[00:00:00] Speaker A: In business, they say to control the controllables. And in our business, our controllables are revenue, cogs and labor. Manage those and you can run a wildly profitable restaurant business. On today's episode, we're talking all things labor. How do we limit churn, how do we increase retention? And how do we manage our payroll on a weekly basis so we can be profitable? I'm chatting with the CEO of Time Forge, a guy named Anthony Presley. Very, very smart guy. Can't wait for you to hear this conversation. Don't go anywhere. There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking.
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. This is the Restaurant Strategy Podcast weekly podcast where we put out two new episodes every single week. The whole focus is to help you build a more profitable and sustainable business. We've got interviews, we focus on operations, marketing, leadership, management, everything in between. I wrote a book, it's called the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. You can find me on YouTube, you can find me on Instagram, you can listen to 400 and some episodes. I also run a mastermind called the P3 mastermind where I gather restaurant owners from all over the world on a weekly call. Two hours every single week where we're laser focused on profitability. It syncs perfectly with the conversation we're having today. If you have a busy restaurant but struggle with profitability and you want to learn more about the program I run, best way is to get in touch. Set up a conversation restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule it's a 30 minute call absolutely free where you get to ask us a ton of questions about what we do and how we get the results we get. 20% profits is doable, I promise you. We do it hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times over and over again. Again. Restaurant strategy podc podcast.com schedule if you want to learn more about the program we run now, are you tired of juggling schedules, tracking hours, worrying about HR compliance and dealing with all those last minute no shows? Well, it's time to say goodbye to the headaches and hello to Time Forge. Time Forge is a labor management solution designed for the fast paced world of restaurants with product offerings ranging from recruitment to retention of your team members. With Time Forge, you can simplify employee scheduling with automated AI schedules based on sales, weather and other events. You can Track attendance and labor costs in real time, keeping up with complex labor laws like fair workweek and meal penalties. You can recruit staff who live near your stores from our more than 11 million hourly job seekers. They have 11 million plus job seekers on their platform. You can pay employees their wages and tips on a daily basis after every shift. And you can communicate proactively with your staff, using messaging, surveys and more. And that's not all. Time Forge integrates seamlessly with most POS systems, giving you full visibility into labor and sales performance and suggesting when you should staff up or staff down. Whether you manage one location or dozens, Time Forge saves you money, time and stress so you can focus on what really matters, delivering exceptional service and growing your business. Thousands of restaurants trust Time Forge, so why not you visit time forge.com restaurantstrategy today and see how Time Forge can help your team and your restaurant run like clockwork. Again, time forged.com restaurant strategy. As always, that link is in the show notes.
So my guest on today's episode is Anthony Presley. Anthony is the CEO of a company called Time Forge. It might sound familiar because they're one of the sponsors of this show. They are a sponsor for no other reason, except I've asked them to support the show because I think what they've built and what they continue to build is just the best in class. It's. It's the best out there. We're going to get into it over the course of this conversation, going to talk about what Time Forge is, what they do, how they're sort of different than the other, the other options and solutions out there. Before we get to any of that, though, we got to welcome Anthony to the show. It's good to have you.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Yes. We're going to talk about Time Forge and I want to have you walk us through what you've built, why you built it that way, what you're continuing, how you're continuing to evolve it. But mostly, I think the value of having someone like yourself on the show is that you are an industry expert. You get to connect and network with a whole bunch of people at all different levels across the industry. And mostly you get to peek behind the curtain at a lot of different businesses. I say this almost every time I do an interview like this. That is of, I think, immense value to the listeners. Because. Because we are all siloed in this industry. Right. We think that what we're dealing with is unique and we're the only one who's got it like this. But when we get to hear from someone like you, who gets to peek behind all these different curtains, you get to run back and be like, hey, so here's the common threads. Here's what I'm seeing. Here are the trends. Here's what is. Here's what's coming down the pike.
