How Ford’s Garage Uses Fourth to Transform Workforce Management and Accelerate Growth

Managing an hourly workforce across multiple restaurant locations comes with immense challenges. Turnover in the industry often exceeds 100%, costing thousands in recruiting and training. Hiring and onboarding new staff without centralized processes is time-intensive. Lack of granular labor data for restaurant management makes controlling costs difficult. And disjointed point of sale and restaurant management software and solutions only compound these issues.

Ford’s Garage, a fast-growing restaurant chain in Florida, leveraged Fourth’s integrated workforce management system to transform and manage their recruiting, employee scheduling, restaurant management, payroll, and unlock rapid scalable growth.

The Typical Workforce Management Struggles Restaurants Face

Running a single restaurant is hard enough to manage. For multi-location restaurant brands overseeing operations with numerous general managers, workforce management headaches get magnified exponentially:

• High turnover — Losing hourly staff and hiring replacements consumes massive amounts of manager time. The restaurant industry averages over 100% turnover, costing thousands in recruitment and training.
• Distributed hiring — With no centralized recruiting, each location struggles filling open roles. Hiring delays directly impact customer service and revenue. Managers spend hours interviewing candidates just to fill one position.
• Compliance risks — Keeping up with fluctuating state/local pay and labor regulations across many restaurants is challenging. Just one violation can mean big fines.
• Lack of data — No visibility into granular labor metrics makes it impossible to identify problems. Overstaffing issues and inflated payroll costs quietly eat into margins.

These challenges are compounded when restaurants rely on disjointed point solutions for administrative tasks of scheduling, applicant tracking system management, and payroll operations. With systems not working in tandem, managing the workforce becomes extremely inefficient.

“Fourth has helped us join together a couple of our disparate processes – from hiring, scheduling and onboarding, HotSchedules coupled with PeopleMatter and Fuego has helped us overcome our challenges while staying competitive in this market.”

 Jason Borders, Director of Operations, Ford’s Garage

How Fourth Provided Ford’s Garage with an End-to-End Workforce Management Software to Scale

To gain organization-wide visibility of employee performance while eliminating employee workload duplication across locations, Ford’s Garage implemented Fourth’s unified workforce management system:

• HotSchedules — Intelligent forecasting tools reduced scheduling-related issues and improved scheduling time and speed of operations by 30%.
• PeopleMatter — Streamlined applicant tracking and onboarding enabled hiring high-quality staff.
• Fuego — Gave employees access to earned wages to improve employee satisfaction and experience.

Fourth’s solutions manage and integrate seamlessly via a common data platform and mobile devices, providing system-wide consistency in performance. This enabled supporting Ford’s Garage’s growth from 5 to nine teams across 17 locations while improving workforce productivity.