The copy button does not know about next Thursday
Copying last week’s schedule is wonderfully efficient if next week is planning to behave exactly like last week. Employees, catering orders and customers have a disappointing habit of failing to cooperate with that assumption.
In a conversation recorded in Trophy Club after Food On Demand, Anthony Presley tells Beck that copying a schedule can preserve the very decisions a manager should be reconsidering. Presley, introduced as TimeForge’s CEO and CBS NorthStar’s CTO, describes workforce management as getting the right person into the right place at the right time. The sentence is simple. The work behind it is not.
He recalls an early conversation with an operator who saw no reason to pay for optimized scheduling because managers were already paid to build schedules. That response captures a useful distinction: paying someone to perform a task does not tell you how well the task is being performed, or whether the information available to them is good enough.
The people on the schedule help create the sales
Presley challenges the reflex to respond to cost pressure by reducing front-of-house staffing without considering what those employees contribute. Servers and bartenders are part of the sales experience. They explain the menu, make recommendations and influence the visit. A labor decision can therefore affect both expense and the business’s ability to earn revenue.
His argument is to look at staffing, training and the working environment together. Are people prepared for the job? Does the schedule account for what they need? Does the team have the capacity to deliver the experience the restaurant is selling? These questions extend beyond fitting a certain number of names into a certain number of hours.
For an operator, a useful review would look at the outcome of a shift alongside its labor use. Where did the team struggle? Were the right skills present? Did a predictable rush leave guests waiting? Those observations can help improve the next schedule instead of carrying a weak arrangement forward because it is easy to copy.
The interview does not establish a universal sales increase from a particular staffing model. Presley is arguing for a broader decision frame: understand what the team enables before deciding where to reduce it.
Availability belongs to people with actual calendars
One of Presley’s examples is almost stubbornly ordinary. A person’s availability can change from week to week. A system that only remembers a fixed weekly pattern may leave the manager maintaining a separate collection of messages and sticky notes to keep track of the exceptions.
He describes a calendar-based approach that lets employees express changing availability, then discusses more advanced planning using sales data and productivity expectations. Different businesses, he says, become interested in different capabilities depending on how far their scheduling practices have developed.
That is a useful reminder for a software evaluation. The most impressive feature in a presentation may have little to do with the work currently causing trouble. A restaurant moving from a spreadsheet might first need reliable availability, clear communication and an easier way to maintain the schedule. A more complex organization may need deeper forecasting and operating controls.
Start by watching how the manager actually builds a week. Count the places they must look for information. Ask which exceptions they are holding in memory and which corrections happen after publication. That examination turns a vague desire for better scheduling into specific requirements a prospective tool can be tested against.
Software does not remove the need to lead
The conversation ranges into training, different skill levels and the ways organizations develop frontline employees. Presley says some of the partners he values work in leadership development. That is telling in a conversation with someone whose business is software: improving the tool and improving the team are connected tasks.
A scheduling system can help organize information and apply configured rules. It still depends on the business deciding what good staffing looks like, maintaining useful information and preparing people for the work. A manager needs to understand the recommendation well enough to recognize when something about the coming week is different.
Presley and Beck also discuss compliance and timekeeping at length. The full interview is available below, but its jurisdiction-specific examples should not be treated as current legal instructions. This article focuses on the operating lesson: complex requirements need to be identified during evaluation and checked with the appropriate qualified advisers rather than assumed to be covered by a familiar feature name.
The strongest question to take back to the restaurant is a modest one: what does next week require that last week’s schedule cannot tell us? Answering it brings expected demand, employees’ availability, the team’s skills and the guest experience into the same conversation. That is a more useful starting point than deciding whether the copy button is fast enough.
