Last week I visited two places for the first time. One was an amazing experience, so I'm happy to reveal that it was a Rita's here in Charlotte, NC. The second place was a locally owned "healthy hamburgers" joint. I won't reveal the name. We'll just call it "Healthy Burgers."
At Rita's, I walked up to the counter and the young lady smiled glowingly and said "Welcome to Rita's," and I could tell she was being genuine. I simply said, "Tell me about Rita's. I've never been here." She proceeded to tell me about their custards and frozen ices and coffee drinks, telling me why each was so incredibly good. She looked me in the eyes. She smiled while talking. She spoke confidently. I was blown away. She flat out oozed passion for Rita's. I didn't care what I got at that point, I was just enjoying listening to her evangelize her brand.
At Healthy Burgers, I walked in and got a contrived smile and a very tired "Welcome." Again, I said, "Tell me about Healthy Burgers." Her response - no kidding - was "Well, we have food. We have burgers. And sandwiches. There's are menu." It came out like a female Steven Wright. The only reason I stayed was because I was starving and wanted to try a "healthy burger," whatever that meant (she of course didn't bother to tell me).
I'll return to Rita's - a lot. I won't return to the healthy burger place. And that decision has nothing to do with the quality of the product, and everything to do with the experience I had and my interaction with the people. One young lady made that Rita's come alive and gave me a memorable experience. The custard was really good - the experience was fantastic. On the contrary, one young lady made Healthy Burgers seem tired, dull, and lifeless. The burger was actually pretty good - the experience was awful.
Do you and your employees ooze passion? I promise you your customers - or former customers - could answer that question.
So says John Bornoty, owner of The Big Salad. Listen to John talk about selling his software business to start The Big Salad, how he started just before the economy took a dive in October, 2008 and weathered the storm, how restaurants are a "people business," how you'll generate a huge ROI on your employee training costs, how important restaurant technology is, and more...
Restaurant teams are often like families. Working well together week in and week out creates a close bond with other staff. Like a family - you help each other often and you argue sometimes too. I've seen some waiter/chef arguments (during the heat of a busy Saturday night) that would rival many knock-down drag-outs I had with my sister when we were growing up.
This family like atmosphere, overall, is great. It is a big reason why great restaurants run so smoothly - people help each other and they work as a team. However, there can be a interesting side effect of the family like atmosphere. When people are not working - they often stop by. Usually they have a good reason to (especially if their schedule is hanging in the kitchen)...but they tend to linger. They stop by to check their schedule, swap a shift, jot some notes down in the request book or just to see what's going on that evening. While they are there they fix themselves a glass of iced tea, they grab some bread out of the bread warmer, they have a cup of coffee and they definitely distract those who are there to work. Over the course of a month - this drive-by staff consumption and distraction adds up big time!
The reason I am blogging about this is because I spoke to one of our customers in Atlanta GA yesterday and we talked about this issue - and how Schedulefly has nearly erased it. They have 100 staff - almost every single one of them is in high school and a lot of them are close friends. Prior to Schedulefly, the management team was always shooing non working staff out of the kitchen or away from the host stand where the would distract people who were supposed to be setting up for the night. "Come on, shoo, get outta here...your not working tonight...go home!"
An interesting thing happened after they started using Schedulefly 3 years ago. The staff no longer stopped by to check their schedule, to get a manager to sign off on a shift change or to request time off in the book. And once the staff realized that the only people there were scheduled people who had a job to do - they stopped coming by all together. Amazing! Christine Fiorini, the GM at Partner's Pizza, told me that in one month they save enough in drive-by food costs to pay for Schedulefly twice or even 3 times over.
After she told me this - I asked if she would talk more about it while we recorded it! It's so good. Click play...
So says Sean Roberts, manager of Java Jacks coffee house in Nacogdoches, TX. Java Jacks has been around for thirteen years, and sells fresh roasted whole beans and fresh cups, along with a fun atmosphere and highly engaged, energetic employees who love to create awesome customer experiences.
