How Bird Rock brews efficiency for a team of 180 with Square + 7shifts

Meet Bird Rock

Founded in 2006, Bird Rock has grown from a single cafe in La Jolla to a local coffee leader with ten locations, a coffee truck, and a dedicated roasting facility prioritizing high-quality, responsibly sourced coffee.

Bird Rock faced operational challenges as it grew, demanding streamlined scheduling, payroll, and customer engagement solutions. This led the team to Square for a point-of-sale system and 7shifts for a workforce management tool. These tools combined to transform Bird Rock’s ability to operate efficiently and consistently across its now 12 locations.

We spoke with Roger Chagnon, VP of Operations, and Brandon Drayer, HR Administrator, to learn more about the switch to Square and 7shifts and the impact on their business.

Roger has been with Bird Rock since 2017, overseeing operations and managing everything from product rollouts to technology adoption. Brandon, who joined Bird Rock after a 13-year tenure at Starbucks, manages HR and scheduling. Brandon lives in Munich and leverages 7shifts to handle remote team management, scheduling, and labor optimization across Bird Rock’s U.S.-based locations from 6,012 miles away.

The Challenge — An outdated tech stack

As Bird Rock grew, their existing tech stack couldn’t keep up. Their previous POS, Toast, did not integrate with their newly developed mobile app, and their previous scheduling tool, Humanity, was “basically just a scheduler with no data,” says Chagnon. They also manually managed tip calculation and wanted a tool to remove the chance of human error.

Bird Rock needed a modern tech solution that would scale as their business did.

The Solution — Square + 7shifts

Bird Rock found a two-pronged solution in Square POS and 7shifts scheduling platform. Both tools formed an integrated tech stack that served their growing brand.

A fresh start with Square POS

The switch to Square made it easy to integrate Bird Rock’s POS with its new mobile app, developed by GoParrot (which has since been acquired by Square). This allowed mobile app orders to sync into the store POS, resulting in a better overall guest and employee experience.

“With Square, it was a breath of fresh air,” says Chagnon. “Starting from scratch allowed us to organize our backend exactly the way we wanted.”

Another great feature was Square’s ability to integrate into their digital menu boards, making menu changes and pricing updates across their 12 locations easy.

“Having a POS company that has those types of options and has an open API where the sky is the limit, if we want to build more custom stuff in the future that is really cool, knowing that Square can scale with us.”

Embracing modern scheduling tools with 7shifts

With 7shifts, Bird Rock took control of their scheduling, integrating with Square to provide real-time insights into labor costs and sales trends.

“The user-friendliness [of 7shifts], as well as integration with Square…being able to talk with sales and pull data to look at labor percentages…was very beneficial in my mind,” says Drayer.

Data-driven scheduling is Drayer’s preferred process. He used previous years’ data transferred over from Toast as well as current data and he taught his approach to the rest of the team “very quickly.” 7shifts empowered Bird Rock location managers to view real-time data on their smartphones, which helped with transparency.

Switching to 7shifts also addressed Bird Rock’s need for automated tip calculations, which they used to manage manually. This eliminated the chance of human error and, by extension, costly labor violations.

Results

1. No More Manual Payroll and Tip Calculations

Automated tip calculations and payroll sync eliminated the need for manual calculations and the errors that come with them. Chagnon mentioned that managing tips “was a primary factor” in the switch.

2. Smart scheduling with real-time data

The Square + 7shifts integrations allowed Bird Rock to use real-time sales data to align schedules more closely with actual demand.

3. Consistent menu management and customer experience

The Square API, combined with Bird Rock’s digital menu boards, makes instant pricing updates possible at a dozen locations, ensuring a consistent customer experience and eliminating human error.

4. Enhanced Employee Access to Scheduling and Payroll

The 7shifts mobile app gives employees easy access to their schedules, allowing them to manage their shifts and availability. Chagnon noted that “the ease of using both platforms has made the onboarding experience for new hires smoother,” particularly for barista team members who benefit from intuitive, mobile-friendly tools.

Square + 7shifts: Better Together

Switching to Square and 7shifts allowed Bird Rock Coffee Roasters to address key operational pain points with effective, data-driven solutions. The integration of these systems streamlined scheduling, improved payroll accuracy, and allowed for data-backed staffing decisions. As Brandon said, “Square and 7shifts together make it easy to keep tabs on operations, whether I’m a few miles away or halfway across the world.”

For Bird Rock, adopting Square and 7shifts has enabled efficient growth and a more reliable operational model across locations.