11 Month Old SnapShyft Already Has 6,200 workers & 150 venues.
I like restaurants. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy chowing down on some good sustenance blended with a happy, ready to serve you staff providing a positive experience. There’s few things I NEED in life and that’s good food, good people to eat the food with, and good memories to share. Restaurants are a perfect place for that…well sometimes.
The reality is sometimes you don’t find that blissful experience at a restaurant. It’s not the restaurants’ fault, necessarily, but it’s easy for us (consumers) to judge the restaurant every time. In fact 97% of US consumers rank the “perceived customer experience” as THE deciding factor on whether or not they patronize a venue. If it’s not the restaurant’s fault then who’s fault is it? Instead of pointing fingers we must look at the facts.
Turnover for the industry is well above 70% and 36% of operators state hiring and staff retention is the biggest problem they face DAILY.
This is the way the industry is (for now). Technology has left large pockets of the hospitality industry unserved. Before my first job as a cook, when I would go to restaurants with my friends or family and we experienced bad customer experience we simply just accepted it because it happens so often. I didn’t start to notice how bad staff retention and the customer experience was until I worked as a cook at a restaurant for my first job. I knew then, that someone needed to do something about this serious problem. It wasn’t until I started working for SnapShyft when I realized people are working day and night to build the technology needed to fix this major issue in the food and beverage industry. Now, restaurants are able to keep their venues fully staffed to provide a great customer experience.
Thor Wood and Stephanie Corliss launched SnapShyft inOctober of 2017. SnapShyft is an app for food and beverage operations to instantly post uncovered shifts, allowing those operations to connect with experienced hospitality workers. Based on a workers industry experience, they can claim open shifts on the calendar and on-demand. There are shifts for all front of house and back of house positions.
The Market is Huge and is Pleading For Disruption
The restaurant industry is a mammoth. Annually, the industry does over $799B in sales across 1M+ locations. The industry employs 14.7M professionals in the US alone and will add another 1.6M jobs by 2027. Not only is the industry large but the problem is large too.
Each year $146B is spent or lost due to managing turnover and being understaffed.
Yep. That is “billion” with a “B”. The average venue loses $146k/year due to turnover and being understaffed.
The hospitality professionals are having struggles as well. It has become difficult to pay bills with the current wages in the industry. As a result, workers are supplementing their income by working other jobs or leveraging the existing gig economy opportunities like Uber, Lyft, and SnapShyft.
We really care about our users. We are consistently watching our analytics and executing iterations so that we can continue to improve the experience for our them.
“The seven-member SnapShyft team is keenly aware of its usage analytics and quickly iterates to meet preferences and solve for cultural or even gender disparities that have shown up in the data. For example, early-on they discovered that about 80 percent of their users were male and surveys revealed that women were less likely to use the app due to perceived safety concerns. Through targeted videos, social media and other communications and testimonials, SnapShyft was able to build confidence in their venue vetting and ratings system and today female users (54%) have surpassed male users.” — TechPoint on SnapShyft
Ultimately, Thor and Stephanie’s goals are to make this industry better. They want to empower the workers. They want to make the venue’s lives less stressful. Combined, they have decades of experience in the food and beverage industry. They personally understand and relate to the problems both from a worker’s perspective and from a venue’s perspective. And I am both proud and enthusiastic to be apart of the company.
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