Jordan Boesch Founder & CEO of 7shifts

#45 In this episode, our host sits down with Jordan Boesch, the founder and CEO of 7shifts, a leading workforce management software catering to the restaurant industry.

With over a decade of experience in revolutionizing team management, Jordan shares insights into the inception and growth of 7shifts. Having originally encountered the software while vetting it for Aurify Brands, Josh Sharkey emphasizes the genuine admiration for Jordan's leadership and the impactful solutions his company provides to over 50,000 restaurants.

Delving into Jordan's background as a software engineer turned entrepreneur, the conversation explores the parallels between engineering and building a tech company, drawing intriguing comparisons to the culinary world. They discuss the importance of transitioning from hands-on involvement to empowering teams—a challenge both in software development and restaurant operations.

Product development takes center stage as they delve into the nuances of user experience and adoption, highlighting Jordan's success in crafting a user-friendly platform tailored for restaurant operators. The discussion extends to the distinction between features and platforms, echoing Jordan's recent insights on the value proposition and scalability of each approach.

Throughout the episode, Jordan's candid demeanor and no-nonsense approach make for an engaging and enlightening conversation. Join us as we unravel the journey of 7shifts and explore the evolving landscape of workforce management with Jordan Boesch. Tune in for an insightful dialogue that promises to inspire and inform, only on The meez Podcast!

Where to find Jordan Boesch: 

• LinkedIn

Where to find host Josh Sharkey:

• Instagram
• LinkedIn

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In this episode, we cover:

(05:13) MONTRÉAL EN LUMIÈRE
(07:18) Jordan's Boesch's background
(09:47) The benefits and the downside of being a technical co-founder versus someone that is not
(23:00) Coding and how to get started learning how to code
(28:27) Frameworks used in 7shifts to collect feedback
(32:07) Capturing the qualitative piece for the end user
(36:33) Knowing your own strengths
(38:27) Using AI in 7shifts
(44:55) Applying the 11 star experience to 7shifts
(47:56) How Jordan is different today vs. 5 years ago
(51:45) Trusting your gut as a leader
(56:50) The parallels behind what makes you the angriest and your personal values

Transcript

[00:00:00] Josh Sharkey: 

You're listening to season two of The meez Podcast. I'm your host, Josh Sharkey, the founder and CEO of meez, a culinary operating system for food professionals. On the show, we're going to talk to high performers in the food business. Everything from chefs to CEOs, technologists, writers, investors, and more about how they innovate and operate and how they consistently execute at a high level.

[00:00:23] 

Day after day, and I would really love it if you could drop us a five star review anywhere that you listen to your podcast. That could be Apple, that could be Spotify, could be Google. I'm not picky, anywhere works, but I really appreciate the support. And as always, I hope you enjoy the show.

[00:00:44] 

Hello everyone. Today's guest is the founder and CEO of 7shifts. 7shifts is a workforce management software. They do scheduling, they do tip pools, really anything you can think of related to managing your team in the hospitality industry, in restaurants. Jordan Boesch founded the company about just over 10 years ago.

[00:01:05] 

And I met him originally when I was actually vetting the software for a company that I was helping to run called Aurify Brands. And it was awesome back then. And fast forward 10 years, they have, I think, over 40,000 restaurants that they serve. And Jordan is an incredible operator. I want to make it clear, by the way, just because Uh, this season, there's a number of CEOs of food technology companies that I'm interviewing.

[00:01:27] 

And just to be crystal clear, none of them are sponsoring the podcast. None of them have paid to be on this show. I just really respect and admire, uh, the companies that they're building, the product that they're building, and most importantly, uh, the people and their leadership. So, Jordan in particular, I really love his leadership style and his approach to building companies.

[00:01:49] 

What's really cool and something that we dig into in the episode is he's an engineer by trade before he became an entrepreneur, a software engineer. And I find it really interesting the parallels between being an engineer and starting a technology company and being a chef or an operator and starting a restaurant.

[00:02:05] 

And of course, there's so much advantage and value to being able to build the thing that you're selling in the beginning and it's really helpful early on and I think it can become a blocker as you grow if you don't figure out how to sort of promulgate your, your vision and let other people start to do the thing that you do and let them do it through your sort of lens and be able to step back and it can become a disadvantage if you don't figure out how to do that.

[00:02:33] 

I think Jordan has done it really well. And I think the same thing applies in restaurants, right? If you're a chef, if you're an operator, eventually you need to be able to step back and let your team do it well. So we talk about that. We talk about product a lot because him and I both have a deep love for product, specifically user experience and really adoption, user adoption.

[00:02:54] 

And what I mean is the customer's ability to intuitively start using your product really quickly and getting joy and value out of it right away. And it's really difficult to build products like this. And I think Jordan has done an incredible job of building a product that you small restaurant operators without a lot of time are able to pick up and start using right away.

[00:03:16] 

We also talk a bit about difference between features and platforms only because I think like a day before we recorded this, Jordan had posted something about it. And I am really fascinated about the sort of the difference between, you know, companies that build one specific tool versus platforms that have many tools and create an ecosystem where you can layer on

[00:03:39] 

tools from other products and integrate them. And both of them are really incredible. Both notions are adding value, but I think platforms clearly create far more enterprise value and allow sort of the customer to be far more embedded in your product. Jordan has been doing a lot of work to grow his company from a really, really fascinating and powerful tool for scheduling your team into this platform for all things workforce management.

[00:04:06] 

Hope I'm saying that word. I apologize, but that's what I think of when I think of 7shifts. Anyways, Jordan is a no BS guy. So this was a really easy conversation to have and also just really enjoyable. So as always, I hope that you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

[00:04:28] Jordan Boesch: 

So, Josh, how are you, man? 

[00:04:30] Josh Sharkey:

Doing well, doing well. Where are you coming from? 

[00:04:31] Jordan Boesch:

Saskatoon. My hometown. 

[00:04:34] Josh Sharkey: 

That's good. Might have to talk a little bit about Canada today. We'll see. 

[00:04:37] Jordan Boesch: 

Yeah, happy to. We got a nice view, uh, well, it's like the view of downtown here. It's kind of brown. I thought it was on the other side. I don't know if you can see the river. There's a river down there.

[00:04:45] Josh Sharkey: 

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, I see a bridge and then I see the other water underneath. How far is Saskatoon from Toronto? and a half hour flight. Oh, gotcha. So it's, is it like middle of the country, West Coast? Right in the middle. Oh, got it. Cool. Most of my time has been spent in Toronto and, and Montreal.

[00:05:02] 

I spend a lot of time in Toronto, but I never actually been to the West Coast or, or anywhere outside of Montreal and, and some Quebec area. 

[00:05:10] Jordan Boesch: 

Yeah, we're in Toronto as well, but um, yeah, why Montreal?

[00:05:13] Josh Sharkey: 

I was a chef most of my, my career and there's a festival in Montreal called the Festival Lumiere and it's really big.

[00:05:21] 

You might have been before they do, it's like a week long thing and they have like maple in the snow and as it relates to culinary, there's all these chefs from around the world that come and we like, we'll take over another kitchen. Oh, cool. And we get their kitchen for, you know, a day, two days, whatever it is.

[00:05:37] 

And, and we do like a tasting menu together. So I would go there with, I was working with this chef named Gray Kunz. And we would go and, you know, take over a kitchen. And it was, it was awesome. And, and just spend time in Montreal. Great city. Always eat at Au Pied de Cochon And, you know. I freaking love it. 

