Successful Restaurant Business With Values

Christin Marvin 0:08

If you are a restaurant owner facing the challenge of building a successful business while staying true to your values , then stick around . In this episode , we unravel the art of building a prosperous business while staying true to your values , addressing industry pain points and achieving a harmonious balance between business growth and personal fulfillment . Welcome to the No Hesitations podcast , the show where restaurant leaders learn tools , tactics and habits from the world's greatest operators . I'm your host , Christin Marvin , with Solutions by Christin . I've spent the last two decades in the restaurant industry and now partner with restaurant leaders to help them overcome burnout , increase retention , reignite their passion and drive successful businesses . This podcast is sponsored by Schedulefly .

Christin Marvin 0:59

Schedulefly provides a simple , web-based and app-based restaurant employee scheduling software , backed by legendary customer service . If you're using pen paper , excel or a fancy scheduling software with tons and bells of whistles that you don't use , schedulefly is perfect for your business . When I was a regional manager handling seven locations , schedulefly was our go-to for scheduling . It's , hands down , the easiest platform I've ever worked with and their employee communication tool awesome for shooting out mass messages about crucial restaurant updates . Visit Scheduleflycom and mention no Hesitations podcast to get 10% off . Today we are welcoming Will Brawley , co-owner of Schedulefly restaurant employee scheduling software and the host of the Restaurant Owners Uncorked podcast with over 500 episodes and over 600,000 downloads . Holy moly , will I just hit 400 today and I was doing backflips in my living room ? 400,000? .

Wil Brawley 2:08

No 400 .

Christin Marvin 2:08

You'll get there .

Wil Brawley 2:12

Well , listen , no , you'll get there . It's amazing how it starts to compound , but you were just episode . I'm not sure what number we're at right now , but it's 500 and something , so thank you for doing that .

Christin Marvin 2:22

I love it . I love it . Yeah , I'm at 12 . So , a little bit behind you , I'm going to put this out there because you told me to , but Will's flip phone , which I love , we can talk about that . Your phone number is 704-906-2031 and is always happy to chat . Well , thanks so much for coming on the show . It's incredible to have you here . Appreciate it .

Wil Brawley 2:46

You're happy to do it , absolutely .

Christin Marvin 2:50

I'm excited to share your story and give listeners an inside look behind the product of Schedule Fly and really connect with you and your team and talk about your passion for the hospitality industry , which is something that we share , and I know we were able to connect for the first time last week and I'm just inspired by all the work that you're doing to support the industry and I'm just honored to have you on the show today .

Wil Brawley 3:19

So I'm honored to be here . Love the industry .

Christin Marvin 3:22

Yeah , well you . So your background's not in hospitality . How the heck did you end up launching Schedule Fly and getting into this amazing , wild and crazy world ?

Wil Brawley 3:36

Well , you know there's five of us here and we've had the same five since pretty much since we got started in 2007 . Wes Akin used to write the schedule in a restaurant back in the late 90s , early 2000s in college and you know would sit in his apartment Sunday afternoons trying to piece together a schedule on Excel based on , you know , pieces of paper with time off , requests and backs of receipts with . You know I can't work this day . It's been several hours crafting this schedule , you know , knowing who can't work well with who and all this stuff , and you know , creating this masterpiece schedule . And he would take it down and post it at the restaurant in the office there at the bridge tender in Right Eastville Beach , north Carolina . And then , of course , as soon as it got posted , people are calling in and coming in and checking the schedule and changes are starting to happen and you know it just immediately , everything is just chaos again . So he had the idea to write . He was like , well , what if I could just write a you know it's not a right code and I could just write a simple solution for this that would make things a whole lot easier and where people could access it from anywhere . And you know , read shifts without having to make a hundred phone calls and put in their time off requests . You know where it's all in one place . And that was the . That was the genesis of schedule fly . I mean , he had this thing . You know he had friends in the restaurant business , a couple of them trying it out when he had his server , you know , in his closet and his place in Raleigh and West and Tyler and Charles and Hank and I that's our team we all used to work at a different company or a different industry called First Research and we went through an acquisition and you know , things kind of went awry , as they often do in acquisitions , and the culture was kind of destroyed and we were all like , you know I'm not doing that anymore , and so that's kind of how this all got going . And we , you know , over time , all five kind of came together over the next year or two to do this full time and um , no-transcript . I'll be very honest .