Click below to listen to Sean talk about their painful old scheduling system, how he's gone from needing 1.5 hours every week to create the schedule in Excel to 15 minutes in Schedulefly, how useful the Message Wall is, and how much easier Schedulefly is making Java Jacks' staff scheduling and communication.
Wes, Tyler, and I don't have an "exit strategy" (I will use quotations for this term throughout because I think the term is silly in the first place). People always ask each of us that question. "What is your exit strategy?" I think people think it sounds sexy or cool or something. And they assume all entrepreneurs have "exit strategies." After all, when people "exit" it means they sold their business for lots of money, and people like those kinds of stories. So the press always tells us about mergers and acquisitions, and entrepreneurs "exiting" with lots of cash and, presumably, their dreams fulfilled.
But the three of us love Schedulefly. We love what we do every day. As Wes says, "It doesn't even feel like work." So why in the world would we ever have a strategy to "exit" something we love? And since we love Schedulefly, we make decisions based on what's best for our business, not based on propping our business up to be sold one day. Ironically, I'm confident that's the only way you can build a successful business that anybody would ever want to buy in the first place.
So there's the rub for "exit strategists." They make decisions based on trying to grow big - quickly - in hopes of being acquired. So their decisions are by default not based on what's best for the business. And they ironically risk never building a successful business in the first place, much less one that somebody would want to buy.
I'm confident lots of other guys would love to marry my wife. But I'm not going to take money from some guy to divorce her. No amount would be enough. I love her and I always will. I'd never want to "exit" our marriage. Same with Schedulefly.
This is really cool. One of our customers sent us a note this morning [see below]. The President, the First Lady and some friends made an unexpected visit for dinner this past weekend at their restaurant - the Corner Kitchen in Asheville NC. Apparently a call was made by someone saying they wanted to reserve a table for a special dinner and a marriage proposal...and then about 20 minutes before they arrived to eat - word spread it was the President. Pretty sneaky. The President had the Macadamia Encrusted Mahi-Mahi and the First Lady had the Lobster Tacos. Imagine the pressure of making those tasty dishes with the secret service standing over your shoulder. Oh also - apparently an anonymous team of people came in a week earlier to check things out and sample the dishes - and gave it the thumbs up to Team Obama. How do you get that job?
Nice work Corner Kitchen Team and thank you for the nice note...
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Hi Wes and Crew,
I just wanted you to know that we had a surprise dinner guest this weekend when President Obama, First Lady Michelle, and four of their friends came to eat at the Corner Kitchen in Asheville, NC!
We are a small independent, with probably about 30 front of house staff. Still, things can get complicated in trying to balance everyone's scheduling needs and make the entire operation (seem) smooth and flawless.
Thank you for providing the kind of service that allows us to be the kind of restaurant that works well enough to pull that one off!! And we did...beautifully!!
So Says Steve Quarles, GM of the highest volume Hooters in the world. Steve goes onto call restaurant staff scheduling at Schedulefly a "blessing" and a "no-brainer," and talks about how much time he and the managers save, how easy it is for the near 90 staff working at Hooters to trade work shifts now, and how much everybody likes the mobile web site.
Recently on an online forum, somebody posted this about Schedulefly: "It seems like a one man show." The connotation is that being a one man show is a bad thing. And maybe if your software is complicated and your customers need a lot of help, then perhaps that is a bad thing. How could you possibly take care of all of them? But here's my response to that post:
"We're not a 1-man show. We're a 3-man show. We purposely made Schedulefly simple, intuitive, and flexible, so we wouldn't have to have a bunch of people to provide customer support. We don't have many customer support requests, and new customers rarely need any training. We also don't have sales people. You can learn more about the three of us and our philosophies on the About Us link on our site."
To this point, check out this amazing graph:
It's relevant because while Google has 20,000 employees, and Amazon has 24,300, and Yahoo has 13,900.....Craigslist has 30. (http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet). That's right. 30. They have over 50 million users in the U.S. alone, and over 20 billion monthly page views, and they are a $100 million business. With just 30 people.