[00:05:51] Jordan Boesch: 

Yeah, I love it. Out of all the airports, it's like the only airport that I visit where I'm like, Oh, it's actually like good food that they serve here. Cause they're so, it's like home cooked meals they have at the airport. Like what airport just has like a cafe that has like home cooked meals. Like, none.

[00:06:05] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah. I know. Just sort of, representative of Montreal. It's one of my favorite cities. And the food is just sooo good. I mean there's so many good restaurants. And I mean, Au Pied de Cochon is probably my favorite. It's just close to my heart because I, it was the first time I ever went to Montreal. I went, I ate there, and now I eat there every time I go.

[00:06:22] Josh Sharkey: 

But there's so many. I will say though! I'm curious to ask you, Montreal bagels versus New York bagels. 

[00:06:29] Jordan Boesch: 

No dude, I'm the wrong person to ask. I don't even like bagels and I like never eat them. Really? Like I have them but not very often. They're like, I eat the frozen bagels that come from Costco. So like. 

[00:06:38] Josh Sharkey: 

Do you eat Thomas’ bagels?

[00:06:39] Jordan Boesch:

I have no idea what that is. 

[00:06:40] Josh Sharkey: 

So it's funny because I live in New York so I love bagels but there's, I grew up in Virginia and there's not a lot of bagels there but there's this. Thomas’ is a company that makes English muffins. And they also make, you probably see, I guarantee you've seen them. They also make these little bagels and they're terrible, but they're delicious.

[00:06:58] 

You know, you get them in the, you know, they can be frozen or in the, or in the, in the refrigerator aisle. And they're like, you know, they're not a good bagel, but they're good, you know, and you like put them in the freezer and you toast them and put some cream cheese on. Anyways, welcome to the show. Stoked to have you.

[00:07:10] 

I, obviously, I know a ton about your background, but maybe just for anyone that doesn't, just a little, you know, 50,000 foot view of, of, of Jordan.

[00:07:18] Jordan Boesch: 

Yeah, of course. So my background, I grew up working for my dad who ran some Quiznos locations. where I'm from, which is in Saskatchewan. I taught myself how to code to build something really small to try and help him manage staff.

[00:07:34] 

And I just fell in love with coding and programming. And then I moved out east to take part in a multimedia diploma program and learned a lot, continue to build websites, had my own. Side job where I where I built sites and did some consulting and eventually I landed an opportunity to work at a web agency in downtown Ottawa, where I built a bunch of WordPress sites and just got to learn from some really great and smart people and all the while I was when I was working at this agency, I would just go home.

[00:08:09] 

After my job was done, and I would just work on set on what is now 7shifts in my spare time. I just loved building things, creating things. I would recode certain things. I would redesign aspects of the scheduling app that I had built and trying to help my dad with and open it up to the world. And then people started signing up and going into the product.

[00:08:31]

And so that's, that's a little bit of my background and kind of what led to 7shifts. Just honestly, it was just from a love of coding. And trying to solve a pain point and just the thrill of engineering something, it's, it's really innate in me. 

[00:08:48] Josh Sharkey: 

It's so interesting that you're, you're, you're a technical co-founder and you're doing what you love. And it's also something that you're actively, you know, you can, you can build. I think about, I was a chef my whole life and a restaurant owner. Never, you know, wrote one line of code ever and started building meez and I, I love what I do, but man, like if I could actually just jam out, you know, with some headphones on and start, you know, building another feature that I want, you know, I'm sure the feeling is just incredible.

[00:09:17] 

I'm really curious your fast forward, you know, I don't know how many years, how long it's been? About 10 years now. Yeah. So, you know, we think about in restaurants, right? You have a bunch of folks that try to open restaurants and they don't know anything about. Running a restaurant and sometimes they're actually good at it, right?

[00:09:31] 

You know, they may, maybe they have a finance background or operations background and they understand you in economics. They understand people, you know, they understand, you know, op ex enough to, to, to be able to do it well, or they understand marketing or something, but typically it's hard if you don't, if you don't know how to.

[00:09:47] 

You know, how a restaurant runs and, and just with the day-to-day of like how it works, but it's not quite the same in the tech world, but there's definitely some similarities. Like what, what do you think about the benefits and, and, and the downside of being a technical co-founder versus someone that is not?

[00:10:04] Jordan Boesch: 

I think there's a lot, there's a lot of benefits to being a technical co-founder, I would say. Especially when. Your product is so innately technical, right? I mean, you're like you said, for, you know, if you're a chef and you know, starting a company and having that context is super is so valuable. I think being a technical co-founder is is nice because as you're building it, you're still you're still working on it pretty deeply.

[00:10:29] 

So you have this. Intimate desire to make something work and you can actually affect change by by using your skills to to affect change and continue to build now it's at certain points. As we grow our business, it meant me getting more and more out of the code, probably similar to, you know, if you're like having a large scale restaurant and you're like, you started on the floor and then you hire other folks and maybe you take on a management role and you're starting to scale and maybe you're doing less of that thing that was required in the early days to get it off the ground.

[00:11:03] 

And so we were probably about 30 people. When I probably stopped coding and it was it was kind of gradual, but I think that. What's been really valuable is as we brought in more smart and competent people to help on the engineering front to build out 7shifts is I have a lot of context, especially early days as it related to having questions about certain things and helping people wrap up quicker because you can download a lot of knowledge into their brains.

[00:11:33] 

And I also think even at the scale we are now, which is a little over 300 people being able to ask questions and have. Opinions on things because, you know, roughly enough of how to speak the language of what these people are working on. So there is this kind of trust element that they have. Where you're not just, you're not coming down and you have no context and no sort of background to speak to them in a way you have that background.

[00:11:59] 

You can ask those questions and through that builds more trust and it stretches people's thinking as well. So I think that marriage of. Being able to be technical and just the way I almost think of it is is just dangerous enough to pose those questions and push teams in a healthy way is really valuable.

[00:12:21] 

And I think the same applies for as you scale other departments that you're having to oversee, right? So if you think of partnerships, if you think of sales, if you think of support, it's not that you need to be the expert in all of those things, but you should know enough. That you can screen and hire the best people and empower them and challenge their thinking and support them as you build the company.

[00:12:46] 

So I think, yes, kind of going back to me being a technical co-founder, I think, I think it comes back in a lot of ways to think of the engineering exercise of building something. And if you really think about it, building a company is a large engineering exercise. You're solving problems and your, your gears are turning and things fall out of place and you're putting them back together.

[00:13:12] 

It's a bit of a puzzle and at times and it feels like a bunch of gears at times because certain things turn and they have outputs over here. So to me, it's I still get that gratification of building because at the end of the day, even if I'm not coding, I'm still building. This is still an engineering exercise for me.

[00:13:30] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah. I love that. I, I feel like it's a different, it's a different benefit in the beginning, like if you're trying to get it, at least as it relates to a, well, in any, in any business, whether if it's an, if it's a technical company, a software business, for example, being a technical co-founder, you're going to build something much faster, find some sort of value much quicker.

[00:13:47] 

And in terms of like crossing the chasm, that early part of crossing the chasm, you're going to, you know, it's, You're much more beneficial in the beginning. And then, and that's the same thing, by the way, in a restaurant. Like if you are a chef where you've run restaurants a long time, the beginning part, getting it started, you know, understanding how to build those systems is really, is really helpful.