How many restaurants are you currently working with now with time forged.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. We, we currently work with about 3,000 restaurants, which is obviously grown over the years. But, but yeah, we. We're a small team and, and 3,000 is the number. But we, we. We also work in other industries. And as you know, it. Yeah, that lets us. That lets us look behind the curtain at some other places that serve and sling food, like grocery stores and C stores.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: Yeah. So here, this is really interesting. Right. So we talk about. When we talk about, you know, in tech and all that, we talk about verticals. Right. Like, which vertical are we serving? So restaurants are a ver. C stores. Right. Convenience stores is a vertical. Grocery store. Supermarkets are a vertical. One of the coolest things that happened when I went back to business school is that I had spent so long in restaurants that I sort of, you know, you lose sight of the forest for the trees. And when I was in with fellow cohorts who came from CPG and Broadliners and. And grocery stores and on and on and on, it was like, oh, it was so eye opening and refreshing because the problems they deal with are different than our problems. And then provided perspective in.
As to how I was viewing our industry and all that. As you're looking. So we'll start here as you're looking at the world and all the different verticals, the different kinds of industries that you work with, we'll start here and say, what are the common threads that you're seeing across all of them in this very unique sort of environment that we're going through right now?
[00:06:57] Speaker B: Yeah, what, what a great question. And timely. And we'll bring up that the, the thing we all went through with COVID right. When Covid reworked a lot of how. I mean, it's not, it's not just like the gut feeling of reworking work. It actually did rework how work got paid out and how work got handled for a lot of hourly workers and job seekers. And so one of the things that we see is a common thread of things that it's going on in the industry is that hourly job seekers, you know, restaurants sometimes to Your point? Get siloed. And we think we're competing with other restaurants for workers, and we are, but we're also competing with Amazon for workers now, and we're competing with Uber for workers now. And we're competing with all the other hourly job seekers. Medical. If you go look at the number of home health workers that have absolutely exploded in the last five years. And so all of these, we'll call them lower wage, lower salaried job seekers, you know, you're now competing at a much larger scale than we were prior to Covid. And so we're seeing this running thread of how do we retain, how do we find these workers, how do we retain these workers, how do we keep them happy? And then this whole thing around the gig economy and how do we, how do we have W2 workers that are doing our culture right, that are, that know our menu, that know all about our. How we want to serve people, how we want to provide the guest experience, but then are able to work maybe a four hour shift, maybe they don't want to work all day Saturday. And how do we keep them happy? Because they can. It is the reality of today's workforce. They can walk right out the door, open up their phone, click, I want to work for another gig economy and go put in four or five hours and get paid before they get home.
That was a whole lot. I threw a whole lot at you right there, that little bit.
[00:08:54] Speaker A: No, it's true.
[00:08:55] Speaker B: That's what's happened in the last four or five years.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: It's funny, I always talk to my father in law about this and you know, he's nearing retirement age, so, you know, he's, he started in the workforce at a much different time than where we're at now, you know, and we. And he sort of says this. And he's not the only person. I think there are millions of people out there. You'll recognize the sentiment, right? Which is that, oh, the next generation just doesn't want to work and all that. And you know, they just want to put videos on TikTok and make money from their TikTok videos. And we were having a conversation one day and I was like, I don't know about you, but if I can make $100,000 by putting one YouTube video up every week, yeah, that sounds like a really good job to me.
And I think most of us would say, well, if I could make a meaningful amount of money and put up one or two videos a week and that would pay my bills, well then, yeah, look at all the other stuff I could do could be with my family, I could travel, I could, you know, relax, I could do my hobbies and all of that. So I always like to have a little bit of, like, empathy and compassion for, you know, the average worker, for the next generation. I'm like, yeah, man, if they figured out something that we just didn't have available to us, like, good, good for them. And you can't blame them for not wanting to work in a restaurant for, you know, a 10 hour, you know, a 10 hour double shift, and that's okay. And I think what it does is it, I think it puts the onus on us. And tell me if you feel this way, like, we have to have a compelling response to that. Like, yeah, you could do something else. You could go drive for Uber, you could deliver for Amazon, you could, you know, whatever. But the reasons why you would come here and work full time as a W2 employee are as follows. Like, these are the following benefits. These are the things you get out of doing it another way. And I just think we can't have it both ways, right? If we want to complain about people, then we have to give a reason for people to come and join us on this side. Is that fair? Does that resonate?
[00:10:57] Speaker B: It's totally fair, right? I mean, yeah, I mean, if I had a cheat code to life, I should, you know, you should use it, right? I mean, definitely use the cheat codes. And. But yeah, we, we, we actually helped participate in a study a couple of years ago with the Coca Cola Research Institute. And they did a study. It was in grocery, but it was a very interesting study.