Now I'm not comparing Schedulefly to Craigslist, but I do believe passionately and very, very confidently that we can grow our business significantly with just a few people. We have three people now, and my guess is we will have no more than four people two or three years from now. More specifically, we have around 30,000 end users right now. We could serve 300,000 users with four people.
The message here is if you keep things simple, you won't need to hire tons of people, and that's an accomplishment, not a problem! The Craigslist team is proud to be small. So are we - and we'll be very proud to be not much bigger than a "one man show" for many years to come.
Murray Brothers Caddyshack is a place any Caddyshack fan should visit. We're so excited to have them as a customer - we are huge Caddyshack fans. In fact I had to keep myself from rattling off quotes while I was doing this podcast, and I made it until the very end before I lost control. But who could get through this without calling out their inner Carl?
Renee talks about why they switched from a disjointed Excel and Word system to Schedulefly for their restaurant employee scheduling and communication, how easy it was to make the switch, how much she and her team like the Message Wall, how they have fun sharing pictures, and how happy they are with Schedulefly.
This morning I was up early launching a cool new feature for our customers and I realized how lucky I am to be doing what I am doing. I am sitting in my kitchen with my son eating his waffle and my faithful friend at my feet while I deploy some new code to our data center. I am passionately working on a product I know is making people's lives easier and it is absolutely a blast. I have no boss (other than customers :-)), no office to report to and no meetings to attend. A standard day for me is wildly productive. I communicate with my 2 partners via email a few times a day - sometimes the phone. I've been working on the Schedulefly system for almost 5 years now and every day I shoot out of bed excited to work and excited to hear from customers and prospects. I am very lucky - it just does not feel like work at all.
Every entrepreneur's story is different. Something happened in their life - somewhere along the way - that lit a fire under them to go out and start a business. Maybe they inherited their fiery creative spirit from their parents and were destined to start a business, maybe they had a scratch that was not being itched or maybe they just decided that working in a cubicle for a large company sucks. I come from a family of successful business owners - so I think I inherited most of it....although I did work in a cubicle for years writing software for large clients and while it was an incredible learning experience and part of who I am now - I never really fit in.
My parents have owned a successful manufacturing business called Patsy Aiken Designs for over 30 years. They make baby clothes. Mom designs them and Dad runs the business. They are a really great team in life and in business and I owe 100% of my creative and entrepreneurial spirit to do my own thing to them. I grew up listening to them talk about their business every night at the dinner table. They were always talking about pricing, sales and customer service - and orders and shipping and things like that. They were also always talking about power bills, and payroll, yard maintenance at their office, having clean bathrooms for staff and all the other day to day things that a small business owner deals with. The things that really matter. Everything they talked about was important and necessary and basic. I remember thinking that's what all people do - they have a business and they wake up every day to run it.
After years and years of hearing these discussions and asking questions about why they did things and why things mattered - I remember thinking in my first job out of school that I never heard anyone talking about these things. I was never in any discussion that had anything to do with a customer or an order. I had no idea how much a customer was paying for what I was helping create. I never heard about sales or marketing or revenue. I never heard about shipping and customer service. I was trapped in a cubicle, on a team of software developers, cranking out code for "clients" I had never met. In fact - today - the word "client" makes me queasy. I'll never use it to refer to a customer. It seems to add so much distance between me and the people who buy what I make. Honestly - in those first few jobs I really don't even know if anyone ever really did use what I made. Most of what we created was because there was a budget for it and it kept people employed so "clients" could be billed. Great and all, but what I was creating....did. not. matter.
My sister definitely inherited her creativity and desire to run a business from my parents. She has been designing and manufacturing her own line of handbags for over 10 years. Her designs are crazy popular. So popular that magazines like Southern Living and Parenting literally knock down her door for articles. She is a press magnet. Amazing what happens when you create a product that people love. Not only do people want to buy it over and over again - they want to tell their friends and family and readers about it as well. I am working really hard to emulate what she and my parents have done by creating something that people love and feel that it makes their life better if they buy it.