[00:14:03] 

Then it can become dangerous if you don't figure out how to step away and how to lead and, you know, like Marshall, a team to do that the same way that you would. But as an engineer specifically, I totally agree. There's a, I think the biggest skill set of an incredible engineer is the ability to You know, eloquently solve problems efficiently, like what's the least amount of code I can write to solve this thing without, you know, with the least amount of complexity.

[00:14:29] 

And I find that, you know, with engineers is a really beautiful skill that, that applies to so many things in, in business. And it's definitely a different mindset than, for instance, like a, a founder that's a marketing founder or a sales founder. It was just a different approach. 

[00:14:43] Jordan Boesch: 

Yeah, everyone's going to have their own flavors. And I think that even if you think of. Even as an engineer, I've worked with a lot of engineers because I was one and there is at times a tendency to over engineer things. And I think just having some technical knowledge as a co-founder, you can spot those more easily. You can say like, okay, well, your plan is X.

[00:15:05] 

Well, let's do Y. What about that? Like, help me understand the trade offs. Here are the trade offs I would perceive. And then you have a discussion and you're actually talking the same language, which is, I think, very helpful. 

[00:15:16] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah, we're going to talk about it a little bit later, just in terms of some, some frameworks, but you know, I'm curious as somebody who started their career as a, as a developer, right, and now you do a lot of other things.

[00:15:27] 

You know, the beautiful thing about being a founder of any company, to your point, you're forced to learn so many things. It's really fun, right? You get to learn all these things that you would maybe not have known. You know, about in terms of marketing or sales or, you know, success or support. But coding is one of these things that, you know, applies to so many things in life.

[00:15:44] 

Like I, I use chat GPT now to build like applications for tracking my, you know, ketone levels and things like that. And I didn't have to know any code, but I didn't even know before how to. Where to put code? What is a terminal? What do I, how do I actually put this into a website? Any of those things. Like, do you think now, you know, with language models and things that more people can learn to do simple things to solve simple problems in their life?

[00:16:09] Jordan Boesch: 

Yeah, I think there's, there's a lot of, there's a growing amount of tools out there that I have seen where you're leveraging more of a user interface. Like a good UI to kind of build things and under the hood, it's writing the code. And I think those are really exciting and useful and helpful in a lot of ways.

[00:16:29] 

I do think there's such immense value, though, in understanding what's behind them. If you have the interest and if you require the depth at some point in your life to kind of warrant that, I just think it's such an extremely valuable thing. And I think the same way. The same way we are, our kids are learning things in school about the planet or.

[00:16:54] 

You know, my son just learned a bunch about outerspace and and he's telling me things and and it's exciting for him. I think there's such an opportunity to help kids think in a different way. And I think coding is a really valuable exercise. That we should, I believe that all people could benefit from even if it's just doing it a bit in school, like if it was offered as part of the regular curriculums, and I know it is in some schools, but it's definitely not widespread.

[00:17:24] 

But I do think there's such an immense value to understanding the inner workings of things to help you think through problems and be able to solve problems in your own life. 

[00:17:33] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's funny. There's a there's a book I read every year and it's probably the book I recommend the most to everyone called the mythical man month and It was recommended to me by a really incredible engineer who's built some really incredible companies And when he when he recommended to me, I was like, why would I ever read this book?

[00:17:49] 

It's about You know, well, it's, it's essentially about like features versus systems and the exponential increase in time it takes to build a system versus a feature and linear tasks and things, but it obviously like it's written by an engineer and digs into the, I mean, it's an old book, it's like 27 years old.

[00:18:08] 

But it's still completely relevant today and I read it every year because it helps me look at the organization and understand like, okay, how are we scaling? Are we understanding the way in which we'll be able to continue to scale and how much of what we do is linear versus not? And it's so funny.

[00:18:23] 

It's funny because the beginning of the book, there's a reference to cooking and, and that's what that got me to stick with reading the rest of the book. But there's so many things that are analogous to engineering that we can apply to, you know, the rest of the things that we do, but I'll be honest, it's so daunting.

[00:18:38] 

To think about how would you get started learning how to code because one, there's so many languages, like what language should you learn and is that language going to be obsolete in five years? And by the way, I have no idea, but I'm just curious, like if someone was going to, I was going to say, like, start, I want to start learning how to code and not just use a, a, a language model and I don't have, I have two kids, you have kids, you know, like our time is limited. What's the best way to, to start? 

[00:19:06] Jordan Boesch: 

There's good sites out there, I'm not sure if, I think there's Khan Academy, Udemy are some websites that come to mind for people that just want to get started. Like there's enough out there where you can, folks can use Google and find out how they can learn some basics pretty quickly.

[00:19:23] 

So I would probably start there and see if it's something that interests you. Like if, if you do the courses and it interests you, there's a, there's an ability to go further. 

[00:19:32] Josh Sharkey: 

Is there a language that is, like, do you have to start on one coding language, or is it, is it sort of universal when you get started?

[00:19:40] Jordan Boesch: 

I don't know. I mean I think we wrote seven, 7shifts in one language. There's a lot of languages now and a lot of frameworks. And so I'm not entirely sure. I've been, I've been out of that realm for a little bit, but 

[00:19:54] Josh Sharkey: 

You actually posted something, I don't know when it was, maybe a day or two ago, about something I think about a lot, which is like features versus platforms and the defensibility of a platform versus a feature.

[00:20:03] 

And It's a really difficult thing, you know, to build a platform that actually becomes a platform, right, where, where people want to, you know, build an ecosystem around it. And in that post, you talked about why, you know, features can be replicated, and especially nowadays, they can be replicated quicker. But you didn't talk about any other platforms, obviously 7shifts is one, but are there other platforms? That you love that you admire that you think are really like a sauna and you know, 

[00:20:28] Jordan Boesch: 

I think there's there's the obvious ones that we use day to day right slack is very seamless like you don't ever feel like that's getting in your way or things annoy you I think they've done a really great job. I also think great B2B products like Shopify

[00:20:42] 

have done a great job with making something really simple, but also behind the scenes building on a really great platform and having a very good technical vision and executing against that around how partner apps integrate within the ecosystem and how they get exposure and how they get used. I think Shopify has just done a really great job on the retail side to

[00:21:01] 

to kind of empower merchants and empower a huge network of developers to build on their platform. Another one, because I'm more technical and it's more just thinking through great APIs and ways to integrate with other products. I think Stripe has done a really great job creating a very seamless experience for taking payments over the internet.

[00:21:20] 

And then they've got a slew of other products now that they've, they've built on and really accelerated. So I think that's very exciting. But yeah, those are a few that come to mind.

[00:21:28] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah. There are times I think when product that's just a feature works really well, like Miro, for example, is really, I mean, there are things that are sort of platform esque about it, but it's pretty much a, you know, it's a whiteboarding software, but it's pretty great, you know, what do you think it is about a singular product or a singular feature type product that can still be evergreen versus some that, that, that end up just getting eaten up or acquired or, or copied?

[00:21:53] Jordan Boesch: 

I think the best products just generally are. They kind of, they're, they're doing a few things. They innovate, so they're doing something generally not completely new, but they have like a different spin on maybe something that was already existing or they've taken ideas and aspects from other products and kind of merged it together.

[00:22:11] 

So I think that these products at their core are just very simple. They kind of address the core need. They are high, they have a great user experience. It's predictable in terms of how I need to use it. And it feels very familiar. And I think that all of these little, these little nuances around, again, it comes back to solving the customer's pain points, but it's just, it's so, there's so much detail around the execution that is so critical.