Wil Brawley 5:49

When I started I thought , okay , good business idea , not a lot at the time , not a lot of competition . We can make a successful , profitable business . Hopefully we won't ever have to raise capital . We can bootstrap this thing , not pay ourselves for a while and just make a fun and successful business . And that was what I thought . And I also thought that I would be out selling to chains . I mean , what I did in my previous life was enterprise sales with that previous business . So I was out on airplanes and flying around and long-term sales cycles , big long-term sales contracts , and so I thought , well , I'm going to go get all these chains to sign up for schedule flying and that was where we started .

Wil Brawley 6:33

And then where we wound up was realizing we can't serve chains , don't want to serve chains , don't want to do all the stuff that chains need , and we're just going to focus on independence . And thank goodness for that , because I've really developed a profound amount of respect for the people that own and work in and run independent restaurants and what it takes to do that , how hard that is , but how rewarding and not always even necessarily super rewarding financially , but rewarding personally , and there's a lot of heart and passion and love that goes into this industry . It's also the most diverse collection of people that you could find anywhere , that come from all walks of life and all backgrounds and all levels of education and all races and everything . And it's this place where , no matter where you've been or what you've done , if you're willing to come and work hard for the team and be a good teammate and take great care of your guests , then let's go bring it on in , and I think that's really really cool .

Christin Marvin 7:37

Yeah , you mentioned competition earlier , how , and you know , I don't know how many clients you currently have . Now You've been around for 15 years , is that ?

Wil Brawley 7:46

right , yeah , yeah , since 2007 , 16 . Yeah .

Christin Marvin 7:50

How have the five of you been able to stay so competitive in a market that is being very heavily invested in right now ?

Wil Brawley 7:58

Oh gosh , you know there's been over half a billion dollars in venture capital and private equity invested just into our competitors over the last 10 years . And so you know , kristen , we know where we fit in and we know what we're good at and we sort of stay in our lane and we've kind of carved out a bit of a niche . There are , to this day , there's still tens of thousands of restaurants and hospitality businesses that use pencil and paper or Excel , and if it works for them , they should just keep doing that . I'll be the first to say that If it gets to the point where they're spending a lot of time on managing that , that could be devoted to something else , then we have this really simple solution and we take really good care of our customers and then we invest into our customers by , you know , sharing their stories on our podcast , and we've done some books and some films , and when they just need something simple and they really value doing business with a small business and they value great customer service , we're like awesome . But then so we're kind of in that place , right , they might grow into us and then sometimes sweet cows an example they might grow out of us where they have more complex needs . Well , goodness , we can't compete in that space . We've never raised a dime of capital and , as I said , there's been so much invested here . And that's fine , because there's a lot of different companies that have a lot of other features and tools and bells and whistles and they're all kind of fighting it out for those people that might outgrow us or that have more complicated needs or need more solutions . And that's not a fight we want to be in , because every day somebody's opening a restaurant and they're hanging their shingle out and they just need something simple and like we'll take great care of you until we don't have what you need anymore . Yeah , totally cool .

Wil Brawley 9:49

I read a blog post . We don't have a blog anymore , but I read a blog post years ago . My daughter's a sophomore in college , when she was in third grade , I wrote a post that's . I think it was titled Scheduled Flys Like a Third Grade Teacher , and my point was like my daughter grew into third grade and this teacher was awesome and like really great teacher and then at the end of the year she said you know , you're like , you're beyond me now and I wish you well and go on to fourth grade , and then she welcomed the next class of third graders right the following year , miss Owen , and I was like that's kind of like what we're . You know , while you're here we're going to take great care of you and if you get to the point where you don't you know you need more than we'll wish you well and we'll stay friends with you . And you know I'm still friends with the sweet cow guys . They're not customers anymore , but I love them .

Christin Marvin 10:34

Yeah , they're great , for sure . Yeah , it sounds like you guys really are clear on who your ideal customer is and what your wheelhouse is , and what you're willing to do and what you're not willing to do , which is just awesome .