And they went and surveyed a whole bunch of grocers and the workers in the grocery stores, and they found there's five generations of workers that are out in the market today and there's six generations of shoppers, right? And what they found is what appeals to each generation of worker is a little different. Right? And I'm not telling you anything you don't know. You and I had these conversations. So.
But you know what, what appeals to each worker is slightly different. Not everybody wants the ability to go jump on an Uber. And some are looking for upward mobility and some are looking for stability, and some are looking for growth. And you know, there's all kinds of different things. And I'm happy to send that. It's a publicly available study. It's not anything, anything crazy. But one of the most interesting things that came out of the study was that by and large, grocers and I would tell you restaurants, Although I'd be curious to hear your take on it. We spend a whole lot of time flexing our marketing muscle to get guests in the door, to get guests coming back to get retention.
And we spend almost none of that muscle on our employees. And so you're trying, you're going, hey, why would you come work for me? Why would you come work here? What is it about our culture that we want to keep people coming back here? What are the soft skills you're going to learn? What do you want to do in 20 years? Do you want to be a manager? Do you want to be the CEO? Do you want to be the guy, you know, pushing the broom around, you know, whatever those skills are. Are you going to learn those skills delivering boxes for Amazon? Maybe not. But you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of skills you learn in the back of a restaurant or in the front of a restaurant that you're not going to learn in a gig economy.
But we don't, we don't flex those muscles and we probably don't market them like we should.
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Do you ever. I always get.
I've done this on a couple of episodes over the years and I share this with all the members of my mastermind. And one of the things that everybody knows, I say, you know, job listings, like, like a, like a job listing is a pretty terrible way of advertising a job. Like I always, I always say this. I'm like, why are there no pictures in a job listing? Like, this is the, like, especially we, we work, we build really fun, beautiful, exciting places, right? Like, why don't we lead with that? Why don't we put our best foot forward and say this is the room where you'll be every, every day. Like that's, that's a beautiful restaura. Like this is the stuff you're going to be working with. You're going to be serving great food, great wine, great beer, cocktails, whatever it is.
Why don't we, why do we lead with the. Here are all the things you're going to be responsible for, right? Or here are all your requirements to have this job. Here are all the things you're going to be responsible for, right? This is like Advertising 101, right? Advertising 101 says you lead with. Because the consumer always approaches any sort of ad by going, what's in it for me? So as an employer, why would we not do the same? To your point, we market our guests. You know, we think about marketing to our guests so much and we hardly give any thought to marketing to our people. But like, we have to say, well, what's in it for them? There was a really famous case study of Ritz Carlton in the 1980s going into the 1990s. Whereas Ritz Carlton at that point was the number one brand in the world and they were having a lot of very difficult time getting employees. And they hired one of the big consultancies to come in and they basically said, there's really great things about this job for very specific kinds of people and you guys just aren't doing a good enough job talking about it. For example, they had this whole transfer program. You could transfer to another Ritz Carlton anywhere in the world for a year. Basically, you could work your entire 30 year career and work in 30, 30 different countries. They would help set you up with the requisite visas and whatever you needed. And then you go work in Cairo for a year, you go work in Bangkok for a year, you go, like, wherever you want it to go. And they said the average person off the street doesn't even know that that's possible. But for a certain person who's like, I want to see the world, like, that's really appealing to them for certain people at a certain age. And maybe they would do that in their 20s. And from 24 to 30, they go live in six different countries. And then they start thinking about settling down and finding a city. And when they think about what city they want to settle down to, they just open up the book and say, well, okay, where are all the Ritz Carltons? Well, maybe I want to settle in San Francisco. Maybe I want to settle in Philadelphia. And you pick one of those. There's such an opportunity to get up and move. And they basically said it was the one example that they use in the case study of, like, here's one of the biggest things you get out of this company, that they've got a massive footprint. And they weren't leading with that. Right? It's like, if you want to see the world, if you want to travel the world. And what they did is over the course of the next 10 years now, and now, of course, we see they now their hiring practices are emulated, like, the world over. You know, Starbucks brings them in, Apple brings them in, Disney brings them in to say, how can we be more hospitable? How can we court top talent and retain top talent and all of that? But to your point, lead with the things that are great. Hey, this is what you're going to love about this place. So what I tell all my clients is like, lead with a top 10 list. Here are the top 10 reasons why you're going to love this place. Here are five reasons why you may not love this place. Right? This is the requirements, I think, for you to really succeed here. And this is what you're going to be responsible for. Basically flip that job listing upside down. And for the life of me, I don't understand why we don't have pictures and, you know, different fonts in there. I think we could dress it up in the year 2025. You know, we got. We got AI making. Making movies for us. We can certainly add pictures to a job listing.