[00:22:43] 

And I think the best products just really capture that. And it is a feeling like it's, it's hard to just say it's one thing. It's like a feeling you get when you use an incredibly great product. And For instance, how many times have you, you're using a product that you just love and, and someone's like, Oh, what's, what is that?

[00:23:04] 

And you're like, Oh, just look at this. And you kind of like show it to them. And you're, you're not like, Oh, I just like that. I can do this. And you're like, you kind of want to show them and you want, you almost want them to have that same experience you were experiencing. And so again, it's not typically about just one little thing.

[00:23:21] 

It's, it's about like the combination of things. And even if it is a product that just has one core feature, it's, it's all of those things behind the feature that. Make it so valuable and easy and evoke that emotion. 

[00:23:33] Josh Sharkey: 

I totally agree. It's a little bit intangible, but I think. At least for me, part of it is, you know, in terms of this UX and the feeling is adoption.

[00:23:42]

Like, how quickly can you just pick this thing up and start using it, right? Like, what is the, what's the barrier to entry to just understand how to do this thing? And I think, especially in the restaurant business, you know, with restaurants, they move so fast and there's, there's not a lot of time to, to spend on, on anything really.

[00:24:00] 

It's funny, people always say chefs. You know, don't understand how to use software. I don't think that's true at all. I think they just don't have, they won't spend any more time than is absolutely necessary to just start using it. And same thing with any, any, any restaurant operator. And yeah, I just, I think adoption is everything.

[00:24:13] 

And I think a lot about that with 7shifts, honestly, because you guys have an incredibly lead driven product, right? You can just start picking, you can pick up. 7shifts and start using it right away, which is how I'm assuming a lot of people start using the product. But how do you think about the optimization of that adoption as they matriculate through, you know, the feature to the using it in the, in the restaurant to getting their whole team on to, to, to everything else that the platform does?

[00:24:41] 

What is it that you do? Are there tactics that you do to, to continually optimize for that adoption? 

[00:24:48] Jordan Boesch: 

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff that. I think it's at first important to note that that's really how 7shifts begun is really trying to build a product where people just could come in and use and sign up and pay without talking to someone, which was me at the time, because I was the only person and it's always been in our DNA to even early days look at.

[00:25:08] 

What made a customer successful? What things that they do? Why did they do them? At what point did they do them? And you almost like just carving out a basic happy path and what that looked like and try to implement and steer users, new users along that happy path that you've discovered and then you're just iterating from there.

[00:25:24] 

And so a lot of it comes down to, I think there's multiple aspects of it. And a lot of it is understanding why people came to you in the first place. And those might be different reasons. And so in the onboarding flow, we'll ask people why they came to 7shifts and what they were hoping to do. And, you know, in a very simple way that we're, and you're, you're trying to like not add too much friction, but just enough where you can get what you need to cater their experience to be that really great experience.

[00:25:53] 

And so. That's part of it. And then, and then making sure that your product is really simple and making sure they can do those things quick and easily. And so understanding our core segment, our restaurant operators, they do not have the time for anything. And so if there's any amount of confusion or friction within a product, it's kind of like you're dead in the water.

[00:26:15] 

So you have a small amount of time to capture the attention and show the value of the product that you're, you're building. And so it's really, it's really important that you understand that and you show them that as quick as possible and allow them to discover it. So I think it's easy to. And we're guilty of this too.

[00:26:34] 

at times. I think it's easy to not bite off the hard thing that you know needs to be done to really make it really simple. And it's easy to almost like build around the problem. So you're like, well, we don't have enough engineering resources to tackle this one issue, but we can do it. You know, use the marketing team to add a bunch of tooltips to say, go here and then go here and then click this and then do that.

[00:26:58] 

Well, I think again, you have to understand what's right and what the tradeoffs are for your business as you think about stuff like that. But we shouldn't forget the opportunity around really kind of solving the core root problems and not be afraid to invest in those to kind of get where we need to go.

[00:27:16] 

And so if you're, if you're thinking you want to stop gap for the next few weeks and you know, you'll tackle and take a bigger bite out of your resources in a. In a few weeks, and that's fine, too. But it comes back to a priority discussion with the team and figure out what makes sense. But I think it's important in any product led organization that you have to, you have to think about what are those true problems that you have to take a bigger bite of that are going to cost you more, but are going to pay off in the long run.

[00:27:41] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah that's difficult. I think the most difficult part about that is not necessarily how to solve the root problems, but what are the root problems, right? You have these, all these thousands of people coming into your product every day, right? And doing all these disparate things and asking. these certain questions or not asking questions or going here or going there.

[00:28:02] 

And you're trying to get them to that end result. It makes me think a lot about, you know, frameworks of how, of how we operate. And I'm sort of digging a couple of these. I'd love to get your insight on how you, how you go about them. And the first one is how do you collect feedback, right? So I'd love to know if you have any frameworks for this, because you talk about like solve the root problem, but let's just say you have a lot of people coming in to start building a schedule and they're not doing the thing that you want.

[00:28:27] 

What is it actually that's stopping them from doing it because those tooltips are band aids, right? The little things that you put everywhere, go here, do this, here's a product or they're band aids But you don't actually know, why aren't people going to this button? You know that they're not, but why? Are there frameworks that you use to collect feedback so that you make sure that it is objective and that its universal?

[00:28:47] Jordan Boesch: 

Yeah, I think there are ways to kind of diagnose that kind of stuff, but honestly We need to kind of empower folks to also just call out when things are bad. You don't need a framework to say like, Oh, it's hard to do that. And I think that to some extent with all the things that we have our own data and measuring every little thing, it's easy to just get caught in trying to measure every little thing.

[00:29:10] 

And I don't believe that that's productive. I think there are certain things to measure that we want, that you should try and understand. But I think starting with, Hey, like we've got, this is a core part of our product. People aren't doing the core part of our product of everyone in this room. If we just look at this and we use it, we all use it.

[00:29:30] 

Why is it hard and I bet you your team will go, wow, this sucks if it is actually not a great experience and they'll have some ideas right, right out of the gate. And then I think you can, like, have a discussion of how you tackle that, but I actually don't know that in, in some case it's helpful to, like, ask the customers, hey, why aren't you doing this thing that we want you to do?

[00:29:52]

But at the end of the day, like. If you use your own product, you kind of know what's hard to do because we all use great products, and we know what a great experience is like. So I'd almost start with like, what is not good today that we know about? And is it a big enough problem that we think this is worth tackling versus some of the other things?

[00:30:12] 

Now, I don't think it's, I think you should do other things in tandem to some degree of asking for feedback. And You know, looking at behaviors and using things like hot jar and using things like customer feedback and, you know, throwing that into asana and categorizing it and all that stuff is important, but I just think we need to use a little bit more gut as well within the products that we build.

[00:30:36] Josh Sharkey: 

Interesting thinking if I should reframe this question because I completely agree with you. I think part of what is difficult sometimes is typically it's not a room of engineers that go to solve a problem independent of feedback from customer success and sales team and your customers. And oftentimes, you know, we hear solutions, you know, I needed to do this.

[00:30:59] 

I needed to do that. And it's, it, for humans is, it is sometimes difficult to, to just get to the, what is the problem that you actually have, because a problem isn't, I don't know how to find this button. A problem is, my team is not being scheduled at the right time on Thursdays because of this thing. You know, or I don't know how to understand the best time for my team to be scheduled so that they feel comfortable with XYZ, right?

