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Matt has let his lifelong passion of food and people lead him to 15 amazing years as a restaurant manager and another 9 years working as a Director with a major food service distributor. He has channeled this passion to help create and run ShiftNote. When he's not dominating the food service industry, he's spending time with his 4 children and cheering on the Tigers as a Mizzou Alumni.
If you're running a shift-based business, you already know that your most valuable asset, and your biggest expense, is your workforce. Balancing labor costs with the need to provide excellent customer service is a daily tightrope walk.
If you've ever managed a restaurant, you know that building a weekly schedule can feel like an intricate, never-ending puzzle. Between balancing employee availability, time-off requests, labor budgets, and unexpected dinner rushes, shift managers often spend hours locked in the back office staring at spreadsheets or whiteboards.
Running a successful hotel is a masterclass in managing controlled chaos. Every single day, your property operates as a living, breathing ecosystem where the front desk, housekeeping, and maintenance departments must work in perfect harmony.
Anyone who has spent time running a restaurant knows that the industry operates at a relentless pace. Between managing labor costs, ensuring guest satisfaction, and putting out literal or metaphorical fires in the kitchen, shift managers are often stretched to their limits.
If you've ever managed a shift-based business, you know that the most critical moment of the day doesn’t happen during the morning rush or the evening close. It happens in the narrow fifteen-minute window when one shift ends and another begins.
A restaurant is only as strong as its internal communication. When the dinner rush hits, the tickets start piling up, and the front of house is navigating a sudden influx of walk-ins, there is no time to stop and ask questions about what happened during the morning prep.
In a shift-based business, the handover between teams is the most critical moment of the day. If the incoming team isn't up to speed, momentum is lost, mistakes happen, and customer satisfaction drops.
For decades, managing a shift-based workforce meant wrestling with chaotic spreadsheets, deciphering endless sticky notes, and navigating a never-ending flood of text messages about shift swaps.
Every single day in hospitality is defined by the success or failure of your shifts. As executives and regional leaders, we know that the secret to a thriving hospitality business isn't just a great menu or a beautiful lobby, it is the people on the floor and the systems that guide them.
If you have ever managed a Friday night dinner rush with two servers calling out, or navigated a fully booked holiday weekend when your housekeeping staff is stretched thin, you intimately understand the beautiful, chaotic rhythm of the hospitality industry.