Jordan Boesch’s father had a recurring problem in the back of his Quiznos restaurants. Every week, he needed a schedule. Every week, the people on it had lives that refused to fit neatly into the squares. Availability changed. Requests accumulated. A finished roster could begin coming apart as soon as somebody needed to swap a shift. His son had been learning to build websites. Here was something worth putting on one.
The first tool let his father upload a spreadsheet for employees to download. That was the extent of the proposition. A family business had a repetitive chore; a young programmer thought he could make it easier. There is something pleasantly modest about the arrangement. The customer was close enough that he could see the problem for himself.
Boesch now runs 7shifts from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The company says its software serves more than 55,000 restaurants. Hiring, training, scheduling, payroll, and keeping teams together have become parts of the same project. The original question remains recognizable: how much of a manager’s week should disappear into organizing everybody else’s?
A family favor with a login
Restaurant work was familiar territory. Boesch grew up working in his father’s business. He saw the inconvenience from inside it, where scheduling meant reconciling actual people with the hours a restaurant needed covering. A spreadsheet could hold the answer for a particular moment. Keeping everybody informed when the answer changed was another job.
He taught himself to code and kept improving the tool. In his account, it became a passion project before it became his full-time work. The slow development matters. Company histories give 7shifts a 2014 founding date, but the experiment that preceded it ran for years. The useful thing existed before the founder had settled on what sort of business it might become.
For employees, a schedule is unusually consequential paperwork. It tells you when you can make other plans and when you need to be somewhere. A late change travels into the rest of your week. Boesch’s business grew around giving that information somewhere better to live.
An education in useful things
His route into software began with gaming. Building websites for the teams he played with gave him a reason to learn how the web worked. There was an audience, however small, and something to make for it. He later went east to Ottawa for a multimedia development diploma, studying a mixture of programming, design, audio, and video.
At Algonquin College, he was also building websites and taking on outside work. Afterward came software jobs and consulting, with the restaurant project continuing beside them. Learning a new technique could mean another improvement to the application. The project supplied a place to put the education to work.
His public code offers another view of that period. On GitHub, Boesch’s repositories include Gritter, a notification plugin for jQuery, and jSquares, an image gallery. These are small, practical pieces of web development. A person encountering them without the company biography would meet a programmer making things other programmers could use.
That impulse is still audible when he talks about the business. He enjoys putting something into the world and finding out whether it helps. Feedback gives the next piece of work a purpose.
The trip west, and the trip home
Early selling was less elegant than the software might suggest. In Ottawa, Boesch carried printed screenshots into restaurants because he did not have a laptop for demonstrations. He could turn a page to show the next screen. He remembers closing zero deals that way. As a sales technique, the paper prototype had considerable room for improvement.
There were better signs elsewhere. His first customer outside his father’s business, he recalls, was an A&W in Richmond, British Columbia. Somebody had found the product, signed up, and paid. He called afterward to learn more. A stranger’s willingness to use the thing changed the scale of the experiment.
By 2013, he had left his software job to pursue 7shifts full-time. With his co-founders, he went to the Bay Area for an accelerator. They found customers, made mistakes, learned from complaints, and raised about US$150,000 in angel money. Then came a decision that gave the company’s story its particular geography: they took the money back to Saskatchewan.
The Bay Area had provided a useful education and access to capital. Operating there was expensive. Returning to Canada let the team stretch its resources and concentrate on building. Boesch’s headquarters eventually took root in Saskatoon. The customers could be elsewhere; the work could happen in Saskatchewan.
The return also makes the story less tidy than a one-way pilgrimage toward a famous technology address. He went west, got something useful from the experience, and came home to continue. That seems a sensible use of a trip.
A smaller market, a longer to-do list
At first, the software served several kinds of businesses. That breadth created a problem of its own: a general scheduling tool had to answer to very different working days. Boesch and the team chose restaurants. Specialization let them understand the customer in greater detail and build around the systems that customer already used.
He has described connections with companies such as Toast, TouchBistro, Revel, and Square as part of 7shifts’ advantage. A restaurant’s sales and staffing belong in the same conversation. When the systems can exchange information, the person making the roster has more to work with than intuition and last week’s file.
He also understood the cost of getting staffing wrong. Too many people on a quiet shift consume the gains from additional sales. Too few leave the team stretched and customers waiting. The schedule sits between the restaurant’s economics and its employees’ expectations. A tool built for that setting needs to take both seriously.
- Hire
- Train
- Schedule
- Pay
- Retain
The weekly roster became the starting point for a wider set of connected jobs.
Over time, the product extended into the surrounding work. The same employee who checks a shift needs to communicate with colleagues and eventually receive pay. For Boesch, following that sequence offered a coherent way to expand. Each additional task brought another opportunity to remove a little administrative friction.
The programmer gets a bigger team
In February 2022, 7shifts announced a US$80 million Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with existing investors Ten Coves Capital and Enlightened Hospitality Investments participating. At the time, the company reported 27,000 restaurant locations. The funding was intended to expand the team and build across the employee lifecycle.
The investor list included a connection to Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group through Enlightened Hospitality Investments. Boesch has also hosted Meyer for a discussion about hiring. A business that began with arranging people’s hours was now spending time on how restaurants choose those people in the first place.
Running the growing company required Boesch to move away from doing everything himself. He describes progressing through coding, work inside the business, and work on the business. Product remained a strong interest. The person who enjoyed solving a problem directly had to become useful through other people’s decisions, too.
“I love coding.”
Jordan Boesch, 2024
He supplied an amusing example of that transition in 2024. A joking GitHub comment about an old library left developers wondering whether the CEO was serious. The confusion reached the head of engineering. Boesch says his access was revoked. A founder had discovered an unexpectedly efficient way to delegate: become a questionable influence on the code review.
The episode carries a management lesson without requiring the joke to become a seminar. Familiarity does not automatically expand with headcount. The programmer may hear a harmless wisecrack; the engineer reading the CEO’s comment may hear a new priority. Growing a team changes the meaning of being in the room.
Ask while the shift still matters
By 2024, Boesch was talking about employee feedback as an operational tool. Asking people how a shift went could reveal problems while a manager still had a chance to respond. Waiting until someone left meant waiting until much of the useful information had arrived too late.
He was also enthusiastic about payroll and tip payouts becoming easier to use. The objective was to let operators do more of the work themselves, without a difficult setup consuming the time the product was meant to save. There is a fairly strict test hidden in that ambition: does the tool actually make an ordinary day easier?
In a January 2025 discussion of 7shifts’ workforce report, he returned to flexibility. Operators need to understand their business requirements, then fit employees’ availability against them. He also emphasized explaining how someone can learn and progress. The conversation had travelled a long way from uploading a spreadsheet, while remaining concerned with the same people.
The next lesson
The 2026 employee study gathered 1,074 responses from U.S. restaurant workers between February and March. In his accompanying note, Boesch urged operators to ask employees what they need rather than organize a team around assumptions. The insistence fits the history: observe the work, hear from the person doing it, improve the process.
Training has become part of that effort. In an August 2026 podcast appearance, he argued for learning that continues beyond onboarding. In September, 7shifts’ Employee Training feature moved out of beta. The company’s product update described courses available on web and mobile, additional quiz types, and tools for assigning and tracking lessons.
The details are ordinary by design. A lesson gets assigned. A shift gets checked. A worker gets paid. Boesch has spent years finding software problems inside those actions. The spreadsheet that once helped his father share a roster led him into a much larger collection of restaurant chores. There are still plenty left on the list.