[00:31:28] 

They typically aren't going to tell you that. They're going to tell you something about your product. It's typically, the feedback you're getting is very specific to your product and not The problem at hand, because a team of engineers in a room will be using a product, but they're not in a restaurant scheduling, you know, that day they might be, but typically they're not.

[00:31:46] 

And the problem is typically much greater than, you know, why aren't they doing the thing that we want them to do in the product? It's, you know, the time that I have to schedule is from 11 to 12, and that's also when my dairy order comes in and my manager shift is at that same time. And you know, like that typically is sort of more, you know, dynamic of what, of what happens.

[00:32:07] 

And I'm curious if there's like, if there's some way that you're capturing the more qualitative piece of, of what's happening, you know, for the end user. 

[00:32:14] Jordan Boesch: 

Yeah, definitely. I think those are achieved through things like obviously support sales and different channels. But I think that more importantly, like.

[00:32:23] 

Once you've collected that, I think to your point around a lot of customers have solutions in their mind of like how they. I think it really comes down to really great product managers and designers just know how to ask the right questions to get to the root issues that are just sort of like they kind of cut through the noise of they cut through the noise of of a customer being like, hey, it needs to be solved this way.

[00:32:46] 

Like, okay, where, like, what are you experiencing? And why is that important to you? Tell me more. And they're asking questions that are great. Going to elicit like you're going to talk about the problem and then they're going to take that back to the team and they're going to try and work on the problem.

[00:33:01] 

They're not going to work on the solution for what the customer said is the solution. They're going to work on like, what do we as a product and design team think is the best solution, which is their job to do that really well. So hopefully. They can get that information and, and have a good idea of how to execute on that.

[00:33:21] Josh Sharkey: 

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[00:34:31] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah, I think like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, like, it's usually the question that's the hard thing. Not, you know, what's the right answer, but what is the right question to be asking? It's funny, I shadowed. You know, through our product managers doing interviews for, you know, some new, new products we're releasing.

[00:34:47] 

And, you know, we, we always run into a challenge of like, we're doing, you know, something that's with meez is that's such a net new experience of how it never existed digitally. And so the, the way in which it can be solved is sort of, there's myriad ways. And when I listened to a great product manager asking these questions, I'm like,

[00:35:04] 

Wow, I'm so glad I'm not the one asking these questions because I'm too close to the product and I have so many cognitive biases around the answer that they give and how I want to steer things because of what I believe. 

[00:35:18] Jordan Boesch: 

But I do think you can be helpful in other ways though, right? Like, even if there, you have a bias towards some things, I think you can still ask.

really great questions that test to see if your team is thinking about those things that you're thinking about. I think those are, those are important things. 

[00:35:32] Josh Sharkey: 

You know, I think that's the one balance I've found. I'm sure this relates to every business, but at least, you know, in the software world, like we have this vision of the world.

[00:35:40] 

I mean, this vision of this product and in the beginning we're doing everything right. And then over time you have to hire product managers and engineers and customer success folks and marketers that start talking about your vision and building your vision and organizing your vision. And Innately, some of those things start to get a little bit diluted and how do you balance, you know, being as involved as necessary, but no more, and still maintaining the vision and the first principles and the, and the reason why this thing started without preventing sort of the autonomy that's necessary for a team to do what they need to do to be successful.

[00:36:15] 

It's a big challenge. I'm curious, like you're, you're 10 years in now. Do you have any. Anything that you do to sort of help gauge as a barometer of like, okay, I'm, I'm a little too deep into this or I need to, or I need to get deeper into it or I need to step in and, you know, and make an executive decision, you know, versus not.

[00:36:33] Jordan Boesch: 

First of all, I think identifying your own strengths is really important. Versus where you're not strong. So like for me, I believe my strengths are more on the product end. So I tend to spend maybe more time there and the team hopefully, you know, if, if they agree, you know, finds it, finds it just as valuable when we collaborate.

[00:36:52] 

But you are constantly, you know, stress testing things by asking questions and learning and, and stretching thinking. But I think when you have really great people on the team. You know, they appreciate that and they want to do that because they want to get better as well. And I think that if you find yourself, like, you know, really having to always get folks, like, stretching their thinking over certain things that you just need them to have, again, it comes down to your expectations of the individual.

[00:37:22] 

If they're, are they meeting those expectations? Are they not? If you find yourself having to, like, do the work. For the job that you hired them for, that's obviously not a not a good position for you to be in. And you probably made a mishire. So I think that those are really important to identify because those are the one.

[00:37:37] 

Those are those are the instances where leaders get burnt out when they're spending an inordinate amount of time doing the job of the people that they hired to do the job. And oftentimes leaders are left with this feeling of, but it's my responsibility to make them successful. Like it's not you're you are accountable for that.

[00:37:58] 

thing and and and delivering it and helping set expectations and providing guidance around that function, but they have to meet you halfway to write like they've got to do the work and, you know, take the coaching and make the changes that they need to be successful. And so I think that if you ever feel like you're kind of pulling people through the mud, I think it's just a very clear sign that you may even had a misfire because you clearly don't trust that person enough. To let them be on their own and you want to build a team of people you can 

[00:38:27] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah, yeah, that's a difficult one. That's for sure. I'm going to diverge a little bit here because I wanted to talk a little bit about, and I promise we won't talk about this for a long time because it's so fucking cliche, but AI, when I first met you, I was

[00:38:43] 

Running a restaurant called Aurify Brands, I was the COO there, and we were looking at scheduling softwares to roll out to our, all of our brands. At the time we were using, I think the 365, you know, native. And then we moved to 7shifts, five guys use a different, a different platform. But I remember talking to you about, you know, predictive analytics and using machine learning.

[00:39:02] 

At the time, I believe you were using employee sentiment to sort of feed your model of the best. schedule for the next week, you know, I don't know if you're still doing that, meaning like the team would rate their shift and then that rating would go into the model that, you know, to, to understand like how effective was that shift?

[00:39:20] 

How productive was it? Uh, are you thinking about or using or leveraging AI more today than you were or machine learning? more today than you were back then? And what do you think is like still principles that are true today that were 10 years ago when you started this? And then obviously there was a bunch of paradigm shifts, but what's like the biggest, biggest change?

[00:39:40] Jordan Boesch: 

So we used machine learning pretty early on, like when we were, we were doing some testing with it. And I, back in the day, it was called a lot of people were scheduling using a method called activity based forecasting. So you sell X amount of products, you schedule X amount of people. So, We tinkered around with that, did some work on it, and then we moved to doing to leveraging more machine learning because we wanted to provide a solution that was really easy for people to create schedules without having to understand all the the depth of details around items and how many people weren't to be scheduled for items like for our core segment, like single unit operators.

[00:40:19] 

They don't understand that. And the vast majority of them anyway. And We wanted again to coming back to building an easy, simple product. We wanted to make it turnkey for them. And so we kind of met our solution was more meeting halfway of sorry, I'll back up at the end of the day. They really just cared about did I hit my labor target?

[00:40:42] 

Or whatever it was, what target I had, because if you ask all these operators who are obsessed with activity based forecasting, if you dig deeper and talking about people asking questions, dig deeper, why does that matter? Well, I want to get the right schedule. Okay, well, what does the right schedule look like?

[00:40:57] 

Oh, it looks like this at the end of the week. Great. So if we get you this by the end of the week, and it's this target and it's hit, do you care how you achieved it? Or do you care that you achieved it? And All of them were like, well, I care that I achieved it doesn't have to be through this activity formula.