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you take pictures and I know it. I know it's bugaboo in a Lot of places. But, you know, putting. Putting the dollars like it's. It's okay. I mean, this job pays 10 bucks. This job pays 15 bucks. Like, it's okay to weed some people out right at the beginning. You know, you're not wasting my time. You're not wasting your time. We know exactly. Everybody knows what's up, and that's okay. I mean, you're trying to build your tribe of the people you want to talk to, and. And it's hard to do that if you don't put any. Any dollars on there or you don't know what's going on. And you get all the way to the finish line, like, all the hours that are wasted, to get all the way to the finish line and find out that your expectations aren't aligned. Or worst case, there you make a hire and you're three weeks in, you've already trained them, and then you go, ah, we got to separate now. Like, that's the worst. The worst.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: Totally. It's funny, in business school, I had this really great leadership class, and they were talking about vabes V A B E. Right? It's an acronym that says values, assumptions, beliefs, and expectations. I said, every interaction you have with another human being is a potential like landmine. Because I me, Chip, I have my set of values, assumptions, beliefs, and expectations based on where I was raised, the way I was raised, parenting, the friendships I had, the places I've worked, and all of that. You, Anthony, you have your own set of values, assumptions, beliefs, and expectations. And our job in any sort of relationship is to sort of, like, find our common ground and sort of suss those out. We don't do that consciously, but it's happening in every interaction and, you know, making sure that you understand. I always talk about, you know, I always talk to, you know, restaurant owners or, you know, operators like, oh, this person's so lazy. They're just, you know, they're not doing X, Y, and Z. It's like, okay, well, have. Have. Has it been you know, explicitly described to them what you expect of them? Or is it just an assumption? We used to do this in fine dining all the time. I said, because you're saying, well, this person's so lazy, they're not up to speed. But you don't know. This might be the hardest this person has ever worked. The only. Like, they just might have a different set of assumptions because the place they've worked at were low key, were casual, they had no oversight, nobody cared. So again, I come from fine dining. Like, when you're asking someone to elevate. Like they just don't know. They're not, they don't understand the culture or the norms yet that has to be explicitly outlined to them. And it, it really starts at the very beginning. It's going to, it's going to make for a better relationship and a longer term relationship which we know, we know how expensive churn is in a restaurant. Do the other, do the other industries you were talking about have the same level of churn that restaurants have?
[00:21:38] Speaker B: They do, they do.
They do. And it's funny how I say it's funny. It's not funny haha. But it is, it is funny how they sometimes track it.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: So.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: And as you can imagine, in a convenience industry you've got some very, you've got some unique operators that maybe only have two employees that show up, you know, and you have, you have one person call out or one no show, like you might have to shut the whole place down.
And so there's some unique operating conditions in that space.
We recently had a multi unit grocery operator very proud, very proud of their turnover stats and came to us and we were looking at their turnover stats and our numbers and their numbers did not match at all.
But they had dropped their turnover down to like 40% or 50% and they were very proud of it. And we finally dug in and I got ahold of one of their analysts and I was like, explain this to me. And they're like, oh well, we don't, we don't count cashiers specifically if they churn in the first 90 days.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: And I went, well, you still got to train them. It's training dollars. That's part of your churn. Your, your churn expense.
[00:22:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I feel, I feel like that's probably, you know, that's probably not how you should count those dollars. But, but anyway, so yeah, generally speaking, I'd say that all three industries have a similar problem from, from turnover.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: I want to dig into time forge a little bit because there's a lot of reasons why I love it.
