How 7shifts founder Jordan Boesch’s restaurant scheduling software is crushing it from his base in Saskatoon

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This article was published 26/03/2022 (1379 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Not many Saskatchewan-based tech companies complete venture capital fundraising in San Francisco’s Bay Area, return to Canada, and go on to massively expand their operations around the world. 7shifts is one of them.

After seeing how expensive it was to operate in the Bay Area, 7shifts founder and CEO Jordan Boesch converted their U.S. angel round into Canadian dollars and moved back north of the border to help the company “refocus and buckle down and build products for restaurants.”

Since 2014, when Boesch noticed how his dad struggled to organize shift schedules across the Quiznos franchises he managed, 7shifts has grown into a respected leader of software designed to simplify scheduling headaches. At a time when small restaurants are going bankrupt, 7shifts has decided to stick it out — and even reported substantial growth among restaurateurs.

The Star spoke to Boesch about running a tech company headquartered in Saskatchewan, and a recent major investment by Japanese finance giant SoftBank:

There’s a lot of scheduling management tools on the market. Why did you think you could build a better one?

Initially, we built 7shifts to be a horizontally focused scheduling tool. We had every industry using 7shifts — retail, restaurants, construction, even some folks in the medical field. What we found was that we were building a product that didn’t make people really excited. We were a jack of all trades, master of none.

In this world, where you can essentially order a shirt that’s tailored exactly to your size online, we believed software should feel the same. Back in 2014, we made that prediction — and we feel it was the right one — and that operators would gravitate to a tool that’s really catered to them. So we opted to go very deep into the restaurant business because we wanted to build a product that would resonate with restaurant operators specifically and get them really excited.

Why focus on the restaurant industry?

At the time, the restaurant industry lacked innovation. A lot of folks weren’t really building for restaurants, especially independent ones, because a lot of people thought they just couldn’t afford to pay for software. It was true, to a certain extent. Margins are really tight in restaurants. The number of people who were avoiding restaurants, from a technological innovation perspective, was huge.

We thought there’d be a great opportunity to build for this segment that has been wildly underserved. It took us a few years to really get the momentum and to start building a restaurant product. But people were overwhelmed with joy. Restaurant communities are typically very small and intimate — word-of-mouth got around.

How did you convince restaurant owners to pay for software at a time when they might be worried about keeping the lights on?

For about six months, about 1 per cent of our customer base shut down either permanently or temporarily. It was a very challenging time for our customers — and the trickle-down effect is our business. We just offered our product for free for existing customers and for new customers that were onboarding. Our customer service team would talk to them, and if they were in a bit of a pinch and needed something, we’d offer them six months free or a large discount — just get them up and using the product.

We found the long-term effects of someone using our product is that they typically stay. So, we wanted to just get our product into the hands of folks so they could manage through the pandemic and see the value in the tool — and then, if they decide they want to keep it and pay for it. And they did.

7shifts is promising to improve the happiness and efficiency of workers. Restaurant workers have long complained that they don’t have stable working hours — that they’re constantly being thrown all over the place. How do you juggle happiness with the efficiency needed to run a successful restaurant?

The best thing we try and communicate to our operators as part of our offering is that it’s important to get feedback from your staff on how they’re enjoying their shifts. What I’m excited to see is that there’s almost a shift in the balance of power. Short-term, there’s a worker shortage, but I think that what we’re seeing is that there are a lot of employers that are getting really creative in how they attract employees and how they retain them. It’s becoming more about the flexibility of work, and it’s becoming more about the pay and culture of restaurants.

I think that, largely, it was an industry that almost had an excuse not to. It was more of a short-term, rotating door career. We’re talking to a lot of operators right now that are trying to build career structures, especially for chefs and cooks. There’s an overall shift in attitude toward workers.

By and large, operators will need to balance the needs of their business with the flexibility of their workers. One is not more important than the other. They’re both very important to running an efficient business. We’re seeing a lot of sentiment change around the engagement of workers, and it is largely to do with the feedback that employers are asking from their staff and changing their behaviours accordingly.

You’re from Saskatchewan and, as far as I can tell, 7shifts is still based in Saskatchewan. Are you still there?

I grew up in Saskatchewan and I’ve lived in Ottawa for a little while — I’ve moved to France with my wife — and moved to the Bay Area. We raised money in the Bay Area to build this company in Canada. We set up Saskatoon as our headquarters, but we’ve expanded — we have another office in Toronto and that city’s office has as many people as our Saskatoon office now.

We have a small office in New York, and we have some folks in Calgary, Vancouver, Atlanta, Michigan. COVID has really allowed us to hire the best people from anywhere. At the end of the day, we’ve always had a strong bias toward hiring great Canadians because we think that we have a really big opportunity to build a massive, impactful company and to really help Canada solidify its place on the map as a booming technology ecosystem.

Do you ever see yourself moving your headquarters? Do you want to stay rooted in Saskatchewan?

I don’t see us jumping headquarters. I think we’re going to be opening more satellite offices that are going to be flexible for if people want to come into the office or if they want to work from home. The more folks we bring into the same city, the more they start asking for the ability to meet up with their teams in a more formal way — whether it’s a WeWork space or just a collaborative environment. So we want to be accommodating as we end up hiring more folks to meet the needs of how they want to work.

7shifts finished an $80 million funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund. What prompted SoftBank to say yes — and what do you intend to do with the money you’ve raised?

I think we have a really compelling vision that aligns with how they think about their Vision Fund. We’re excited to have SoftBank on board as a partner because they’re more long-term investors — and we’re not building a company for the short term. We’re building a company that’s going to be long-term and long-lasting and impactful. And so when we sat down to chat product with them and how we were going to go about executing our vision, it was very clear that there was strong alignment.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Brennan Doherty is a Toronto-based writer. His work has appeared in the Toronto Star, VICE World News, TVO.org and Maisonneuve. Follow him on Twitter: @Bren_Doherty