[00:41:14] 

And so, okay, great. Because what happened. With activity based stuff is the VPs and the high level folks loved it, but the people on the floor didn't know how to use it or didn't trust it because that's not how they built schedules for their staff because there's other factors that corporate or the person that sits on high is not aware of.

[00:41:34] 

And so we wanted to build something where people we couldn't factor in the targets, but then also how managers typically build schedules and what people they have at certain times and why they have them at certain times. And so we came up with a model that that. built based off some machine learning algorithms of that built a schedule that was looked very similar to what they would do, but it created some optimizations around the edges and it achieved the labor targets.

[00:41:59] 

And while this was an exciting win, you know, I think that for us, it was built for, I think it was built ahead of its time a little bit. I think that more multi unit operators were very interested in this type of thing. And Our core segment was not that and it still isn't like we're 85 percent single unit independent operators and they're this kind of stuff is.

[00:42:23] 

Still scary to them. Like they're coming off of Excel. So I think that we need to be mindful of how we introduce things, the comfort level of the customer. How do you bridge them into this technology without making it scary? And I think that we're still not quite there yet. Like we're getting there, but it's a journey.

[00:42:41] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah, it's scary to trust the model. What you just said is exactly what I was alluded to before, is you might get 500 of the highest paying customers or prospects tell you, we need a better activity model. And your product team, if they're not doing the right, the right job, might say, let's go build a better activity model.

[00:43:00]

Uh, when the problem actually is, has nothing to do with the activity model, it has something to do with getting a schedule that meets, that meets your labor goals. And I think that's one of the beauties and challenges of, of, of building great product is, is getting to the, to the root of the problem. So I'm sure you're still using, you know, AI today, but what do you think, like if you think about the arc of like the, how people schedule, right?

[00:43:21] 

So it started with. Before spreadsheets, even just pen and paper, right, you had a bulletin board and you would just write, you would have a bulletin board, uh, with a calendar on it and you would just put people's names and then it became, you know, spreadsheets and, and then some really, really basic software and now you have software that can help you optimize your schedule and now you have platforms, you know, if you think about sort of that arc, like what is still the same today at its core about scheduling that you, that you make sure is, you know, really tight in, in 7shifts.

[00:43:53] 

And then separately, I don't know if you know, like the 11 star experience from, you know, from, uh, Airbnb. No, I haven't, I haven't heard of this. It's, it's a really, you know, it's this sort of exercise that Brian, the whole team sort of goes through often. I don't know if they still do it, but they were doing it a lot in the beginning where, you know, what does, you know, we know what a five star experience of the, of, uh, of an Airbnb experience looks like.

[00:44:14] 

Your key works. Right, the place is clean, it looks like what it was supposed to look like, you know, the, you know, the person that was there before is gone, you know, maybe there's some snacks in the fridge, and then that's a 5 star, and so like, you know, a 7 star would be, they've left your favorite chocolates, you know, on the table, and they sort of keep going forward, like, what is it, and the 11 star experience, you know, they You know, fly you in in a private jet and there's a parade with elephants waiting there and all of your favorite foods and your star your favorite, like, movie stars are there waiting for you when you get there and they've planned an entire evening for you and, you know, they walk through this pretty sort of, you know, you know, obviously like over the moon experience, but they use that as a framework to say, okay.

[00:44:55] 

This is the 11 star, you know, we're at the five star, there's a big delta here, but like, it helps you think through like, what could, you know, what could an experience look like if it was greater than a five star? I'm curious, both what is like the core part of like, you know, scheduling a team, that's, that's true today.

[00:45:11]

And what is the future look like for what you're giving to these customers? If you think through that lens of like 11 stars.

[00:45:18] Jordan Boesch: 

Yeah I think of what hasn't really changed is people just want to do something They just want to be fast, efficient and valuable. And when, especially when they're doing something like scheduling or labor management, like there's a lot of complexities and nuances around that.

[00:45:33] 

They just want it to be easy. They don't want to spend time here. They just want to get it done and over with and move on with their day. And so that really hasn't changed. And so delivering that experience is really core and important. What I think the future looks like as it relates to that 11 star experience is one where.

[00:45:52] 

It comes back to leveraging maybe some ML and AI stuff, but at the root of it is really trying to solve this pain point I'm mentioning, which is like the speed and efficiency like can you get to a point where you're just talking into your phone and you're just saying like, hey, build me the schedule for next week and someone's walking you through a few of the changes.

[00:46:11] 

Hey, John can't work for Sally or he'll go into overtime. Would you like to use Luke instead? You know, Luke's Yeah, it's like, yes. And then you kind of make those changes via voice. And then you just confirm and you publish. I think that those types of feedback loops are gonna be important. And even asking questions, right?

[00:46:30] 

Like if, you know, it's like we recommend putting Luke in this spot. Okay. Why do you recommend that? Well, Luke has X amount of hours You know, and maybe there's a slew of other reasons why the, the AI model and thinks that Luke would be the best person to sub in in this case. But I think it's more interactive and quick, like on the go, like you should be able to just build a schedule from your car the same way you talk to your, your friends from your car.

[00:46:56] 

I think that that's going to be a really powerful thing where people are going to go like, wow, like this has changed my life in terms of how I operate a restaurant and. It's just so it comes back to time savings, convenient, quick and efficient. Yeah, 

[00:47:11] Josh Sharkey: 

I love that. You know, I have this belief that over time, especially, you know, it's not just in the restaurant industry, but there's so many rote things that, you know, the future is just an audit with an explanation.

[00:47:22] 

So we shouldn't have to. Go and count inventory, or write a schedule, or pay our bills, or, you know, place the order. Those things just happen, and someone is telling you, Hey, is this correct? You know, and we think that maybe you should try this, but the idea of actually, like, writing things down and spending that time.

[00:47:42] 

You know, I, I definitely said, especially for, you know, for something like your building where you can just happen and then you're just asking the, you know, the administrator, like, Hey, do you want to, you know, do you want to try this? And we recommend this because it's your point. You had, there's so much time savings there.

[00:47:56] 

I mean, there's a huge opportunity as it relates to the future. I don't know if you think about this, but. I always feel like if I'm not embarrassed by what I was doing five years ago, or like what I put out five years ago that I'm just not growing enough. How are you different today as a leader and entrepreneur from five years ago?

[00:48:14] Jordan Boesch: 

Yeah I would say I'm probably more thoughtful and patient. And I think it's really important, you know, doing more as you get to a certain size to like doing more listening than talking. And I think just again, finding ways to exercise your strengths because You're going to find early days, you're wearing all these hats and you have a lot of context and you're, you know, you're downloading into people and you still are, you know, you're still the guy working on the big partnerships.

[00:48:41] 

Right? Which was true for me up until like, you know, 3 years ago. Like, I think that, There is again, it's just understanding how to flex your strengths and like enable those people and you're opening doors for the partnership team or you're you're helping with that close that sale, you know, someone's tagging you in and and but you're just there to kind of show face or you're you want to collaborate on something that's product related.

[00:49:07] 

I think just knowing where to spend your time where it's going to add the most value. Thank you. And it comes back to just being more thoughtful about your time. And yeah, how you add value to the business. So I'd say I do that a lot more. I would say also trusting but validate and I say this because I think as you get to scale and Toby from Shopify, the CEO of Shopify says this really well, which is whenever he hires a new executive, it's kind of like you're you're at like a half trust battery, right?