We talk about it's a labor management tool. And I think there are two ways to think of labor management. I think the first way we think about it is how do we manage that expense? It's the biggest line. Our people expense are the biggest line item on our, on our monthly P and L. And that's, I think that's cool. It's a people industry. We need people to make it happen. I think people are the thing, the reason why it's so great so on the one hand, it's about managing that expense. If it's our biggest expense, we have to be very, very aware of it or it'll run away with us and it'll eat up all the profitability. And obviously the goal of a business is to be profitable. More profitable we are, the more we can grow, open more, feed more people, employ more people. So we have a vested interest in managing that. But then the other piece to it, which we don't spend enough time talking about, and we have spent a few minutes now talking about it, which is thinking about how we actually manage sort of the retention nature of it. So managing meaning, like how do we acquire new employees and how do we treat them and what do we have to do to keep them here for a long time?
Because somebody who's been here for a year is better than somebody who's been here for a month. They just are. There's institutional knowledge. So talk to me about Time Forge. What is it? How did you build it? Why did you build it in the way you did, how you think about it?
[00:24:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So we, you know, I'm an engineer by trade, so I started, I started this business going, hey there, managers are just spending too much time building schedules. And you got to remember, I'm, I'm old. My hair reflects this statement.
So we, we started this, this product in 2007. An iPad didn't exist and so I teamed up with an industrial engineer and we started building machine learning AI. Right, everybody's very excited about AI these days. We started with AI in 2007 and we started with point of sale integrations in 2007 and we were looking at what the schedules should be based on sales and predictive analytics. And frankly, I took that to a multi unit operator in 2007 and said, Look, I can click this button and within 30 seconds the most accurate schedule is kicked out and your manager will have a schedule. And this CEO of a multi unit, I'll leave the name out so that we protect the non innocent in this case. But he looked me dead in the face and said, I pay my managers to build schedules. Why would I pay you also?
And I think the industry has changed a little bit from there. But we, you know, we were, we were able to spit out a schedule in 30 seconds that followed the sales trend that knew exactly when people needed to be on the floor. And so I went back to work, we started building point of sale integrations, we started building HR functionality and we really lasered in on the how do we Keep managers on the floor. And how do we enable communication? Because the communication is so key, you know, whether or not that's manager to staff, or if it's staff to manager, or if it's group wide communication, you know, if you can keep everybody's expectations back to your term on the same page, then you know a lot of this turnover stuff. Well, what do you mean you need me there in 30 minutes? I didn't know I was on call this week. You know, if you can keep all of those expectations in line, then you can control to whatever degree you can the turnover and your retention. And so we spend a lot of time trying to manage and make sure that the software enables those pieces. And so that was the genesis. We wanted to build schedules very quickly in an automated fashion. And over the years it's evolved and the whole thing has evolved from everything from how you find job seekers all the way up through until you cut paychecks. We don't cut paychecks. We used to, we got out of that business. So some, we have lots of partners that actually do payroll. We don't do payroll.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: So scheduling is the part that I think most people know as far as like a time management solution. Talk to me about the. So the recruitment piece of the software.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: Yeah, this is, you know, I think everybody, we talked about, you know, job postings, right? You put a job posting, you might, you might have, you might have a chat GPT generate you a job post posting. It'll go, you know, average out your three favorite or three best job postings and put that together for you and you can then put that on Indeed. You know, we'll post it to Indeed. The problem with Indeed or any of these, if it's not on your website, is that nobody, you know is, you know, really what you're looking for. Somebody that's around you. And we've done some studies on this. We have 11 million job seekers on our platform that are constantly looking for jobs. And the, the math on this is a little craz. There are 80 million hourly workers in the United States and they change jobs on average four times a year. So do the math. Wow. Yeah.
And so that's who you're competing with and competing for in that job pool. And so, you know, you got to kind of think about it from that perspective. And they're generally not leaving because they suddenly doubled their salary. They're leaving because proximity, right. They got a 25 cent raise, they got a 50 cent raise. They're getting better tips, they're moving to A better, less hostile work environment.
And so they've got a better manager. Right? There's that old saying, if people don't quit jobs, they quit their manager. That's pretty true.
And so our recruitment piece will actually is an app. They download the app and think of it like a gas buddy. It'll show them within 1 mile, 3 miles and 5 miles the jobs that are available near them so that they can do a video application. The manager can then see a video application for 30 seconds. They can see attitude and aptitude and they can hire or ask them to come in and chat with them.
And so you kind of skip over that whole scrolling through doom scrolling on indeed.