So I am sitting here in "my office" thinking about those days of listening to my parents at the dinner table talking about things that matter and thinking about the path they blazed for themselves. I'm thinking about my sister and her business and the other friends and family I've got that have hung out their own shingle and blazed their own path. Sure there were other children's clothing manufacturing companies and handbag companies - but none like theirs. They followed no one. Their product, their passion and the way they delight their customers is unique. Sure there are other companies offering restaurants scheduling software - but none like ours.
If you are ever worn out from a fun day of navigating the whitewaters of the Arkansas River in Colorado, stop on in at Eddyline Restaurant & Brewery in Buena Vista Colorado. Its a friendly place to quench your thirst and hunger, and reflect on where you've been, and where you're going next.
Listen to manager Brian England talk about how simple it was to switch his restaurant staff scheduling to Schedulefly, how quickly veteran managers with minimal computer acumen were able to get up to speed, and how he immediately won over any skeptics by showing them how easy Schedulefly is to use.
Click play. Bryan is a bit hard hear for 10 seconds or so - but once I reconfigured our fancy podcast recording equipment...it got much better.
I know this is the case - because I would do the same. If Patagonia or Tibor Fly Reels or South Beach Grill in Wrightsville Beach NC sent me a video camera in the mail and asked me to say something about their business or product - I would take time out of my day and stand in front of it and tell people how much I love it.
When we send our flip video camera to our customers - we simply ask them to point the camera at people who work there and ask them to say something about Schedulefly. We've never suggested they say anything specific, especially getting together outside to hoot and holler about how much they love our software. Actually I am amazed at how many customers use the word love. Unlike a written testimonial that a company writes and asks the customer to OK, this is clearly a sincere message and it is awesome.
Here are some more....and there are a bunch more lined up waiting for our camera!
Listen to Kiersten Traina, co-owner of the highly successful Liberty Market in Gilbert, AZ , and you'll want to own a restaurant. Her passion and love for her business and her employees are palpable. I could have talked to her for hours - I'm thankful I was able to pull her aside for these fun 20 minutes.
I love the show "24" and the main character, Jack Bauer. Jack is a bad ass government agent who helps stop terrorist plots. He's willing to do whatever it takes to fulfill his mission. And doing so means he occasionally has to "go dark." He cuts off all communications with everybody else, for his safety and theirs, and simply gets stuff done.
If you own a business, take a Jack Bauer day on occasion. In fact, do it as often as you can. Go dark. Don't answer your phone. Don't even thinking about checking emails. And simply focus on stuff that needs to get done. Stuff that you are really good at when you are able to focus. You will get more done on a day you "go dark" than you will in most typical weeks.
Wes, who writes all of Schedulefly's code, went dark yesterday. I knew because I had called him, emailed him, and texted him and got no response. Once I realized what was happening, I wasn't concerned. I wasn’t frustrated by no responses. In fact, I smiled widely and nodded in appreciation. I knew he had "gone dark" for the day, and I knew that meant he had his head down and was cranking out some awesome stuff. O.K., so he wasn't risking his life to save the world from eminent destruction like Jack does, but he was deliberately pulling himself out of the noise for a while, and he had an incredibly productive day for our company.
This is a really cool interview with one of our long-time customers - the legendary Palm Restaurant in New York's Tribeca neighborhood. It is just steps away from the financial district and is known for its prime aged steaks, Novia Scotia lobsters and warm hospitality.
Scott Young, GM of The Palm talks about how Schedulefly makes last minute communication with restaurant employees a cinch, how his staff has embraced Schedulefly as a great way to stay connected at work, and what it was like to switch to Schedulefly from his comfort zone of using Excel to create his weekly staff schedule.
The best business advice I've ever received came from "Uncle Brian." Brian was the uncle of my business partner in my former business, an industry research company called First Research. Early on, Brian saw that we were not staying focused on the core market we had set out to serve - banks. He sent us an email that was titled, "Focus, Focus, Focus. Dominate, Dominate, Dominate." He went on to make the case that we needed to quit trying to explore new markets, and spend 100% of our focus on banks. Only with a clear focus could we become a "must have" for banks and dominate our market. We took his advice. And we dominated. Within a few years 95 of the top 100 largest U.S. and Canadian banks were customers.
