Will Stewart, Founder and CEO of RightWork, joins Zack Oates to discuss how labor strategy directly impacts both guest experience and restaurant performance. With a background as a data scientist at Starbucks, Will brings a data driven perspective to one of the most complex challenges operators face today: finding the right balance between efficiency and experience.

Labor Is an Investment, Not a Cost (03:20)

“Labor is responsible for impacting both of those things.”

Will reframes how operators should think about labor. Instead of viewing it purely as a cost to minimize, he positions it as an investment that directly affects both employee satisfaction and guest experience.

Why Understaffing Breaks the Experience (02:57)

“That is affecting both of those things.”

When restaurants are understaffed during peak times, the impact compounds quickly. Guests face delays, employees feel overwhelmed, and service quality drops throughout the shift.

Go Beyond High Level Scheduling (07:01)

“You lose a lot of the nuance.”

Looking at labor only through weekly or monthly budgets hides critical insights. Will explains that real improvement comes from understanding staffing needs at a much more granular level.

Every Location Is Different (08:06)

“The needs of each location can be slightly different.”

A one size fits all approach to labor does not work. Factors like volume, channel mix, and customer behavior require tailored scheduling strategies for each location.

Connecting Labor to Guest Feedback (09:40)

“You could just clearly see.”

By layering guest feedback data with staffing levels, operators can directly connect poor reviews to understaffed shifts. This creates a clearer picture of cause and effect.

Scaling Consistency Across Teams (12:51)

“Raise the floor of capabilities.”

As brands grow, maintaining consistency becomes harder. Will explains how better systems and tools can help replicate the performance of top operators across all locations.

Links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-stewart-23339b66/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/rightwork-inc/about/

https://right.work/

Transcript

00:00:00:09 – 00:00:25:06

Zack Oates

Welcome to another edition of Give An Ovation, the Restaurant guest Experience podcast. I’m your host, Zack Oates, and each week I chat with industry experts to uncover their strategies and tactics to help you create a five star guest experience. This podcast is powered by ovation, the feedback and operations platform built for multi-unit restaurants. Learn what’s actually happening at your restaurant and exactly how to improve while driving revenue.

00:00:25:07 – 00:00:48:21

Zack Oates

Learn more at ovation up.com. And today we’ve got the founder and CEO of Right Work, Will Stuart. And Will does not come from the traditional restaurant tech background. He was actually a data scientist at Starbucks prior to starting this company. So this is a guy who is in data who is in FNB, and I’m excited to have you on the podcast.

00:00:48:21 – 00:00:49:22

Zack Oates

Will.

00:00:49:24 – 00:00:53:02

Will Stewart

Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Zach.

00:00:53:04 – 00:00:58:00

Zack Oates

So for those who aren’t familiar, give us the quick overview of what right work does.

00:00:58:02 – 00:01:23:05

Will Stewart

Yeah, sure. So we started mainly from a labor forecasting and scheduling perspective and have kind of evolved into being a bit more of a labor optimization platform. But really what we do is help make sure multi-unit restaurant chains are scheduling labor when they need it. So making sure they are able to provide a great guest experience to their customers and do so profitably.

00:01:23:07 – 00:01:26:17

Will Stewart

So yeah, that’s kind of the overview core of the product.

00:01:26:19 – 00:01:54:18

Zack Oates

And I love seeing the back end date of how you’re pulling in the ovation data into our mutual customers and giving them really good insights into understanding what is happening when different people are on shift, what’s going well, what isn’t, how does that affect by time of day when managers are on, when they get off? Like there’s just so much information because as we’ve talked often about on this podcast, is that the guest experience cannot exceed the employee experience.

00:01:54:20 – 00:02:15:11

Zack Oates

And so you got to have you got to understand how that works. And I actually remember a story one time of someone who signed up with ovation and they were like, I’m going to take my first Friday night and be at home because they had a couple of restaurants and they were always in the restaurants, and so they were at home, and all of a sudden they get a ding.

00:02:15:13 – 00:02:41:11

Zack Oates

That said, service was slow. They get a ding long wait, they get a ding. The long wait, and then they get another ding. By the end of the night. The ding was terrible service. Our waiter was so rude. Now why? Because turns out they were understaffed for that day. So that experience at that, at that location that evening started off with long waits.