It's pretty awesome. It's a new way to find. And you're not going to get 3,000 applicants over the weekend. You might get two, but those two, you know, live in your area and they are close to you and they want to work for you.
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[email protected] RestaurantStrategy. I will add in here. This fits in perfectly with what we're about to talk about again. Davosalestax.com RestaurantStrategy and yes, that link is in the show notes.
Yeah, that's really cool. Talk to me. Now I want to bounce back to the sort of the scheduler because this predictive analytics, this is right up my. This is right up my. In my wheelhouse when I was in business school and I said this on the podcast. So anybody who's heard me say this before, apologize. For the rest of you, this will be new.
One of the things that I wanted to go back to school for, went back to school at the age of 40. I was like, it just shouldn't be so hard to make money in this industry, when everybody loves restaurants, everybody loves to go out to restaurants. We've got full dining rooms all the time. It shouldn't be this hard. Why is it so hard? So I went back to school largely to fill in the gaps in my education, but also to answer that question. And I was in my second semester, and I ended up connecting with somebody, a fellow cohort who worked for Campbell's Soup Company, right? So I went to St. Joe's St. Joe's is in Philadelphia. Campbell's has an incredible. We talk about, you know, employee retention and development, right? They'll pay for your grad school. They'll pay for you to go get your mba or they'll pick up a meaningful percentage of it. So we had all these. We had all these people from Campbell Soup Company that were, you know, wanting to move up into leadership positions. And I was saying, oh, why'd you go back to school? I said, why'd you go back to school? We were just talking, and so I explained. I said I wanted the answer to that question. Why is it so hard to make money? And he said to me, without even flinching, he's like, oh, I know why. It's because you guys have three moving targets in your business. And I think about this a lot. And I'm going to hold up a hat so anybody who's listening will not see this. But I had these hats made for when we do our profitability summit. It's got three targets. This has resonated with me so deeply. He said, well, you have three moving targets in your business that we don't have at Campbell's. I said, what do you mean? He's like, revenue is a question for you, right? It's a moving target. You don't know exactly how many people are going to come in and how much each of them are going to spend on that given night. So revenue is somewhat of a moving target, right? Because of that, you don't know how much food to buy, right? So cost of goods sold is a moving target. If you buy too much, you've got waste. You're going to have to throw stuff out. If you've got too little, you got 86s. I was like, oh. And he's like, in labor, right? You're staffing up, assuming you're going to be busy. But if you end up not being busy, well, then you're heavy on labor, and there goes your profitability. So you have three moving targets that you constantly have to manage, and it's being managed by people who aren't typically business minded. They are food focused, they're hospitality focused and not thinking of the business applications. And he said, think about Campbell's. We have salespeople selling our soups a quarter in advance. He's like, so we already have the sales. We already the, you know, the purchase tickets and all that. We know how much revenue is either going to come in or has already come in. He's like, therefore, we order just enough product to fill those cans that have been ordered. And we understand how, you know, how we have to staff and run the line to put out that number of cans. He's like, revenue, cogs and labor are not moving targets in our business. Now we've got others. When it has to do with supply chain and, you know, managing, you know, you know, massive, massive, you know, organizations that they're selling to. He's like, but the thing that makes your business so hard, we don't have an issue with. He's like, so you got to figure out how to manage those three moving targets. And it really set me on a course through the rest of my education.
We ended up having to take three different forecasting classes. And I was like, this is it. So when we talk about predictive analytics, it's about forecasting. It's about predicting the future. So ever from the beginning, as you said, you were into this, and I know you have even gone deeper and deeper into this. This is the biggest moving target here, which is revenue, because that sets our budgets for everything else. So talk to me about how you think about it and how what you've built sets out to solve that.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Yeah, and. And I'll just start. I'm going to start with. By saying it's. It's so hard. It is incredibly hard. And what I might say for one concept is not always true for another concept.
We. We have it. We have a customer that has 14 stores, and.
And what they have, what they see at one store is not always true at another store from a. From an algorithm perspective. And so over the years, we've actually developed 42 different forecasting algorithms that get deployed to every store and every department because there are so many different variations. And if you just think of, like, you know, something. Something very similar, simple. So we could. We could talk about, you know, holidays, like a very simple concept of a holiday. Super bowl, like, super bowl does not affect every restaurant the same. It just doesn't. Some restaurants are absolutely slammed, and they are slammed weeks in advance. You can go look at your catering orders, you can look at what's going on with your call ahead orders, you can go, you know, you might have, you might be booked out for say a Valentine's Day event and you can go look at triple seat or open table and go look, we're going to be absolutely slammed. And other restaurants in that same date have nothing going on. I mean they're just absolutely barren.