Wil Brawley 10:49

Oh , because we didn't raise venture capital . Yeah , that's a luxury that comes with that if we had different ball game . But yeah , we were fortunate to not have to , so we're able to kind of create our own . You know , our own rules and our own boundaries .

Starting a Company and Maintaining Balance

Christin Marvin 11:02

What was the point and moment of insight for you starting this company when you knew you had something that had some legs ?

Wil Brawley 11:11

Well , you know , that's a really interesting question . I think that I was pretty naive early on . I just kind of thought , well , gosh , if some people are paying for this , then tons of them will . And it turned out they did . But you know , I think that at the end of the day we knew well , first of all , we were fortunate that we didn't have to raise money . I mean , that's huge , that's a really , really big advantage if you're able to do that , because you don't have to try to race and you're not dealing with not only trying to get customers but also with investors .

Wil Brawley 11:48

And it was pretty clear early on that if I mean , we have look , we have a very a common problem , which is that scheduling and communicating with staff is just a challenge in restaurants . So it's a pain point that kind of everybody deals with at some point in some way . And if you have a common pain point and you can provide a really simple solution to that and then just take great care of the customer , whether it's scheduling soft or whatever space that may be , and even what you do , I mean there's a common problem of , like , trying to develop leaders . And so if you have an issue that most people are dealing with and you have an easy way for them to engage you and you have an easy solution for them and you just take freaking great care of them , then you got a business right . And then how scalable is ? It is all you know . Up to you Look , we have far fewer customers than we could have had had we decided , okay , we're growing at this rate , let's go . Let's go rake in a bunch of money and deploy that into sales and marketing and really just scale this thing up . And we have people that started way after us , that have a lot more customers than us . That's okay . That's not how we measure success .

Wil Brawley 12:54

My measurement is , you know , we love what we do . We wake up every day and get to have fun at what we do . We take phenomenal care of our customers every day , which is a lot of fun , and we have the ability to spend . You know , we all five of us we're all fathers . You know two , three kids . All of us . We've been able to spend time with them , watch them grow , as you and I talked about on our episode . I mean , I've spent a massive amount of my personal energy on fitness and nutrition and over the last 15 years and I suspected if we were in a situation where we were , you know , growing at five times the rate , with five times the problems , I would have let myself go . I wouldn't be in this situation that I am now , which I feel like I can do this forever with that balance .

Christin Marvin 13:41

Was that part of the initial vision that you had , knowing , hey , let's talk about lifestyle , let's talk about what the five of us really want our lives to look like , and then how does that coincide with the business and how do we keep that balance ? Was that part of the original vision or is that something that you kind of have found throughout your career ?

Wil Brawley 13:59

A little bit of both . I mean , we knew we didn't want to go like we had been a part of a fast growing business and we were acquired and we knew what that meant and what that led to . I mean , I was a shareholder in that business Personally , financially it was great , but it was the worst . The earn out period was the worst 18 months of my life , I mean I was early 30s , losing hair and stressed and not sleeping and they kind of you know . So we knew we didn't want that and yeah , I mean you know our goal was we thought , well , if we get to , you know , 100 customers and 1000 customers and then 10,000 customers , and then I mean , and I don't know if we'll get to 10,000 . We were closer before COVID than we are now . We have fewer customers now than we did before COVID , but and then we had a ransomware attack and we lost some business from that , you know . So we've , I mean , the last few years I couldn't be more proud of this business . So that I am now more than ever because you know , since in the last , let's say , five years , hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the competitive tools COVID takes out , you know , at the time we did like would we even have a business still right , like you didn't know when COVID started , but so COVID takes out a lot of our customers and we get hit with a ransomware attack . So we've just withstood this just massive amount of forces and pressures against our business and that yet here we are on the other side of all that with , you know , nearly 6,000 customers , super , super happy customers .