00:02:41:11 – 00:02:56:23

Zack Oates

And then customers got grumpy, and then the server got grumpy. And then by the end of the night, the server was just totally wasted and angry and created a terrible experience because they weren’t staffed appropriately. And I’m sure that you see that a lot. And what you’re looking at.

00:02:57:00 – 00:03:20:00

Will Stewart

Yeah. No. Exactly. And that is one of the reasons why we wanted to kind of build the integration with ovation is to have some of that kind of supporting data of, of the reviews and the guest experience kind of back up some of the labor recommendations that we’re making because but oftentimes, I think there’s this kind of conception in the industry that like labor is a cost, right.

00:03:20:00 – 00:03:45:14

Will Stewart

And we like to think of it more of an investment because you are investing in the employee experience, you’re investing in the guest experience and being able to highlight exactly what you mentioned of when you are understaffed during your peak dinner rush. That is affecting both of those things, both the employee experience, not wanting to take that shift in the future as well as the customer experience, they’re not likely to return.

00:03:45:20 – 00:04:06:13

Will Stewart

So being able to not just like cut labor, right? We talk about optimizing labor. And that can mean both investing at peak or trying to yeah, streamline things off peak when when that labor is not needed. But looking at the entire equation and how labor is responsible for. Yeah. Impacting kind of those experiences is what we try to do.

00:04:06:13 – 00:04:13:15

Will Stewart

And that’s why we are super happy to be able to pull in that data and provide some of that additional visibility to our customers.

00:04:13:17 – 00:04:27:01

Zack Oates

Now as you look at this, what was it that you had? You say, I need to start this company because you’re obviously you’re at Starbucks, you’re looking at all this data. What does that look like for the journey to starting right work?

00:04:27:03 – 00:04:52:02

Will Stewart

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I had a tremendous experience at Starbucks. I was there for for five plus years. Still have a lot of good friends there. And yeah, got to see some very interesting parts of the business. I was on operations engineering, which was helping with the functional design and layout of our stores, our Starbucks stores. I still say, and then I was on kind of an operations analytics team, mainly focused on on labor and kind of optimizing that.

00:04:52:08 – 00:05:27:15

Will Stewart

And then I was also on a real estate strategy and analytics team, helping to determine where stores should go. Throughout that whole process, I kind of saw first and foremost, like how data can be very helpful for making these decisions. And I kind of got to see it across the lifecycle of how a store kind of comes to life, of where a new store is going to go, how it needs to meet the needs of the customer segment that it is serving, and then how that store ultimately comes to life from a functional design perspective, and then also how it gets operated with managing labor and your team and whatnot.

00:05:27:15 – 00:05:52:20

Will Stewart

And so through all of that and part of the I would say the majority of the time was spent in the kind of operations analytics realm. And I actually helped to kind of build some of the internal tools and systems that Starbucks uses to manage labor across 10,000 plus stores. And so we had kind of looked at some of the tools in the market and had ultimately decided to build some of it in-house and had some fairly sophisticated tools when I was there.

00:05:52:20 – 00:06:19:19

Will Stewart

And it was a couple things that kind of made me a eventually venture out on my own. There is, I mean, when I kind of had the entrepreneurial itch, I saw some of these problems that we were solving at Starbucks and kind of realized there were needs across the rest of the industry. And then also, I just became very passionate about building products and being able to go into a store and kind of see your products being used was just one of the most fulfilling things.

00:06:19:19 – 00:06:44:01

Will Stewart

So ultimately, I decided to kind of venture out with some of those learnings and wanted to bring some of those capabilities to kind of a broader audience. So I focused on the kind of labor and scheduling side of things, because I felt like that was the most impactful opportunity I could have to help restaurants be be profitable and manage their operations more efficiently.

00:06:44:03 – 00:07:01:16

Zack Oates

And as you’ve looked at the data that you’ve seen over the last few years of running this and working with restaurants, what would you say is some advice that you would give to people who are like, hey, I want to improve my labor, obviously. Number one advice is use right? Work. What would be some other pieces of advice you’d give?

00:07:01:18 – 00:07:33:12

Will Stewart

I would say the first thing that we often see is just managing labor. Kind of too high of a level. So looking at like a monthly budget and how the store is performing relative to that monthly budget or even weekly and that just you lose a lot of the nuance in a manager may just be scheduling the same amount of people all throughout the day, when in reality you are understaffed in your peak and over staffing, you’re off peak.