[00:49:35] 

And and it's there's no way anyone stepping in. It's like I'm hands off. Like, all right, you just run it. Go ahead. You have to spend time with that person. You have to download your context into their brain. And they have to execute and prove that they can be trusted and that they are with all the context that you have, that they are making sound decisions and through making a series of sound decisions like anyone in life, the trust battery builds and it gets full.

[00:50:05] 

And so I would say that. I think very much in that world of leadership and in the in thinking through the trust battery and and kind of having not throwing people into like the deep end and let and but but really like having them in deep water, but also like trying to help them succeed more like trying to like really and then, you know, back off as you kind of see that the trust batteries filling and they're making those calls. And I think understanding where that that inflection point is, is just comes with doing it more.

[00:50:38] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah, I love that and I couldn't agree more. I made that mistake so often early on and now it doesn't matter, you know, if it's an executive or, or a junior level employee, but even more so for an executive, you know, there's the, I do, we do, you do principle, right?

[00:50:55]

We're like, you're going to spend 30 days just doing every, you're, you're replacing something that, that I do or someone else is doing. It's like. And just, you have to get all this historical context of like what's happened, you know, in the past. That doesn't happen in a day. And, you know, having them shadow for longer than they were comfortable with because they just want to get going, at least the good ones want to just get going, you know, I think is so valuable, you know, and, and then doing it with them.

[00:51:19] 

It's hard, you know, because we were moving so fast. You know, it's not quite like a restaurant in a restaurant. You got to fill that hole today and have to start today. And there's not much you can do about it. You know, you don't really have the benefit of it sometimes, but I think, you know, there's more opportunity, especially in a company like yours, at least at the size.

[00:51:36] 

But is there anything you're like, I mean, is there anything you're embarrassed about from five years ago, six years ago where you like, think back like, man, I can't believe I acted that way or I did that.

[00:51:45] Jordan Boesch: 

I mean, certainly I think it even just comes back to like bad hiring decisions. Like that I'm embarrassed about, I think those are the, those are like the most embarrassing ones that I've learned like a ton from over the years, but yeah, I think those are the most embarrassing ones where it's just like, you know, you had that feeling, I feel like you just kind of like got to trust your gut more.

[00:52:07] 

And like, yeah, time and time again, I think one of the biggest things is as it pertains to like new leaders coming in, I've just seen enough come and go where it's like they're really great leaders are not only adding immense value to the company and their role within like even month one, but they're actually building trust very quickly with the organization and their respective department.

[00:52:29] 

You know, if like a leader is like many months in and like half of the team doesn't trust them and there's like there's kind of like toxic like talk and and like water cooler talk around it, then it's kind of like I always it's on the leader, right? It's it still comes back to the leader. Like, yeah, those people are not a great fit or you're not a great fit.

[00:52:49] 

Like you, those people are not a great fit for the vision of what we're trying to do because they're not coming along or you are not succeeding and bringing them along. And either way, it's a reflection on you as a leader. Because no one wants to look at a leader and see half a team misaligned. And so I think a lot, I think a lot about that of.

[00:53:07] 

Just kind of yellow flags in my mind when I think of new leaders coming to the org is like how well are they actually building trust within their team, how quickly and what types of things have they already changed for the positive is kind of earning them that trust and great leaders do this so seamlessly, it's like it's just you watch an odd as they do it.

[00:53:26] 

And you know, I had one, we had brought in a new leader and I was talking to a director the other day and he said, you know, this person is moving mountains. But it doesn't feel like they are in a good way. And I think that those are very great leaders, right? They're moving mountains. They're changing a lot of things for the better.

[00:53:45] 

And it doesn't feel like that. The team doesn't feel that. But there is a lot of changes being, there are a lot of changes being made. 

[00:53:50] Josh Sharkey: 

It's the worst feeling when you hire the wrong person, man. No matter what, I don't care who you are, you never let them go fast enough, right? It's like, when the decision's made, you're like, why didn't this happen a month ago, two months ago?

[00:54:04] 

It's tough, man. It sounds like, you know, I mean, look again, I'll be honest, part of this, why I was excited to have you on is I just get to pick your brain and, and, um, you're much farther along in building a company that I really respect. So I get to just, you know, get your insights, but you know, you're now five years.

[00:54:21] 

farther along than you were when you were doing that. Do you feel like you have a lot more of the wherewithal to cut ties quicker and to identify things before, you know, they, you bring them on? Yeah, yes, absolutely. Why? What changed? Just the burn of, of it happening? 

[00:54:36] Jordan Boesch: 

Yeah, you're just sort of like, You just, it's, it becomes a bit of a pattern recognition type of thing, right?

[00:54:41] 

Like you see, you see those core warning signs right away. And, you know, I would say even early on, like I did exit, like there were some folks that some executive level folks that maybe only made it a couple months with me, like even early days, I think of like even four years ago or three years ago, and.

[00:55:02] 

But it's funny. And then, you know, others you see different. Maybe you see like different types of behaviors that are not the exact same that you've seen before, but are not sitting well with you. And so I think again, it's you're going to, I think founders encounter a lot of different types of Leaders that they hire and and I think the quicker you can identify some of these patterns or behaviors that you're not going to tolerate.

[00:55:28]

I think it's going to be really critical that you, you know, part ways with those types of individuals if they're not aligned to the values and people aren't buying it. And I think that's honestly, it comes back to like, I almost think of it as like the cockroach analogy, you know, and it's like, You see a cockroach in your, the whole thing is like, you see a cockroach in your room.

[00:55:48] 

It's like, it's not just one cockroach. Like, you know, you, you bust open the wall or something. There's like, there's like a whole nest of cockroaches. And so, and so when, when you hear you're like a few members of your team, they'll like have concerns about a leader. And it's like, oh, and now there's like five people are concerned.

[00:56:03] 

It's like, okay, like there's probably 20 people minimum that have concerns here. And so you just have to understand that. And what took me even just through experience of seeing this is like more often than not, it's the cockroach problem. Like there are, there are more, you're just not hearing it. You're only hearing that people that feel comfortable to talk to you about it, the ones that are closest with you.

[00:56:24] 

And how about the company? Because I think that. I think it's just important to, to understand that and, um, and address it.

[00:56:31] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah, yeah, it's a tough one. So I got to ask the question. I was at this like retreat last year with a bunch of like, there's just like a CEO retreat. There's really interesting exercise that we did.

[00:56:41] 

So I'm gonna ask you this question and then I'll tell you the premise afterwards. But what makes you really angry? Like what really boils your blood within your, within your company? 

[00:56:50] Jordan Boesch: 

Oh, um, that's a great one. I think like there's a, there's a couple of things that come to mind. I would say. When the user experience and the product is sacrificed for something like, and just, and it creates like a disjointed experience that like frustrates me a lot because it's like they, we knew that we did that, but why did we do that?

[00:57:11] 

And, and I almost, to some degree, it's almost like there's never an excuse to do that. I understand at times that there's, there's circumstances, but anyway, so that's one that. Generally frustrates me. I would also say that from like personality traits that I have that frustrate is just like, I think it's just like the like the more talking less action, like people that are like really, really smart and just like kind of can can talk and get Garner following through talking, but the rubber just never meets the road.

[00:57:40] 

And I think that, you know, that's that's also like a cultural problem. So, like, I think that person shouldn't be in your organization just because of like, if one of your values is like, Bias towards action or act like an owner, like, which pretty much every company has, like, that's going to be difficult, but I would say, yeah, those, those few things definitely frustrate me.

