Customer story: Granny Scott’s Pie Shop

About the business

• Type: Quick Service Restaurant
• Location: Lakewood, CO
• Employees: 10
• Food Provider: US Foods

Background

After years of working in the home security field (think burglar and fire alarms), Larry Green wanted off the corporate ladder and onto a new frontier: chicken wings. But when a fancy New York chef was looking to sell his popular pie shop, Larry’s focus turned from hot wings to hot pies. Although not a trained baker or even a pie consumer himself, Larry took over the business ten days before their busiest time of year (Thanksgiving), and has been baking popular pies like Caramel Apple, Vermont Maple Pumpkin, and Old Fashioned Pecan for over eighteen years now. While selling up to 2,000 pies a week has been a challenge, what Larry finds the most challenging is handling labor and compliance.

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The problem

Larry dreaded coming in on Monday morning, for he knew what was ahead of him: ten to twelve hours of developing, changing, and posting the employee schedule that he created in Excel. Trying to figure out how to make everyone happy, making sure he didn’t forget any time-off requests, and not scheduling too many “Clopens” (assigning the same person to a close shift right before an open shift), was causing Larry headaches each time he made the schedule. Larry first tried to move to technology through a product called Sling, but found that their interface was clunky, and that their customer service was slow and their terminology hard to understand. When Larry met Homebase at a US Foods: Food Fanatics Live show, he found a solution that worked for him and his employees.

How Homebase helped

Two things have changed since Larry started using Homebase. First, the time it takes for him to build a schedule has gone from twelve hours to thirty minutes. And second, Larry now “looks forward to building the schedule on Monday mornings.” My hair turned grey from building my schedule in Excel for so many years. Now that I use Homebase, I am hoping the color will come back. Before Homebase, Larry was stuck managing an endless sea of text messages, emails, and random slips of paper to handle availability and time off changes. This was causing Larry to have to make changes to the schedule after it had been published, causing more time and headaches to go into this task. With Homebase, employees manage their time off and availability in the Homebase app and Larry immediately gets notified, and his schedule builder gets updated. Before Homebase, Larry was scheduling his key employees into overtime, and sometimes forgetting to give them a day off. With Homebase, Larry gets an automatic tabulation of hours worked per week, so he does not schedule anyone into overtime. And with a handy weekly and monthly view of the schedule, he’s able to keep better track of days off so he makes sure his employees have more time with their families.

Larry says, “my employees are young, and technology comes easier to them than some of us old farts.” But with Homebase’s easy to use features, Larry was able to make the switch quickly. His only complaint, “I wish I had found this sooner!” “If you have someone who is on the fence about switching to Homebase, have them call me. If I can help another small business save 10 hours per week, I am happy help.” And Larry, we are happy to have you as a Homebase customer!