00:07:33:14 – 00:07:56:19

Will Stewart

So I think providing that kind of more granular view into the business, like that’s the first thing we say. We just want to create visibility into where we think the opportunities are, and then determine how we can help capture those with recommending improved schedules. So that’s kind of the first thing is just being able to go into a little bit more granularity to understand where the problems might be and that you are.

00:07:56:19 – 00:08:26:20

Will Stewart

Yeah, understanding that that Friday dinner rush and you are losing customers and it is affecting the guest experience. And then the other thing I would say is treating every location like it’s the same and deserves the same labor budget, because that also is not the case in that you’re higher volume stores are going to have a little bit more leverage, and also the different channels that we see growing particularly fast with pickup and delivery and especially for full service, those can have kind of different labor profiles associated with them.

00:08:26:23 – 00:08:45:07

Will Stewart

So the needs of each location within a multi-unit operation can be slightly different. So we want to help represent the nuances of those different locations and make sure each manager is receiving kind of recommendations that fit the needs of their business, as well as the needs of their team.

00:08:45:09 – 00:09:10:03

Zack Oates

And what correlation have you been able to draw between scheduling and guest experience? Because obviously I’ve got dozens of anecdotal stories of missed mischiefs or people coming in late, or people calling out sick or last minute no shows. And what happens to the guest experience? Is there any data that you’ve been able to see of how any correlation?

00:09:10:05 – 00:09:40:14

Will Stewart

Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely some correlation. And you can see if you have kind of a more aggressive labor model that you are inherently kind of sacrificing a little bit on the guest experience. So it’s about kind of finding that right balance obviously. So so there’s like yeah, definitely some data to support that. But I would say just the most compelling thing that that are like customers now using both right work and ovation C is looking at like the intraday charts of like the previous days.

00:09:40:14 – 00:10:06:22

Will Stewart

Because once a day happens we like do the kind of retrospective analysis of all right this is when you were understaffed. This is when you were overstaffed. And then now with the elevation data we are able to layer in like when the reviews actually happened and like the first view that we took it that after pulling in the elevation data, you could just clearly see, okay, there’s a three year, three star review that is talking about speed of service.

00:10:06:24 – 00:10:22:18

Will Stewart

And they were 2 or 3 people understaffed at that period. So like these visuals are just very compelling. And you can see like okay, we’re we’re a bit right here. We’re understaffed. And that is directly showing up in the guest reviews.

00:10:22:18 – 00:10:43:05

Zack Oates

So and it was interesting because I saw some of these charts and you have these really interesting. It’s like when someone cuts on and when something gets off. And so you have them kind of stacked on when they were on shift and it was like when there was multiple people there, it was like five stars, five stars, five stars, and then like three people left and it was like two stars, one star.

00:10:43:05 – 00:11:11:10

Zack Oates

And then more people came back on. It was interesting because I know there’s a balance, and I do this session where we go through every single initiative that you may have in a restaurant falls into one of two buckets. You’re either working to increase profitability or you’re working to improve the guest experience. And yes, would it be ideal if we could have B double staffed every single shift?

00:11:11:10 – 00:11:31:02

Zack Oates

Yeah. Then like, absolutely. If I could have two people on XPO triple checking what was made and then I’d have no issues with order accuracy if I can like serve will and I could be with Will the entire time and make sure that everything he needs is great. So I could like get him napkins before he needs them.

00:11:31:04 – 00:12:02:15

Zack Oates

Great. But like that’s not going to be profitable. And on the flip side of it, if you try to cut down, try to improve profitability too much, your guest experience could suffer. So the balance of profitability and guest experience is so key to look at what you’re doing it right. Work is such a way to optimize and to find that sweet spot of where can you maximize profitability and the guest experience, because there’s an intersection there where they both reach a peak.

00:12:02:17 – 00:12:09:13

Zack Oates

And having a company like right work really helps to manage and to analyze that ideal point. Right?

00:12:09:15 – 00:12:30:09

Will Stewart

Yeah, definitely. I mean, we like to say we want to give managers and operators like the confidence in the plan going into the day that it is going to. Yeah, kind of efficiently serve their customers. And yeah, I mean it starts with kind of the guest experience. And we we like working with with companies that already have good reviews.

