Take The Hassle Out Of Scheduling with Ready Set Work and Twilio SMS

Take The Hassle Out Of Scheduling with Ready Set Work and Twilio SMS

If you’ve ever worked in a bar or a restaurant,  you know that the one constant is change. Menus, specials, and schedules are always subject to change with or without notice. Whether you’re a bar back or a business owner, it’s difficult to get in touch with staff to cover a shift, especially when you’re working with a paper schedule. Ready Set Work is hoping to make that process a little easier by ditching the paper schedule in favor of online schedules and SMS notifications.

Ready Set Work uses online scheduling and SMS notification to tame schedules. Once a business owner sets up their account and imports employee and schedule information they can switch shifts, reach out to employees, and handle scheduling conflicts all in one place. If there’s an open shift, the owner can send a text to their employees notifying them, and get a reply quickly.

We spoke to Jacob Dreyfuss, Co-Founder and Product Manager of Ready Set Work, about how his company works and what’s next for the company.

You’ve managed quick-serve restaurants. After seeing how hard scheduling employees and communicating  with employees  in the service industry is, how did you come up with such a simple service like Ready Set Work?   

When Joel and I sat down and really thought about the core of the issue, we saw that communication was really where the chaos ensued. The paper schedule was merely a static, outdated virtual meeting place for our employees. We knew that if we could bring that paper to life we could help a lot of people save a lot of time and even enable them to make more money! After all, we were using technology for everything in our business–why not the schedule?

We profiled Ready Set Work almost a year ago, what’s happened with the company since then?  

You mentioned you sent over 250,000 messages to employees about their work schedules, that’s huge! What differences are companies and employees seeing with this kind of communication?  

We are now well past 420,000 messages and picking up speed as we go! Companies find that employees will typically respond to a text message about an open shift within 10 seconds. As you can imagine, this is a lot faster than the old never-ending game of phone tag. Do people even check voicemail anymore?

Also, now that these text messages “live” within our app, no longer do managers have to scroll through massive text message conversations on their phone to remember what an employee said. We have a file on every employee and managers can easily look through all conversations that they ever had with an employee whether it was via email or text message!

What’s next for Ready Set Work?

In the next 6 months we are hoping to double the size of our distribution network while working with Twilio as you expand through Europe. Hopefully we can continue to work together to bring innovative solutions to businesses around the world.

Check out ReadySetWork here.