Wil Brawley 15:30

And you know we're building on our media side of our business . We have a lot of things that we're working on there with the podcast and content generation , and you know we kind of every day is very similar . We have happy customers . We don't have a lot of support , which is why we can do this with five people . We have 250,000 end users . We might get five phone calls a day , you know , maybe 10 on a busy day and maybe 30 or 40 emails . So that's been very , very deliberate . Keep the software . We've never done a training session , you know . Keep the software simple . Make it kind of point , click and go and then when people need something , they're going to get us , they're going to call and they're going to get us , or if they get a voicemail , they're going to get a call right back , or if they send an email , they're going to get any email right back and it's highly sustainable because we're not like 24 , 7 , 365 , pedal to the metal like burning ourselves out .

Christin Marvin 16:26

Yeah , yeah , I , you know , I can really attest to that too With using schedule fly . At Sweet Cow , I had a background in writing schedules with Excel , right , same thing that you're saying earlier . Grab a piece of POS receipt paper . Staffs handed them to me left and right right , taking them in the office , putting them in my sheet at the end of the days make sure I wouldn't take them home with me and wash them or forget them and moved on to hot schedules .

Christin Marvin 16:54

When I worked for snooze , we worked with hot schedules for a little bit , and then working with you at schedule fly , you know we didn't need a lot of support , which I love because the system is so simple and whenever I would need anything , you know , steve was like I'm going to email Will and I'd see the emails come through right , and you were just so quick to respond . And I think you know , even though I saw those emails , we were with you during the ransomware attack and I just have to say that that was such a moment . I think that spoke to your culture and how much you care about your customers and how available you are , because I can only imagine that that was hell . I can't remember if it was four to six weeks or how long it was , and that went on .

Wil Brawley 17:39

It seemed like four to six months , it was 12 days , it was 12 days .

Christin Marvin 17:42

Oh my God , it seemed like so long for us too .

Wil Brawley 17:44

Oh , I bet it did .

Christin Marvin 17:46

The team was like what's your schedule going to be of what's your schedule , you know ? And so we didn't have . We had to go back to Excel and for just a short time and I didn't know who you were , who the team was at schedule fly , but you started producing videos that were being sent to us and in that moment it was like holy shit , there's real human behind this tech company , which you don't normally necessarily think . And you were so sincere and so genuine and you could feel through that video how much you cared about us and that you were working so hard to try to get us back up and running . And it wasn't about keeping us as a customer , it wasn't about you know , hey , we'll discount you , or you know , whatever the case was . It was just truly about like , we're sorry , we're trying , we're here , know that we feel the pain that you're going through . And that was a really eye-opening moment for me working with schedule fly . So I really appreciated everything you guys did during that really challenging time .

Wil Brawley 18:49

Thank you , we have no PR team . We had no idea . I was like all I know to do is just talk to people Like I like to share and I like to communicate and I like to be authentic and open and just so . Yes , that was what we thought was the best thing to do is look at the camera and say , look y'all , I think this really freaking sucks , and it sucks for you . I mean ,

Positive Feedback and Lessons Learned

Wil Brawley 19:10

we woke up .

Wil Brawley 19:10

That day was January 1st 2022 . And I'm like , oh my God , I can't even imagine running a restaurant right now . And we're down and they're trying . It's New Year's Day . I was like , oh , I feel horrible for all of our customers . But you know , I got to tell you , kristen , what I learned . I've got chills right now thinking about this and what I learned about the people we serve . This is why this is why I already loved the people we serve and I loved our business and we had been doing the . I've been talking to people all these years .

Wil Brawley 19:39

But man , y'all showed up In such a positive way because I thought , justifiably , we probably have a lot of people calling us being like dude , well , you know F . You like we're screwed , like we're really having problems right now , because you , but we didn't . We had some , of course . 97% of the communication was we love you , we got your back , we're going to work through this , we'll use it , we'll go back , we'll go , we'll do it out . Like you know , we're here for you .

Wil Brawley 20:10

Man , I mean , I don't know how we would have gotten through that , like the mental fatigue of that was was , without that support . And I think that your industry the hospitality industry is , would be , would handle that better than any other group of customers there is , because that's what y'all do is you take care of people and you know that every day stuff happens , things go awry , and you're you're used to having to deal with that . So I was so blown away at how positive the feedback we got was , it was , it was a . I mean , I'll never forget it . I'll never forget that , and how , how that sustained . I mean , that sustained me , there's no doubt about it . I don't know how I would have gotten through it , millie , I think I had just a complete breakdown without the amount of absolute , abject , incredible support that y'all gave us .

