[Case Study] How Snakes & Lattes Cut Their Restaurant Labor Cost by 8% with 7shifts

Snakes & Lattes is Toronto’s premiere board game cafe, with 5 locations across the city. After struggling with time and money lost to manual scheduling, they ditched spreadsheets to streamline their scheduling, communication, and performance tracking with 7shifts’ easy-to-use, intuitive labor management platform.

With 7shifts, Snakes & Lattes drastically reduced overtime, trimmed their labor cost percentage by 8%, and grew their sales per labor hour by 5.2%.

Building schedules in minutes, not hours

Snakes & Lattes abandoned spreadsheet scheduling in favor of 7shifts’ robust, drag-and-drop schedule builder, as they were looking for a way to minimize time spent on admin work and maximize time spent in front of customers. Now, Snakes & Lattes can easily build and publish labor-perfect schedules to staff in minutes—with overtime, staff availability, and compliance automatically factored in. Not only did this save them hours a week on their scheduling, but it allowed them to staff more efficiently according to sales and weather forecasts, and utilize the weekly budget tool to consistently build schedules that met their labor targets.

“Before using 7shifts, we would generate our schedules on a spreadsheet and transfer it over to a website. It’s a lot easier now on 7shifts where everything is in the same place.” — Aaron, Floor Manager, Snakes & Lattes

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Staying connected with their team

From juggling calls, texts, and social media chats, Snakes & Lattes streamlined and simplified their communication with 7shifts’ built-in chat and Announcements tool, which allows them to easily inform the whole team about goings-on in the cafe. Now, they keep their team informed and quickly share messages, emojis, and photos—cutting staff calls and texts by 70%. From their free mobile apps, staff can easily chat, swap shifts, and submit time-off to stay on top of their schedule and make the manager’s life easier.

“Text messaging, messaging services, phone calls—the fastest way to get in touch with someone always felt too personal. With the 7shifts app, there are notifications right on their phone, and it’s still in a professional context.” — Aaron, Floor Manager, Snakes & Lattes

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Manager communication—simplified

Snakes & Lattes came to 7shifts to streamline their management processes—customizing their daily note tracking with the Manager Log Book, and using sales and labor reports from the Manager Dashboard to schedule more efficiently. With these robust tools, the board game cafe managers can stay in sync and make more effective labor decisions that help grow their business.

“We chose 7shifts because mainly the Manager Dashboard [and Manager Log Book]. It’s customizable so we can put the information we find valuable on there...the easy-to-see labor cost and sales projected over the day allow us to schedule better.” — Aaron, Floor Manager, Snakes & Lattes

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Since starting with 7shifts, Snakes & Lattes has:

Cut their labor cost percentage by 8% in four months

• Improved their sales per labor hour by 5.2% in four months
• Plans and staffs for 15-20 events/month
• Easily swaps an average of 4 shifts between employees every week
• Sends dozens of Announcements and group chats per week

“With the time I’ve saved using 7shifts, I like to pour my time back into the company: generating events for the staff or taking extra time scheduling so I can make sure I’m paying attention to all of their preferences.”

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Dew Smith

Hey! I'm Dew, the former Brand Strategist. I cultivated 7shifts' social and content garden, and I looked for ways to grow our network of restaurateurs, local talent, and tech companies.