If you own a business, it's often easy to think of all of the great possibilities for your product, and all of the markets you could potentially serve. It's easy to get distracted by all of the noise and all of the stuff surrounding your focus, as in the picture over there on the right. Notice how busy and noisy that picture is unless you, well, focus 100% on the word "focus."
We're of course 100% focused at Schedulefly on serving restaurants. Our product development, our marketing, and everything we do and every decision we make centers on trying to dominate our segment - restaurants. Sure, we have customers in other industries. They run free trials and, since Schedulefly is so flexible, it works for their needs. And we're very happy to serve them. But we don't focus any energy on trying to find anybody but restaurants to use Schedulefly. And any time we add a new tool or make an enhancement, it simply has to be valuable to our restaurant customers.
We haven't dominated our market yet. Nobody has. The market is enormous and we're on the front end of a trend to move restaurant scheduling and communication online. But we are definitely already a key player in our space, and we have a laser focus on dominating it. We'll see what happens. I wouldn't bet against us - and that's not a cocky statement. Rather, it's a statement made from the confidence of knowing that all of us wake up every day with a very clear, crisp focus.
Software. Retail. Restaurants. Pick your industry. If you own a business, figure out what segment you are really good at serving, and then focus, focus, focus. Eventually you'll dominate, dominate, dominate.
We've added a simple way for our customers to set reminders for themselves and their staff. It is seriously handy. While testing over the course of a few weeks - Wil and I set reminders for ourselves and now we are hooked! Reminders can be about anything - maybe a staff meeting reminder for all your servers and bartenders or perhaps your mom's birthday next Friday. Reminders are easy to add - you can even add them via email from your mobile device. Check it out.
It's so refreshing to listen to Kiersten Traina, co-owner of the highly successful Liberty Market (50 employees) in Gilbert, AZ. She oozes passion. And I love how Kiersten and her co-owner husband, David, are heavily employee-focused. One of the first things she talks about is how Schedulefly enables her to not mess up her young employees' schedules.
Schedulefly helps her make sure she doesn't schedule them when they have class or other recurring commitments - because she doesn't want to frustrate them! She goes on to talk about how Schedulefly helps her: empower employees to be responsible young adults; build a cohesive staff unit; get information to people quickly; and recoup her investment easily by making her employees happy. Want to know why people love Schedulefly? You gotta listen to this....
We talk a lot at Schedulefly about keeping things simple. We try to keep our business model simple and our restaurant staff scheduling software simple. And we try to make sure it's a simple process to do business with us.
To that end, we've always had just one version of Schedulefly. While most software companies maintain multiple versions of their product, and ask their customers to decide which is best for them, we believe in making the decision for our customers. People are forced to make tons of little decisions every day, incrementally taxing and exhausting themselves, and we don't want to contribute to the dilemma.* Rather, we want to make our customers' lives just a little bit easier.
The only choice anybody makes with Schedulefly is whether or not to use it. That's it. If you want to use it, you pay based on how many employees you have:
It's that simple. Also, when we add a major enhancement, or a new feature, our customers all get it. We don't ask them to decide whether they want to pay more to use it. Rather, we simply roll it out, tell them about it, offer some ideas on why it might be useful, and get out of the way to let them decide if it will help their business.
Sure, customers then have to choose whether to use the new tool. But that's an easy decision because there is no cost involved. What matters most to them is they never have to make a decision on whether to "upgrade" to a more robust version of Schedulefly to get more tools, or "downgrade" to a less robust version to save money. If we provide a tool, it's theirs to use.
If you own a business, think about how you can make your customers' lives easier by simply stripping out many of the choices you ask them to make. You may find that not only are your customers happier, but that you are too because you've now made your life easier as well!
Chris Lillis of Tria Café in Philadelphia (40 employees, 2 locations) talks about topics such as: The "little community" Schedulefly created at Tria; the elimination of missed shifts; the simple process of staff shift trades; how Schedulefly empowers the staff; and how Schedulefly made his life a lot easier. Chris also has some great advice for restaurants that are considering trying online staff scheduling at Schedulefly.