Christin Marvin 21:07

So yeah , you get what you give . That was awesome . Yeah , well , I guess so .

Wil Brawley 21:11

Yeah , that's right .

Christin Marvin 21:14

What was the biggest gift that you , besides what you just talked about ? What was the biggest gift that the company really found coming out of that challenge ?

Wil Brawley 21:24

Well , I mean , look , you know it sucked but it made us better . I mean we're like bank level secure now , um , and we , we I think this was not the intent , but what you just said I , I mean , I still get people . I mean it's been almost two years and I'll be two years , it's . I get people that almost every week that when , like , they call , and I get the call and they're like I need to change my credit card or whatever , and then we'll do that , and then they're like they tell me the same thing you just said , which is God , when you know , when y'all had that ransomware thing , like we didn't , we didn't , we had no idea , it was just a small .

Wil Brawley 22:03

I think it was just made us relatable Like cause , we are just a small team and we serve small teams and and so I think that built this level of um , this bond with our customers , that probably would never would have had to that degree had that not happened . So that was this weird positive outcome where people were like you know , we love these guys and we're sticking with them , um , because they're not this big VC backed company where it doesn't really matter , and you know big , you know like this is their livelihood and I think they saw that and I think a lot of people um gained a level I don't know camaraderie with us that we probably wouldn't have otherwise .

Christin Marvin 22:46

Yeah , I mean , it's so refreshing when you're an operator and you're moving in a million miles an hour and you've got a tech problem .

Christin Marvin 22:54

You just want to get that fixed as fast as possible because it creates a bottleneck in your business that is out of your control and is very stressful for you , for the , for the employees and the guests , right , and it's so refreshing to be able to not have to send an email and then it will start a ticket and you know , or do an online chat with somebody or be on the phone for four hours on hold and I'm not exaggerating because and take yourself out of operations because you're just dealing with that one thing and you're hoping to speak to a human . So you definitely you know the , the simplicity in the systems that you have created are so important to managing the manager , stress and and and streamlining operations . So thank you for that from a firsthand experience . Would you share some of your client stories around how Schedule fly is helping retain helping restaurant owners retain their managers and employees ?

Wil Brawley 23:53

Well , you know , it's funny because it's been interesting . We've had all this money invested into these competitive tools over the last few years , so there are people that would move on and go to something else . Now we're starting to see there's this term of right-sizing your tech stack that you're starting to hear more and more of and we're starting to see people come back . I'll give you an example because it's real fresh . It's the episode I literally just posted , I think yesterday , with David Weeks . He's a Duncan franchisee . He also has nukes and barbarritos , but they the Duncan the franchisee and we have mostly independent restaurants . But we'll get these franchisees where they have autonomy and it may be Duncan or Jersey Mikes or whatever it is . He's been a customer a long time

Schedule Fly's Appeal & Importance of Trust

Wil Brawley 24:42

.

Wil Brawley 24:42

In this summary called it's like hey , man , I hate to do this , but they really want us to move to this new system . It's all integrated , it's all in one play . The siren song of integration is really appealing . It says we're going to have to leave you . I love you , but we're going to move to this new system . It's going to be a little bit more efficient . Then he calls me three or four weeks , I guess will we turn you off two months ago . How do we come back ? I'm like , oh , you guys want to come back . When do you want to go ? As soon as possible ? Is it going to take a few weeks ? Do we have to build ? I was like , no , do you want me to turn you on right now ? He's like , oh , my God , you should . I literally just turned their account back on .

Wil Brawley 25:25

He's like you're not going to believe this , but we had a GM meeting and our head of operations came to me and said look , one of the topics today is we all want to go back to schedule fly . We want it back , and the employees want it back . They don't want to be dealing with this other stuff . It's complicated . It makes their life harder . They love schedule fly . It's easy , it's simple . That's what they want . That's what we want . David Weeksley he's like well , that's what I want too . Let's do it , my point being that we focus on the end user experience . We want schedule fly to be simple and reliable and just not something you have to think about . You shouldn't be spending a ton of time in schedule fly trying to manage things and do things . That's what he said they were doing with the other stuff . They spent all their time just dealing with the tool , with schedule fly . It ought to be like boom , boom , quick , simple . I don't need anybody to tell me what to do . We've never done a training session .

