Meet Wes Aiken from Schedulefly – A Rockin’ Service for Restaurants
I was privileged to sit down with Wes Aiken from @Schedulefly. The people at Schedulefly are doing amazing things for the restaurant industry. I cannot thank Wes enough for taking time from his busy schedule.
This is a must read for restaurant owners! Enough of me yapping, lets get to the interview:
1. I know what it has taken to develop UrbanBacon, and we still have light years to accomplish. Can you tell me the story behind Schedulefly and what are you guys looking to accomplish?
You bet! Since 1998 I had been developing software applications for clients at 3 consulting companies in Raleigh NC. I learned a lot about systems analysis and design and delivering software to customers – but something was missing and I was burning out. I was tired of starting over each time from scratch. I was tired of the daily meetings and slow release cycles. I was thinking about ideas for my own product – a web application I could create and sell to people over the Internet – something useful. I was watching others do this – and I was fully capable of building something people could use. I just needed an idea.
I had a few ideas – the one I kept coming back to was a tool for restaurants to use to schedule their staff. This idea was interesting because I had been a waiter for more than 5 years while in college (The Bridgetender in Wrightsville Beach NC). I created the schedule for 40 servers (all college students). It was on paper – so were the time off requests – and it was miserable. The memory of getting calls all week from guys telling me when they could or could not work drove me crazy. The calls after it was posted were worse. All of them had terrible handwriting – so the paper requests required follow up phone calls. As a non scheduling waiter – I would drive to the restaurant on Sunday night to see when I worked for the upcoming week – or mid week to swap a shift and get manager approval. Really? We did that? It was so clear that I could help the industry with a really simple system. I knew how to write software and I had a concrete example of a real business problem that needed solving. So in 2005 I quit my consulting job and I wrote the first line of code. 3 months later I put on some real clothes (got out of my pajamas) and set out to show it to some friends who owned restaurants.
Over the next 2 years a couple of restaurants and a retail shop used Schedulelfly while it ran in my closet. I had gone back to consulting to help my wife keep the lights on and ended up spending most of my time with a client name First Research. First Research eventually hired me as head of technology. While at First Research – I would occasionally get a call about Schedulefly being down – from my 3 non-paying “customers”. Usually it was because power had gone out at our house during a snow – or the cleaning service had accidentally unplugged the server while dusting. It was fine – they didn’t pay me and it wasn’t really a business yet. An interesting thing was happening though. They started to rely on it. They got used to it and their staff absolutely loved it.
In 2007 my boss at First Research, Tyler Rullman, asked me what my plans were for Schedulefly and was I interested in turning it into a business. I had no plan. I mean – here is a guy with a Harvard degree who helped turn First Research into a multi-million dollar business. Now he is asking me if he can be an owner of Schedulefly and try to sell it to restaurants. Are you kidding? The business was incorporated, we setup a free trial system and Tyler began emailing, calling and visiting restaurants to try and get them to give it a whirl. They did – and a few started paying us. By the way – Tyler still does this today.
In 2008 – I left First Research and joined Tyler full time and soon after that a principal at First Research, Wil Brawley, joined us as well. Wil leads our sales and business development efforts. He is like a college football coach – lots of hand waving and yelling and passion for what we are trying to do. Its awesome! The 3 of us own Schedulefly and are now pouring our hearts into this business and are working hard to make customers happy. During the past 2 years the product has come along way (thanks to great feedback) but the ease of use has not been compromised. It’s still simple to use. We know because our users tell us that. All of our customers tell us they love our software because it’s easy to use. Our plan is to continue acquiring customers while creating more awareness about our technology in the restaurant industry.
2. You mentioned that Schedulefly is “the antithesis of corporate guys.” Can you elaborate a bit on your culture?
We enjoy this business model and we know that keeping everything we do simple will allow us to continue to focus on our customers and making our software better. We do not have a lot of overhead and fancy offices so we can invest the money we make today back into our product. We work wherever we want to work and wherever we feel inspired. Inspiration is critically important. I feel strongly that everyone on our team must be inspired every day to do something great. We enjoy alone time and we work best in quiet places. We are not looking to hire dozens of employees. We do not want to lease a large office with a water cooler. We would prefer not to have many meetings and certainly do not want to have to hire people that manage other people. We are not corporate guys.