Ever noticed how good kids are at making you answer why something happens? They just keep pressing. My daughter boxes me in all of the time....
Her: "Why is the sky blue?"
Me: "Good question sweetheart. That's just how it is."
Her: "But why?"
Me: "Well, it just is."
Her: "Yeah daddy. But why?"
She simply doesn't settle for "Just because," nor should you if you own a business. Learning to ask why - and pressing until you get a clear answer - is a great practice because it cuts out lazy decisions and decisions based on conventional wisdom. We ask why at Schedulefly all the time.
Why do we need to go to trade shows? Why do we need to issue press releases? Why do we need sales people? Why do we need distribution partners? Why do we need to provide a product demo on our site? Why do we need to try to serve anybody but restaurants? Why do we need office space? And so on.
So many conventional business practices and methods just don't make since for our business, and probably don't for your business when you really start asking why. Asking why like a five year old is a simple but powerful practice because it helps you whittle your business down to the basics, keep your overhead low, maintain a laser focus, and generate profits!
For what it's worth, asking why obsessively helped us conclude that we don't need to go to trade shows, we don't need to issue press releases, we don't need sales people, we don't need distribution partners, we don't need a product demo on our web site, we don't need to spread ourselves thin and try to serve anybody but restaurants, and only one of us needs an office outside the home.
We made some minor enhancements to our employee log system - aimed at making it easier to add and review staff notes. Restaurant managers use this tool to jot down stuff about staff - stuff like customer praise, sick calls and other things that might be useful for an employee review. We stick a time stamp on each note and we also keep track of who logged it. Check it out...
Last week I visited two places for the first time. One was an amazing experience, so I'm happy to reveal that it was a Rita's here in Charlotte, NC. The second place was a locally owned "healthy hamburgers" joint. I won't reveal the name. We'll just call it "Healthy Burgers."
Restaurant teams are often like families. Working well together week in and week out creates a close bond with other staff. Like a family - you help each other often and you argue sometimes too. I've seen some waiter/chef arguments (during the heat of a busy Saturday night) that would rival many knock-down drag-outs I had with my sister when we were growing up.
So says Sean Roberts, manager of 
Wes, Tyler, and I don't have an "exit strategy" (I will use quotations for this term throughout because I think the term is silly in the first place). People always ask each of us that question. "What is your exit strategy?" I think people think it sounds sexy or cool or something. And they assume all entrepreneurs have "exit strategies." After all, when people "exit" it means they sold their business for lots of money, and people like those kinds of stories. So the press always tells us about mergers and acquisitions, and entrepreneurs "exiting" with lots of cash and, presumably, their dreams fulfilled. 
This morning I was up early launching a cool new feature for our customers and I realized how lucky I am to be doing what I am doing. I am sitting in my kitchen with my son eating his waffle and my faithful friend at my feet while I deploy some new code to our data center. I am passionately working on a product I know is making people's lives easier and it is absolutely a blast. I have no boss (other than customers :-)), no office to report to and no meetings to attend. A standard day for me is wildly productive. I communicate with my 2 partners via email a few times a day - sometimes the phone. I've been working on the Schedulefly system for almost 5 years now and every day I shoot out of bed excited to work and excited to hear from customers and prospects. I am very lucky - it just does not feel like work at all.
If you are ever worn out from a fun day of navigating the whitewaters of the Arkansas River in Colorado, stop on in at 
I love the show "24" and the main character, Jack Bauer. Jack is a bad ass government agent who helps stop terrorist plots. He's willing to do whatever it takes to fulfill his mission. And doing so means he occasionally has to "go dark." He cuts off all communications with everybody else, for his safety and theirs, and simply gets stuff done. 
If you own a business, it's often easy to think of all of the great possibilities for your product, and all of the markets you could potentially serve. It's easy to get distracted by all of the noise and all of the stuff surrounding your focus, as in the picture over there on the right. Notice how busy and noisy that picture is unless you, well, focus 100% on the word "focus." 
Ever noticed how good kids are at making you answer why something happens? They just keep pressing. My daughter boxes me in all of the time....