Wil Brawley 26:22

To answer that question , I can confidently say if you hand or you put a schedule fly in front of an employee that has used us and picked your competitors , I won't say that . Whatever All the other well-known names you say , which one do you want to use ? We're going to let y'all choose , not what we choose at the top , because we need seven , eight , nine times out of 10 . I put my money , they'll choose schedule fly . I say that because , anecdotally , I hear that all the time . We don't even want to leave schedule fly because everybody loves it . Now we got to go to this more complicated thing , but it's all tied together in our POS and blah , blah , blah , blah blah . Give them the choice , they'll choose schedule fly . We work well in cultures where they want their employees to be really happy and have what they need . They defer to them to help make these decisions versus forcing something on them .

Christin Marvin 27:19

I would say that the ease of the system has really I appreciated it managing seven locations six to seven locations with Sweet Cow because it was so easy for the managers to write a schedule , look at the report to see where their labor was being distributed , how new employees in . They could spend more time and energy on the floor with their guests and with their team , which is what they really wanted to do at the end of the day . The staff loved the communication tool . We could rapid fire messaging out like hey , there's a schedule change tonight . Hours are changing , there's an issue . During the pandemic we were messaging every single day and it was just such an important tool for us to use . Yeah , thank you , the managers loved it .

Wil Brawley 28:02

Of course , you talked a little bit earlier , but tell me who was scheduled to find not for Well , look , our biggest customers have 15 to 20 locations and some of them , quite frankly , probably use Schedulefly , when maybe , theoretically , they may well have . In some ways they're probably using it even though they could use something else that may make things more efficient . I don't know . Like Big Red F , dave and Dana , they've been a customer for over a decade now . Most places like that get to a point where they're putting all things into one place and integrations and all this kind of stuff . But this is what I talk about is like we're the right fit when you have a culture of trust and autonomy and appreciation for who you do business with . What I mean is they could say there oh well , it's not integrated with our point of sale . We want it to be because we want to systemically prohibit people from clocking in early and with Schedulefly . If you need that , that's fine . But then when you have a culture of really tight-knit people who are bought into what you're doing and trust , you don't have to systemically prevent them from clocking in early . You coach them on why and we , with transparency of the numbers and where the money comes and goes and how it flows , that they understand like , hey , we're all clocking in early , we're clocking out late , we're kind of taking advantage of the system and then we're all going to collectively suffer from that . So why don't we police that ourselves , versus having that and then having ? Well , then you have somebody that needs to come in early because the manager , and then they got to stop what they're doing and go in there and keep the like . Our customers , that's how they roll and that's a very trusting culture where they're not relying on technology to dictate people's behavior . Does that make sense ? It does . That's who we work well with . And there's a point where you probably like I'll put it to you this way we knew this early enough that I bet it was . I'd have to look at the year I bet it was 2009 or 10 , I wrote a blog post and it was titled why we Walked Away From $250,000 in a Million Headaches . And this was early . We weren't even probably doing $250,000 . I'm sure we weren't in revenue at that point per year .

Wil Brawley 30:44

And we had a person who was familiar with Schedule Fly , that was part of a chain of restaurants and was called , and was like I really want to put Schedule Fly in and it would have been like $250,000 a year , and I was like , oh , that's pretty cool , maybe we could do this . And then you know we talked and Wes is like you know , they're never going to stay with it , we're never make them happy , they'll always want more , they'll always . And then we'll be in their back pocket . And so called the guy back the next day and I was like dude , we're not going to like , we don't want your business . He's like what do you mean ? I'm like you should call Hot Schedules Like that's what they're for . Like we don't do that , we don't want to do that . He could .

Wil Brawley 31:21

I mean I think the guy paused for like 30 seconds before he said another word . He was so surprised but , like , we knew we're not going to make those people happy and that's not what we want to do . We want to serve people that , you know , just want something simple and love their team . And , quite frankly , chris and like , people outgrow us a lot of times . They get so top down and corporate that the people that were there when it was fun and small and trust they leave , they go down the street , they go to the restaurant that's on Excel and they're like hey , we need a schedule installation and they're like I know one . And then they go to the schedule .