[00:57:57] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah, but I totally agree. Like academic exercises drive me nuts. Let's just think about the, the UX problem for a second. Like, why does that make you so upset? 

[00:58:07] Jordan Boesch: 

Oh, because it just goes against my values of, of like building a great product for the customers and it's putting them second class if you're sacrificing their experience.

[00:58:18] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah. Why do you want to build a, like a great product? What is it that makes you want to build like a great product? 

[00:58:24] Jordan Boesch: 

I believe this industry deserves really great solutions and they've just been like, they've been without it for so long. Like I actually feel for them. I feel for this industry. Like it's just, it's a tough industry.

[00:58:35] Josh Sharkey: 

You're already sort of tying this together. And we could probably go a little bit deeper into why, why that matters so much to you. But the idea of like the things that make you the angriest, the things that when they, when they happen, you just get so, oh, like those are your like personal value. They don't necessarily, you know, become necessarily have to be your company values, but are so clearly your personal values.

[00:58:55] 

And I had never thought of it that way because there are things that make me really, really upset, like attention to detail. If somebody brings me something and, you know, it's not, It's not tight, you know, like they haven't like reviewed it for, you know, edits and it's just sort of like messily put together.

[00:59:09] 

And they haven't really like thought through, like, you know, just like the detail of it just makes me like, like really, and same, same thing with product. But do you think that your personal values are the, are identical to your company values or are there some, some differences? 

[00:59:21] Jordan Boesch: 

No, I think they're very much. I think I think about a lot of the values come back to like the founding team. If you're not demonstrating those values that you put on there that say that are important, you shouldn't have them as values. Just I think that's a miss that a lot of people get caught up and then they create aspirational values of what they want to be, not what they are.

[00:59:40] 

And so for me, it's like, yeah, another one that frustrates me is like, it's like the inverse is like a value of ours. Like, I am very direct. I don't. Like a lot of colorful language around, like, what is the point? What are we trying to get to here? And I think that, you know, solve with simplicity is one of our values.

[00:59:59] 

Like you need to be able to deliver your message cohesively and simply. I sort of have like this thing where I don't like a meeting with me should never be longer than 25 minutes. Like, unless we're doing like. Executive planning because we should be able to, we should have a good practice where like we're sharing documents ahead of time, we're sharing presentations ahead of time, we're making the most of this meeting, no one should have to sit through an hour long meeting to kind of get a point across.

[01:00:24] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah. How do you stop that? Like if you have a meeting that's going over and you're like, okay, like, do you just cut it off? 

[01:00:30] Jordan Boesch: 

No, I just, I think that there are meetings that go over and like, I think that some of those are just like good learning moments too. And like, sometimes there's a topic that just has to be discussed.

[01:00:40] 

And so sometimes we get vigilant around our weekly executive meetings where like, yeah, like we, for, sorry, for executive meetings, we do meet for an hour once a week. If it goes over, it's because there was probably something we really needed to talk about. And we ranked the meeting at the end. We all ranked the meeting.

[01:00:57] 

You know, I get docked points if I was late to that meeting. People can say like, it was an 8 out of 10 because Jordan was late. And like, I will say it's an 8 because I was late. And like, you know, we're all like docking points and like seeing how we can do it better next time. But sometimes people be like, Oh, I'm a 9 because we went over.

[01:01:16] 

I'll say, well, I, I was, I was a 10 outta 10 because we went over and we had a really good discussion around what we needed to talk about. And again, like it's just sometimes those happen and sometimes they're actually really valuable. 

[01:01:29] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah. Yeah. Well, wrapping up here, like if you had to ask you, you call them shifty, right? It's like the, yeah. If you had to ask a shifty why they work at 7shifts, what do you think they would say? 

[01:01:40] Jordan Boesch: 

I just asked this question actually in like a survey, so I have real answers. 

[01:01:45] Josh Sharkey: 

Um, here we go. All right, we got, yeah, exactly. 

[01:01:48] Jordan Boesch: 

So there was a resounding sentiment of kind of like a relating to the industry that we're serving because everyone worked in a restaurant.

Like not everyone, but most people have worked in a restaurant or some variation of it and did some hourly work. And I think that. There is sort of this deep sense of passion for solving for what other you, you maybe never had in your own job. And a lot of reasons why people work here is because they feel like they can impact people in an industry that they care about.

[01:02:18] 

And so, you know, a lot of people, a lot of things I was reading was, Hey, you know, these I've worked at other companies where we built software for the insurance industry or some other industry that I didn't really care about, but coming to 7shifts, I know we're actually impacting the lives of restaurant workers because I was one and it sucked and I didn't have any of this technology and you know, people love our product and I want to be part of a team where people love the product that they're using because it makes everyone else feel good.

[01:02:49] 

If your customers absolutely love your product, Like your team, it's so much easier for your team to get bought into what you're doing. 

[01:02:56] Josh Sharkey: 

Oh yeah, what's funny about that is you just talked about the two things that make you angriest and the two values which were generally helping the restaurant industry and building a great product and ironically your team just said those are the two reasons why you work there.

[01:03:12] 

Great call, you're right. That's pretty cool. Absolutely. We're wrapping up here and I'd love to know, I asked you everything I wanted to ask you. There's probably a million things I could ask you more, but is there anything that we didn't cover that you think would be helpful for restaurant folks, chefs, anybody else in the, in the food world that's listening here?

[01:03:27] Jordan Boesch: 

I think just knowing like, Hey, we empathize with, with you, the folks that are in the food industry and, and working. And I think that, you know, meez and 7shifts, like we're building things that solve these pain points in this industry. And I think we're at a really great time where there's an opportunity to partner with people that genuinely care about making a difference in this industry.

[01:03:45] 

In ways that we haven't seen in a number of years, and I would just encourage people to do some research on, you know, the why behind some of these companies that exist and look at the background and look at the history and understand why people are in it. And folks like myself and you, Josh, like we worked in the industry.

[01:04:02] 

We, you know, my parents ran some, some quick service restaurants. You were a chef like there's. There there's a raw passion that undeniably comes out through through the product experience that I think people should bet on when they're looking at software and solve some of their pain points.

[01:04:17] Josh Sharkey:

Couldn't agree more. Well, Jordan, congrats, man, on what you've built and what you're building 10 years in. It was the anniversary recently? Yeah, yeah, it was actually 10 years ago. A month ago. So it's awesome, man. It's awesome. Well, it's just it's been really cool to see the journey. Like I said, I think the first time I heard and learned and touched experienced 7shifts was in 2015.

[01:04:39] 

And it's come such a long way and it's really, really inspiring. So thanks for taking some time. I know you had a busy day, but this was, this was awesome. Thanks 

[01:04:45] Jordan Boesch: 

Thanks for having me, Josh. It was great chatting.

[01:04:51] Josh Sharkey: 

Thanks for tuning into The meez Podcast. The music from the show is a remix of the song Art Mirror by an old friend, hip hop artist, Fresh Daily. For show notes and more, visit getmeez.com/slash podcast. That's G E T M E E Z dot com forward slash podcast. If you enjoyed the show, I'd love it if you can share it with fellow entrepreneurs and culinary pros and give us a five star rating wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[01:05:15] Josh Sharkey: Keep innovating. Don't settle. Make today a little bit better than yesterday. And remember, it's impossible for us to learn what we think we already know. See you next time.