00:12:30:09 – 00:12:51:07

Will Stewart

And as they are trying to scale, one of the difficult parts is maintaining that service standard as you open up new locations and, and a lot of these kind of restaurants, you may have a like a superstar general manager that is able to write a perfect schedule and create a great guest experience for their team and for their customers.

00:12:51:07 – 00:13:20:19

Will Stewart

But it’s kind of hard to scale that you’re not spending tons of time recruiting like the best general manager. So we try to help provide the tools and resources to kind of raise the floor of capabilities and kind of provide some guardrails and recommendations to make sure that all of your locations can kind of be performing at the level or capability of your highest performing GM, because gyms are super important, obviously, as you know, in the business and have a correlation or relationship with the reviews of the location as well.

00:13:20:19 – 00:13:41:24

Will Stewart

So that’s one of the things like as, as companies are scaling, like how do you maintain that service standard? And as you open up a new location, like your attention to the guest experience right out of the gate, like that’s critical, right? Like we are, we want you to optimize towards that. Like, and that means scheduling a few more bodies on the floor, particularly as they’re getting trained up.

00:13:42:01 – 00:14:05:01

Will Stewart

And then how do you like kind of control those levers of profitability as you have a trained team and as you’re moving kind of more into, profitability and sustainment? So it’s an interesting balance. Yeah, it really is a balance. And how do you help kind of find the right balance in for the company and like what the company values too, because they may want to.

00:14:05:02 – 00:14:22:19

Will Stewart

Yeah, provide a much superior guest experience where another may focus more so on convenience. So how do you like kind of expose those levers and just create more visibility to the process. And yeah, ultimately for writing. Yeah. Then the ability to serve their customers as best they can.

00:14:22:21 – 00:14:37:20

Zack Oates

Yeah. Absolutely love that. Well well we’ll I know we could sit here and talk for hours about the guest employee experience, but we’re out of time here. And so I’d love to understand just who is someone in the restaurant industry that you think deserves an ovation? Who’s someone that we should be following?

00:14:37:22 – 00:15:05:18

Will Stewart

I have to give a shout out to probably David DeSantis over at, Kazuki Ramen and Izakaya. They also have a number of kind of other brands Supreme Dumplings under them, and they’re actually currently using the ovation rate work integration. But we’ve been with them from the start. Yeah, since since day one of right work. And they’ve been super critical into helping kind of guide our product roadmap, as you do with your guests reviews and experience.

00:15:05:18 – 00:15:23:19

Will Stewart

That creates kind of the tight feedback loop between the restaurants and their customers. Like they kind of do a similar, role for us of providing that quick feedback loop to make sure what we are, building in the product resonates with the customers, or the, the operators. And so I gotta give a shout out to them.

00:15:23:19 – 00:15:39:22

Will Stewart

And then, another kind of recent customer, Nora from Moto Pizza, is a phenomenal brand. I love them, I’m out of the Pacific Northwest as well. So they are scaling and building in kind of the systems and standards and processes to, enable that brand, which is super exciting.

00:15:39:24 – 00:15:48:14

Zack Oates

Yeah, love, love both those brands and yeah, I mean, great shout out there. And how do people find and follow you and write work.

00:15:48:16 – 00:16:07:23

Will Stewart

We’re still building out our, our social media presence and whatnot. I have been more active on LinkedIn as of late, so that’s probably the best place to, to reach out to me. Yeah, either either Will Stewart or right. Work is our LinkedIn. And then yeah, we have an Instagram channel as well. Right. Work Inc I believe is is the name of that.

00:16:07:23 – 00:16:14:24

Will Stewart

So we’re we’re building out some of those social media presences a little bit more deliberately here moving forward.

00:16:15:01 – 00:16:25:17

Zack Oates

Love that. Awesome. Well, well for reminding us the guest experience always starts with the employee experience. Today’s ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us on Giving Ovation.

00:16:25:19 – 00:16:27:11

Will Stewart

Thanks, Zach I appreciate it.

00:16:27:13 – 00:16:50:00

Zack Oates

Thanks for joining us today. If you liked this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite place to listen. We’re all about feedback here. Again, this episode was sponsored by ovation, a two question, SMS based, actionable guest feedback platform built for multi-unit restaurants. If you’d like to learn how we can help you measure and create a better guest experience, visit us at ovation up.com.