Christin Marvin 31:54

Yeah , I mean , I've been a part of that Aloha rollout where you couldn't allow people to clock in five minutes before the shift or after , and rolling that out was to think about it now makes me want to throw up , because it's not . It's not an easy sell to the team and the message that it sends is , like you said , we is one of lack of trust , which is really hard when people have been working for you for five , seven , you know , plus years , and I love that you , I love that you said no . I've heard a couple of stories of people saying I've said no to a big client and walked away from a huge financial , you know , game changer for us . But an important part of your culture is knowing when to say no and I love that you are protecting that .

Wil Brawley 32:37

Oh , we've said no a million times to I mean particularly in the . It's tapered off now , but for years and years and years . It'd be like I think I wrote another blog post one time , like you know we said yes once a week , you know , to just one little tweak or one little change , one little like just a couple lines of code , and now we have another checkbox or something like that . You say once , once a week , you know , 52 times a year . And then five years later , we have 260 new bells , whistles , features , changes buttons . And now , all of a sudden , this simple thing that was so easy to use that you didn't even need training on , is , like , so complicated . You're just going out , you know , and what are you doing ? Well , now I'm going to go look for a simple solution . This is too much , and so , yeah , saying no has been very important to our ethos .

Christin Marvin 33:32

Yeah , I love it . Well , I want to give you know I know we've got a couple minutes left here want to give you an opportunity to tell people how to find you , but also share with listeners what's next for Schedulefly . How are you going to continue to keep taking care of those customers ?

Wil Brawley 33:48

Yeah , excellent . Well , we're going to keep doing a lot of the same . I mean , one of the things that we have done differently or not done differently , but we've really started to . We kind of had our heads down below the radar for a long time . The last year or two I've really started to lean into LinkedIn and get to know other companies and we're now like really good friends with and partnering in some form or capacity with companies like Pop Menu and Kickfen , and we've been doing , you know , just trying to build relationships with other companies that serve the same types of customers , that also provide a great product and this is the most important part great customer service and take excellent care of their customers . And so we're real particular about who we build those relationships with . But when we validate them and we , we , you know , we lean into those relationships and try to help them and they try to help us .

Wil Brawley 34:41

And you know , I mean , awareness is our biggest issue . Like it's just in a weird way , it's harder than ever to create awareness because there's so much noise and so much stuff out there and people are getting hit with so many different types of technology . So we just try to find other channels like this and thank you for the opportunity to let people know that we exist and they can find us at scheduleflightcom and they can call myself and you gave it out . I'll give it again at 7049062031 . We it's on the free trial signup page . If you go to scheduleflightcom and click free trial , there's my name , there's my number . Call anytime .

Wil Brawley 35:16

I love talking about our business . If we're not the right fit , I'll tell you where else you can look . You know , and yeah , that's , that's it , and we'll just kind of keep doing what we're doing . Oh , I will say this this is new . This is the first place we've said this . We have an app in the app store for the first time ever . 16 years we never had an app in the app store . We have one now . It uh , we we've had a mobile friendly website for a long time . Now we have an app too . So if you want the app , go download it . It's in the app store .

Leadership in the Restaurant Industry

Christin Marvin 35:44

You heard it here first , I love it .

Wil Brawley 35:45

You heard it here first . That sounds like two days ago .

Christin Marvin 35:47

Seriously , thanks for letting the cat out of the bag . Well , congrats . Well , thanks again . So much for being here . I would love to have you back and talk more about leadership , development and routines and boundaries and culture and all that good stuff .

Wil Brawley 35:58

So , let's stay in touch and let's get you introduced to some of our customers that you'd like to work with and maybe , um you know , could use your help .

Christin Marvin 36:04

I appreciate it . All right , everybody , subscribe and listen each week wherever you find your podcast and be sure to follow me on LinkedIn at Kristen dash Marvin and subscribe to the restaurant solutions newsletter for restaurant leadership tips . Take care , everybody . Talk to you soon .