Axial Shift – a restaurant operations software provider transforming the restaurant industry by providing all-staff level data access and team member competitions and rewards, recently announced a new partnership and $4 million in seed funding from Silverton Partners.
Axial Shift sets up gamified incentives that empower and engage frontline managers and staff while providing actionable insights through real-time data from POS systems. The platform aims to simplify restaurant management and make frontline jobs more appealing, thereby improving staff retention rates.
Managers can foster healthy competition among team members, create contests, and set goals for frontline teams. Staff can see in real-time how they are performing throughout their shift. And they can earn badges, chase monetary incentives, and create winning streaks. Plus, their efforts are benchmarked across teams to create an experience that makes work feel more like play and increased sales feel more like personal accomplishments. The result is empowered frontline managers, engaged staff, and increased sales across locations.
Through the Axial Shift platform, managers can also run their shifts from their phones, showing real-time labor actuals vs. forecast vs. ideal. Also, they can understand tip percentages in real-time, review the sales mix, and see how targeted items are selling by team member or location.
Axial’s Shift platform also includes integrated tools that allow operators to consolidate their current tech stack, like solutions for tip pooling, improved online scheduling, messaging across the entire organization, time and attendance, and access to a marketplace that allows them to integrate with popular apps, such as Airtable, Google Apps, Slack, and more.
The company’s leadership is a trio of seasoned professionals from the restaurant industry. Justin Buckley, CEO and President, and Matt Woodings, Chief Technology Officer, were founding members of the executive team at HotSchedules, which served more than 70,000 restaurants in 27 countries. And Ellis Winstanley, who serves as Executive Chairman, founded Axial Shift to solve firsthand challenges operating eight restaurants, including Austin’s famous El Arroyo.
KEY QUOTES:
“With Axial Shift, we’re not only improving the quality and timeliness of information we give to our operations teams, we are reimagining ways to drive new value!”
— Brian Pearson, Axial Shift customer – who is CTO of Mendocino Farms
“We’re excited to partner with Silverton Partners. This reinforces our mission to bring the next phase of innovation to restaurant operations and will expand our platform to help more restaurants increase sales and make work more enjoyable and rewarding for their teams.”
“This funding is really a tribute to the hard work of the Axial Shift team and their continued enthusiasm for what we do. I could not be more pleased and proud to have the recognition and support of Silverton, and I look forward to the next phase of our business growth!”
— Justin Buckley, CEO and President
“With Axial, we see an extremely exciting opportunity to truly change an industry for the better. Axial brings a new approach to doing business that drives higher strategic sales growth across locations – and they are doing it with a leadership team that has a proven track record in this industry across the last 20+ years.”
— Mike Dodd, General Partner with Silverton Partners
