For those that don’t know, I am the Founder and CEO of SnapShyft, a technology startup that connects hospitality and food-service businesses with fully vetted & experienced front or back-of-house staff, on-demand. Our platform supercharges a manager’s ability to get great staff working on a short-term, seasonal, or long-term basis; delivering the best attributes of the gig-economy while eliminating bias and discrimination from the staffing process — working with acclaimed restaurant brands, high-volume catering & event operations, and hospitality businesses of all shapes and sizes we help fill shifts FAST.

Internally we talk a great deal about time— time lost, time wasted, time spent, time saved, on-time, early, late, etc. So we asked the team: What if you found out you had an extra hour— 60 minutes. 3,600 seconds— how might you spend it? We came up with a simple non-comprehensive list of 10 activities any individual could spend 1 hour doing:

1. Meditate
2. Enjoy a meal
3. Workout
4. Catch up on email
5. Read a book
6. Take a nap
7. Get a massage
8. Go to the barbershop or hair salon
9. Volunteer
10. Take a walk

OK, but why the preoccupation with one hour? I’ll tell you why— TIME IS PRECIOUS and most people don’t value their time as much as they should.

A practical example that motivated us— Results come fast on our platform. The average work opportunity posted on SnapShyft is claimed by a professional in under 60 minutes time. This can be even quicker for immediate on-demand openings — such as when an employee doesn’t show, or a higher than expected demand necessitates extra staff on deck. But the point remains, instead of spending countless hours monitoring and navigating their way through frequent staffing issues, hospitality and food service managers (our customers) can simply spend all of 1.5 minutes posting their open work opportunities on our labor marketplace, and then freely go take care of other pressing matters while the system gets to work. Or perhaps spend the newfound time one of the activities we listed above.

What is the worth of 1,000 hours?

Looking at Q4 2020, 97% of all work opportunities posted on SnapShyft were successfully worked by professionals found through our labor marketplace. What is even more remarkable is that managers turning to SnapShyft are saving as much as 18–20 hours EVERY WEEK, instead of spending precious hours on managing staffing issues like absenteeism, juggling a multitude of potential schedule issues, recruiting new team members, and interviewing candidates.

This is no joke — over 1,000 man hours! Valuable time that can be spent focusing on high-value tasks and activities like growing revenue, improving the customer experience, and supporting the team — all of this helps reduce turnover as well. And managers are successfully avoiding staffing headaches by instead delegating this work to our platform, effectively leaning on the SnapShyft technology and the support team as an extension of their operation. They are effectively eliminating a time-sucking obligation from their plates and freeing themselves up for high-leverage business activities or taking a nap, for goodness sake!

But that’s not the only technology these operators are turning to. We’ve seen a trend that the best run restaurants and food service operations are utilizing a number of technologies to great effect:

Lunchbox for a powerful online omnichannel ordering engine, as well as marketing and customer loyalty.

Customer sentiment can be accessed and addressed in real-time thanks to Ovation, which enables actionable guest feedback on your drive thru, third-party delivery, pickups, and in-store customers are feeling.

Forward-thinking establishments with on premise draft beer are installing the ingenious Bottoms Up Draft Beer Systems — replacing traditional faucets, for a near waste-less, hands-free, revenue driver.

There is also IOT (internet-of-things) company, BrewLogix and their BreweryDB technology, providing data on keg yield, draft performance, and analytics that showcase data around product popularity among other things.

Partender is another reliable tool that can effectively reduce the time it takes to do a full bar inventory down to 15 minutes or less.

Noticeably, each of these tools is food service and hospitality teams a massive amount of time, and also generating revenue or reducing costs (or both).

Bottom Line:

A manager (or management team) doesn’t become great because he or she becomes a full-time “recruiter/human resources/social media/inventory control/logistics/IT/juggling” expert; they become great because they learn to delegate tasks to powerful tools and technologies that can make their jobs tremendously easier and more efficient (i.e. saves time and money). For a food service or hospitality business to survive the debilitating effects of the pandemic and be better positioned for growth and prosperity well into the future they must continue to adapt — augmenting their teams with best in class tools and technology. And when we look back, the winners will have done just that.

What will you be doing with your ‘found hours’ in 2021?

Thor Wood is the Founder and CEO of SnapShyft, a technology company that connects hospitality and food-service businesses with fully vetted & experienced front or back-of-house staff, on-demand. Headquartered in Indianapolis, IN, U.S.A., SnapShyft is delivering the best attributes of the gig-economy while eliminating bias and discrimination from the staffing process — working with acclaimed restaurant brands, high-volume catering & event operations, and hospitality businesses of all shapes and sizes. SnapShyft supercharges a manager’s ability to get great staff working on a short-term, seasonal, or long-term basis — allowing managers to give core staff the support they need while flexibly adjusting staff levels on-the-fly. An industry leader in delivering reliable & consistent results, SnapShyft has a successful shift fulfillment rate that is 3X the staffing industry average. SnapShyft was founded by a leadership team with over 20 years in food service & hospitality, 14 years in executive recruiting & staffing, and over 20 years in operations, finance, accounting, and HR. The SnapShyft platform has been featured in Bar & Restaurant, Business Insider, Buzzfeed, Hospitality Tech Magazine, TechCrunch, Xconomy, Yahoo! News, and was named a TechCrunch Top Pick for Social Impact, as well as a Top 15 Startup of the Year in 2019, and is a recipient of the Indiana Innovation Award.