And so looking at things like events, looking at things like weather, which is very interesting because weather is such a localized phenomenon and even in the same day in the same area, year over year, it can be affecting people differently.
And so we've seen things where like cold weather in the north doesn't affect restaurants like it does in the south.
And so and then if it butts up into a weekend, but if there's an event going on like a sidewalk sale or a tax free weekend, those things can cancel each other out. You can be absolutely slammed even though you've got bad weather. And so you end up with these, this crazy number of algorithms and what in the math world we call regressors. And so you start getting into these AI and stats based terminology, but you end up with these regressors and you have to forecast out or aggressor. And forecasting the weather is hard to do. The weatherman's wrong often. But you've got to forecast that out 14 days or you try and do it 30 days. We try and do things six months in advance. We know that six months out we are going to be wrong. But by the way, when all of your staff wants off on spring break and you can't give everybody off on spring break, but you might want give two or three of them off.
And so we, we go and approach this starting with events weather and then we look at forecasts and we try and look at, you know, trends in your forecasts and we break it down by revenue center, some POS systems, we break it down by items. We do pull in things like reservations from open table and triple seats and some other areas.
And then we also have ways to get data in manually. So if you wanted to bring in things like in grocery, we'll do things like when the truck shows up and you want to, you know, so that, you know, hey, we need three people to unload the truck.
And so there's a lot of manual things that can get in there. We can also drop in budgets. So if you start thinking about a large multi unit publicly traded group may have budgets that they need to adhere to from their corporate standards or their cfo, you can throw those Numbers in. So.
So you've got whatever forecasting magic they've got behind the scenes as well. But it gets really complicated really fast. And then every week, for every department, for every store, we basically, I think about it like battlebots. Like every week, every store, they battle it out. Every algorithm, 42 algorithms battle it out and they. And the best one wins for each store. And it changes, it changes from week to week, store to store, department to apartment. And then, and then, you know, that goes on. And then for some customers, customers that are thinking on their feet, we do intraday forecasting, which is very unique, I think, in the industry. And so we're consuming real time data out of that POS and those systems. And if we start to see that you're getting a high variance, maybe, maybe it's time to say, hey, who wants to go home early? And so you can make and operate like a business and say, hey, you know, we're going to cut some labor. We're not seeing what we thought we were going to see, or we're going to be slammed more than we thought we were. Can we call someone in? Which is a good problem. And you want to know about that as soon as possible, for sure.
[00:39:53] Speaker A: So I want to not put too fine a point on this.
I have worked with a lot of the solutions out there, and this is the thing that makes Time Forge so great. It's why we talk about it so much. It's why, it's why I recommend it on the show to the Mastermind people. Because those three moving targets and they're really set. It's really set by your ability to predict business levels. So for me, what I'm really interested in is restaurants being profitable. So I care about net income. And so I want to say, okay, if I want to make X dollars, well, then I have to do Y in revenue and keep my expenses to 80% of that. That's how I make 20% profit. Right. So that's a dollar amount. Right. And, and what I want for all the listeners, certainly we do this with all the P3 mastermind members. We say go into the period and say, man, what do you need from your business? Like, this would be worth it. All that I put into this. It'd be worth it if I made a certain amount of dollars. And then all you have to do is figure out, well, how much revenue you're gonna do. And if you're pretty good at figuring that out, then it becomes really easy to set budgets so that there's enough leftover. So that the number you said you wanted to make at the end of the period is what's left over. P.S. this is what every publicly traded company does because they need to target earnings, right? They got earnings calls. They've got. They've got a board. They've got thousands of millions of shareholders. You know, you've got even more important shareholders, which are, you know, your family, your, you know, your other partners and all of that. So for me, when Anthony's talking about this, like, the very complicated piece of, like, figuring out how to predict the future, like, we just. Like, that's what's required, right? So I show everybody in my program how to do it, and then I quickly say, but if you don't want to do it, there are tools out there, right? Like, let's. Let's gather around the fire, y'all. Let's build our aggression. Like, here we go. We can do it, but you'll never build it. That will take. You know, no one has the skill set as far as a restaurant owner, nor should they. P.S. by the way, to take into account all of these factors, right? We can maybe work on, like, trending, like, where are we as to, you know, in comparison to where we were last year? But that doesn't take into account that Easter is a week later than it was last year. That, you know, Mother's Day is going to fall on the same weekend as blah, blah, and on and on and on. The end of the day, it begins and ends with our ability to forecast, to predict the future. Because if we can do that well, and we can be right more often than we're wrong, then we can get that much better at our budgets, and it just guarantees a consistent profit number at the end of every period, which is ultimately what I care about, because that's why a business exists, right? It's not a nonprofit. If it's nonprofit, go do it.
