website and any other resources you have. I don't believe this to be the case. I believe you guys are geographically unconstrained. You work with folks all over the country and the continent. You can relate to that and give folks a way to get ahold of you, like your socials. Let them have it.

7shifts.com is our website. You can sign up for a free trial for 7shifts. We pride ourselves on making it simple and easy for you to get started. You can even drop in your existing Excel schedule and spreadsheet, and we'll automatically build the schedule for you. We’re trying to make things easy for folks to migrate into that world. We've also been seeing a lot of success in connecting scheduling with our new payroll product. Check that out if you're on the website. If you want to reach me for any direct questions, I’m happy to chat. My email is Jordan@7shifts.com.

We covered a lot here in a short period of time. I appreciate going through that. Jordan Boesch from 7shifts. You can find them on the web at7shifts.com for more insights and tips from Jordan, including some of his favorite books and quotes. Stay tuned right here after we wrap up a series of bonus questions with Jordan. For more great restaurant marketing, operations, service, people, and tech tips, stay tuned to us here atRunningRestaurants.com. In the meantime, please do us a favor and like, subscribe, or review us. That helps us out, and I appreciate it. We'll see you next time. Thanks, Jordan.

Thanks.

Bonus Questions

Here we go with some bonus questions with Jordan Boesch of 7shifts. Jordan, how did you get your start in the restaurant industry?

I was working for my dad at Quiznos. I learned a lot about the internal operations that he goes through as it relates to managing staff. I tried to build him something smaller and rudimentary to help him manage and schedule staff and make it easy for the existing staff to check their schedules online. It was a labor of love at the time.

What would you say is one of the best pieces of advice you've ever received?

There's been a lot throughout the years. I almost go back to this one. It's basic and simple. Everyone knows it. I would say, “Trust your gut.” That's still such an important thing that gets overlooked.

Let's go to a similar concept. What's a favorite quote or saying that you love?

I am a big fan of Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality. What's rooted within the product is our engagement feature and suite, how we help operators keep a pulse on how their staff are feeling. That manifested its way in feedback on their shift and other data that we look at. If I were to take a step back and tell why that's important in our product, it's because Danny Meyer is famous for talking about how to improve culture within your business.

His quote that I love and repeat every month at our all-hands is, “Culture is the sum of all the behaviors you celebrate minus the ones you tolerate.” Why I love this quote so much is because your culture is set by a bunch of behaviors. We're not all perfect. We celebrate the behaviors that we champion. We talk about them. There are inevitably some that we tolerate that we are always course-correcting on. This is an equation that my engineering brain loves.

Your culture is set by different behaviors. Celebrate those that make your team a champion and pay attention to things that need to be corrected.

Maybe you want to go to Danny Meyer's book, or you want to go elsewhere. What's the book you're reading or a top recommendation?

There are a few. I startedThe 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. A few of my all-time favorites areSetting the Table by Danny Meyer, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and Zero to One. A lot of these are around business and company building. I tend to gravitate to those books a lot.

What keeps you up at night?

I would say making the right decisions and building the right team. Having the right team is critical to how you can execute and get results. Those are two things that I think a lot about.

Jordan, what's one of the biggest mistakes or lessons you've learned in life?

It goes back to my point about trusting your gut. What I learned from COVID is that when that happened and many restaurateurs were going out of business, we leaned hard into being a great supportive company for these hospitality operators. People wanted their accounts paused. We paused them and let them use the messaging tools. They could work with their staff and communicate things about government programs that were coming out to help them. All of this meant that, as these restaurants bounced back, people were ten times more loyal to 7shifts, knowing that we had their back in some of the toughest times. Do not underestimate the power of building loyalty.

Industry-wise, where do you see the restaurant industry in several years?

I see it operating more effectively. It's been a long haul for a lot of the changes that operators have had to go through. With this emphasis on employees and engagement in the workforce and employees valuing flexibility, there's more of a partnership element within workers in the hospitality space. That is going to grow that partnership between workers and employers instead of it being employer-dominated. People can work anywhere. They can work for a different restaurant that has a better culture or benefits. It's going to help raise the waters for everyone as these operators implement some of these things.

I'm going to put you on the clock here. You step into an elevator. The guy behind you is a new operator. You've worked with new restaurants all over the country. You can give them advice for 60 seconds. What do you say?

Try and spend time with people who have been there before you and learn all you can. Try and surround yourself with great people because there's so much that you're going to have to figure out on your own that doing it with a strong network and people that have been there before is only going to benefit you. Bring them in on the business. Don't try and do this alone. Try and work with great partners and people around you.

Surround yourself with great people and learn all you can from them.

There's no need to reinvent the wheel sometimes. What's one thing that not many folks know about you?

I love music to another degree. My wife jokes that I should have taken a career in making jingles for various companies because I'm always making jingles. I love to play guitar, drums, and the piano. I love all types of music.

Episode Wrap-up

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