From Solo Developer to Venture Scale Entrepreneur: Jordan Boesch, CEO of 7shifts (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you just do more of the same for the next few years?

Jordan Boesch: Yes. There were some interesting moments. We hit about 30 people. You start to feel these inflection points where things start to get rocky. It’s a lack of process for things. As a startup, you thrive off of not having processes.

As we grew, I could feel that starting to happen at 30 people. We brought in a consultant to help us in putting in some lightweight frameworks to help guide the business. That was helpful for us. When we hit 50 people, we had almost a full-time facilitator that was part of our team that was doing planning with us and helping with some lightweight frameworks.

We are now 300 people. We still have this person today. The lightweight things that we have implemented into our process, we call it the 7shifts operating system.

Sramana Mitra: You got to build your own software and processes for your company to operate smoothly. Are the employees in your province?

Jordan Boesch: 80% are in Saskatchewan and Toronto. The other 20% are in Calgary, Vancouver, Montreal, Atlanta, and New York. It’s everywhere now. It’s allowed us to perform at a different level.

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise any more money after that first round in 2016?

Jordan Boesch: Yes, we raised a Series A with Napier Park. They’re really great, experienced company builders. After that, we raised Series B with EHI. Then this year [2022] in January, we closed an $80 million round with Softbank. A quarter of our entire company was added last quarter. It’s been a fun journey.

Sramana Mitra: What revenue level are you at?

Jordan Boesch: What I can say is we’re used by one in 25 restaurant workers in the US today.

Sramana Mitra: From being a hands-on developer to being an entrepreneur, what do you think have been the most important things that you’ve done to make that transition?

Jordan Boesch: I don’t know if it’s necessarily about what I’ve done. I think it’s more important to have certain traits or behaviors. Resilience is really important. Self-awareness is very important. Getting a good understanding of where and how you need to fill those gaps is critical. Also, the ability to make tough calls.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you learn at the accelerator?

Jordan Boesch: We learned a lot about what it takes to build a big company that’s going to drive impact. You’re working around teams that are just working all the time. You leave at midnight and come back at six in the morning. Everyone talks about work-life balance. Running a startup that’s trying to compete on the global stage, that’s not our reality.

Sramana Mitra: Startups don’t offer work-life balance. What I observed in your story is you learned positioning at the accelerator. As part of the accelerator, it seems like you did a pivot to focus on the restaurant segment. Laser-sharp positioning is one of the keys to achieving higher velocity growth. It seems like that’s one of the things that you worked on.

Jordan Boesch: We definitely felt that even when we left. We looked around us. You learn through osmosis through feedback. We were seeing good early signs of success with restaurants. We just didn’t have as many of them as we wanted. The features were almost there. As soon as we made those leaps in doing integrated work with restaurant technology, it started the cycle.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : From Solo Developer to Venture Scale Entrepreneur: Jordan Boesch, CEO of 7shifts
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