This case study features Katie Williams, VP of Operations, who has been with Blue Goose for 20 years and oversees labor performance, scheduling discipline, and operational consistency across all locations.
In the early days, scheduling was done on paper. Communication happened through Facebook employee pages and text messages.
That worked — until it didn’t.
As new locations opened, coordination became harder. Overtime wasn’t visible until after schedules were posted. Communication lived in scattered threads. Managers operated with different labor standards.
They were dealing with:
“It just got very messy,” Katie said. “There’s social media policies and companies for a reason.” Blue Goose needed structure that could support growth — not just digitize schedules.
have to replace as we grew.”— Katie Williams, VP of Operations
When evaluating scheduling platforms, Blue Goose prioritized reliability and long-term fit over price.
The team piloted HotSchedules at one location before rolling it out more broadly. Even after pausing during COVID cost reductions, they ultimately returned to the platform once operations stabilized, reinforcing that it wasn’t just software, it was infrastructure.
With HotSchedules, they gained:
Instead of outgrowing their scheduling tool as complexity increased, they built on it.
One of the most impactful changes was projected labor insight.
“Just being able to see the projected labor has helped for sure. You can see if you’re scheduling somebody into overtime.”
Managers could now see labor impact before finalizing schedules—not after payroll closed.
Across eight locations, even small improvements in overtime oversight add up. Avoiding just a few unnecessary overtime hours per store each week can represent five-figure annual savings organization-wide, without cutting staff or compromising service. More importantly, the system created consistency.
Managers now:
As Blue Goose expanded, that discipline scaled with the business.
Before HotSchedules, managers relied heavily on texting and social media groups to coordinate coverage. Today, all scheduling communication runs through the platform.
“All communication is through HotSchedules,” Katie said. “We’ve never had the inappropriate communication issues there that we had through text.”
Centralizing communication provided:
As additional stores opened, this structure prevented operational drift.
See how the power of HotSchedules can simplify staffing and sales for happier teams and guests.
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