The 3 of us enjoy what we do immensely. We are passionate about making life easier for our customers. We love hearing from them and we love to answer them fast. We also love to be with our families and we love the freedom that owning a business provides. We believe strongly in a work/life balance and if had to lean one way – we would lean towards life. This is exactly why we want to keep our product and our business simple. We work well together, learn from each other and have the same philosophy on business and life. Keep it simple and make it fun.
3. It’s no secret, scheduling for restaurant owners is a daunting task. How do you make that simple?
Your are right – it is a daunting task and the main reason is because they are scheduling people with their own lives. Scheduling people is not 100% a computer algorithm. Sure – availability and seniority are variables – but so are unexpected life events affecting the staff, weather changes, personalities that no longer work well together, nightly reservations, expected business, loyal customer’s favorite staff and on and on. Creating that ideal schedule that makes the restaurant hum day-in and day-out takes effective communication tools and frequent input from everyone on the schedule. This where we step in and help. We have built an easy to adopt and use tool that makes it very simple for staff to communicate and ease the pains that I mentioned earlier. We believe passionately that scheduling restaurant staff effectively is a team effort and a very social process, and that is why we created Schedulefly.
4. We both talk to tons of restaurant owners. What are you finding as their overall major concerns? What do they want?
Funny – I think most of them want us to leave them alone! Seriously – I think they want what any business wants – to make customers happy so they can grow. They are laser focused are making sure every customer has a great experience at their restaurant – so they will spread the word and come back. So the challenge is many of them don’t have time to do anything new. Getting restaurant owners to listen and invest time in something new is definitely our challenge. They know that we are here to help – but since (in their mind) we are not directly tied to bringing in more business – we are not a high priority. What we are doing is new. Yes – there here have been companies doing this for years – but only a very tiny percentage of restaurants in the world are using web based software to communicate with employees. Software as a service over the Internet is not mainstream like POS systems are for restaurants – but in time – I suspect it will be. It will steadily become more clear that what we do is actually helping drive more business because it is freeing management and staff to focus on customers. We have so many success stories already on how we are helping restaurants operate more efficiently. We hope, with the help of our customer’s voices, we will continue to create awareness.
5. Lets shift gears a bit. I have said before that hotels and airlines have widely adopted social media and the Internet to market their services. What do you think restaurants can learn from this? Should they be adopting social media and embracing technology as well?
Yes they should – and they are! It is amazing what restaurants are doing on Twitter and Facebook. It is changing the way businesses find new customers and it is free (minus the time it takes to use) . The concept of getting local “fans” and “followers” to engage with you and help you spread the word is much more powerful than blasting out an expensive email. One of the most important things I’ve learned about our business is that people listen when other people talk about our business. If we blast an email out to a list of prospective customers talking about how great your product is – they don’t really care. Of course we think it is great! Until someone that they trust tells them our product is great – they rarely pay attention. Social media sites like Twitter are enabling restaurants to engage with existing customers and encourage them to share their experience with their friends and family. Lastly – the real time feedback is pouring in – and if it is not good – restaurants can address it immediately. In the past – bad news traveled fast and was difficult to address while good news was difficult to spread. Today – good news is traveling fast and while bad news is as well – it can be addressed quickly. It will be fun to see how these social platforms evolve to help all businesses in in the coming years.
6. I know my opinions, but I am curious to hear yours. What restaurant trends will we see in 2010? (from a technology aspect, not food)
Hmm who knows! It is moving so fast – it is hard to predict. I do think that restaurants will use web based technology not only to streamline their operations but to learn more about their customers. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in the restaurant industry will be big. With the help of social media tools, restaurants are really beginning to focus on their local following and learn about them. What are their names? What did they order last time and who is their favorite server? A tool that makes it easy to capture and review this kind of information will be huge. In this economy – people are not traveling and vacationing as much – so building a local following is key to survival. Similar to how grocery stores use a VIC card to learn about the buying habits of their customers – restaurants will begin to do this as well. In fact – I just took a quick break from this interview to jot down some notes on a super simple new idea!
7. Last, and totally off topic. Vacation: Beaches or Mountains?:)
Definitely the beach! My office is 10 minutes from the saltwater marshes of the Cape Fear Coast – so our vacations are usually “stay-cations”. When not working I enjoy fishing surfing and boating with my family. Being near the saltwater inspires me in many ways – but mostly I am inspired to grow a successful business that will allow us to stay here for a long time…
A big thanks goes out to Wes for all your help. Let us know if we can help in the future. Also, check out their blog here!
Tags: marketing, restaurant, schedulefly, scheduling, social media, software