[00:42:52] Speaker B: Just.
[00:42:52] Speaker A: Just run it with plenty of charities. If you want to go run a restaurant and where it just, like, subsists, fine. But I don't think anybody. I'm guessing nobody listening to this podcast got into it to have this just sort of break even for the next 30 years, and then you close it. I think you want to make money, and that's okay. To make money. Security, stability, legacy, all of that.
I love the software more. The more I learn about it, the more excited I get by it.
I want to be really aware of your time. So two last things. Final words of wisdom for the listeners when it comes to this and how they should Be thinking about it. But anything you want to share with. With the listeners.
[00:43:37] Speaker B: Oh, that's a. That's a loaded question for a guy who's been building software for 20 years here.
I would say.
I would say that the. The main thing right now is, you know, we started off talking about culture. We started talking about making sure that employees, team members are kept in the loop and that you're retaining them. And that's hard to do right now.
And I would say that right now is the right time to challenge if just because you've always done it a certain way doesn't mean that that's how you need to keep doing it. Right. There's that saying of what got you here won't get you there.
[00:44:23] Speaker A: Say it all the time.
[00:44:24] Speaker B: That's right. That's exactly right. And so I might challenge that, even when it comes down to writing the schedule and anything as it comes to your workforce, management might be time 20, 25 is probably a good time to revisit some of those things and go, is this something we should dust off and maybe revisit a little bit?
You don't want to do that constantly because that can cause some confusion with your staff. But it's probably a good time, if you haven't looked at it in the last 12 or 18 months, to go, hey, is this really the right way? We want to tackle this problem.
But I would say start there. And the other thing I would say is that training is hard. Training is always hard to train your staff, and there's never enough time to train people, and it's never the right time to train people. And the right time to train people is right now. And so I would say whatever you're doing, make sure you're taking the time to train your staff, because otherwise you don't ever have the right expectations set.
And funny enough, I don't sell training software. But it's the number one reason that we see besides dollars and toxic work environments, is you just end up in a situation where staff weren't trained, managers thought they were being trained, and it's a miss completely, and then you have high turnover and then you're not making any money. And to your point, nobody's in this to not make money. The IRS called the restaurant that doesn't make money a hobby.
[00:46:00] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. Anthony, I love this conversation. We're going to have you back. We're going to do it again. I appreciate your time. Where can people go to learn more about time?
[00:46:10] Speaker B: It's super easy. It's time. Forged.comt I m e f o r g e.com Perfect.
[00:46:17] Speaker A: Go check it out. It really is a powerful piece of software.
More than anything. What I think it does so, so well is I think the most important thing that we should care about, which is again, its ability to forecast, its ability to then like that's sort of the holy grail. If we can get good at that, we can get really good at dialing in our schedules and understanding when we need people, when we don't need people. I can't, I can't say it enough. Anthony, thanks so much for being here. I appreciate it.
[00:46:45] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. Really enjoyed it.
[00:46:49] Speaker A: Once again, thank you guys for tuning in, for taking time out of your week to be here part of this conversation. Big thanks to Anthony for taking time out of his week to sit here and share his knowledge with us. If you want to learn more about Time Forge, you'll find that link in the show notes. Appreciate you guys. One final ask. Haven't asked this in a little while. If you get any sort of value out of this show, please take two minutes, go and leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. That one more than just about anything else will move the needle in this business. Helps us grow our audience, increase downloads which, which just makes for a richer community. Again, Apple podcast two minutes. Spend, just spend two minutes giving us five star rating and review. Appreciate you guys very much. I will see you next time.
