How to Retain Restaurant Employees With an Employee-First Culture

Rev Cianco:
Welcome to the Restaurants Grow podcast, where you get tips, tricks, and tactics on how to grow your restaurant business. Today in the show, we welcome Anthony Presley, CEO of Timeforge, a workforce management platform built specifically to help restaurants unify scheduling, labor compliance, and team engagement with one single tool.

Rev Cianco:
Anthony has a very unique founder story. He started in software engineering with game hacking, went on to found multiple tech companies, and ultimately built Timeforge to solve real-world labor challenges at the intersection of both HR and restaurant ops. He’s a big believer in data-driven decision-making and empathy-led leadership, especially in this industry where manager tenure keeps shrinking and technology adoption isn’t always consistent.

Rev Cianco:
Fun fact: Anthony grew up all over the world, including a few years in Cairo in Egypt, and also has a blue and gold macaw, which is also known as a pirate bird that can live up to 80 years.

Anthony Presley:
Thank you so much for having me. That’s a heck of an intro. I’m going to start paying you to do that for me anywhere I go.

Rev Cianco:
I feel like you have an AI tool that can already do that better than me. Let’s get right to this. What’s the one thing restaurants get right when it comes to retaining employees?

Anthony Presley:
When you’re talking about hourly employees moving their way up, there’s usually a lot of opportunities, even with small chains. There’s a lot of “to get to that next level, this is what you should do.” Although we talk a lot about turnover, that turnover helps create upward momentum for many employees. If you want to move up, you can often do that relatively easily.

Anthony Presley:
The other thing restaurants get right is training. A lot of states and the National Restaurant Association and state associations do a lot of training. There’s focus on training to drive consistency. In other industries we operate in, there are often poor training programs.

Rev Cianco:
So you’re saying there’s good training available in our industry and other industries should take a look at what we do?

Anthony Presley:
I think that’s true—especially around food safety, OSHA, slip and falls, and high-risk areas. You can always have more, but we do a lot that other industries don’t.

Rev Cianco:
What sets the top restaurants apart in keeping employees?

Anthony Presley:
Paying employees well matters. It also matters that they’re not commuting a long way. If I have a low wage job and I’m driving 20 miles, that’s not going to help.

Anthony Presley:
Once you get through dollars and cents, it’s about opportunity: soft skills, coaching, leadership training, employee reviews, continual feedback. Some brands consistently produce general managers who go on to build and run other brands. When you treat the team like disposable “turn and churn,” you end up with a crummy experience all around.

Rev Cianco:
I worked with an independent group that helped general managers “graduate” into new locations. They could also borrow staff across restaurants because the systems were similar.

Anthony Presley:
That’s smart. Standardization makes staffing more flexible. Unique menus and service styles can make that harder because training isn’t transferable.

Rev Cianco:
How important is forecasting sales when it comes to staffing?

Anthony Presley:
You have minimum staffing levels to operate. But knowing the sales forecast helps with budgeting monthly, then weekly, then daily and daypart. I don’t know how you build a schedule or know who to hire without a reasonable forecast.

Anthony Presley:
Saving a couple points in labor is material across a $1–$5 million business. It’s small changes—coming in 15 minutes later, going home 10 minutes earlier. Not huge to staff, but huge over a year.

Rev Cianco:
Is gut feel part of why we got here?

Anthony Presley:
Gut feel is good if you’ve been there a long time. You know the ebbs and flows. But COVID changed the game. Manager tenure dropped hard. New managers don’t know what’s going on. You’re asking them to manage the most controllable expenses: inventory and labor.

Anthony Presley:
A common issue is managers copy last week’s schedule. Weeks are different—sick calls, to-go orders, catering. Copy/paste isn’t control.

Rev Cianco:
If you don’t have a tool, what’s the right way to forecast?

Anthony Presley:
Don’t overcomplicate it. If you’re paid $50 an hour and you spend three hours forecasting, you just burned $150 to save $70. Be careful.

Anthony Presley:
You can do most of it in Excel. Look at last week and last year. Break down dayparts. Excel and Google can do basic regression—select cells and drag. It won’t be perfect, but it’s better than guessing.

Anthony Presley:
Then validate with outcomes: reviews, tips, and guest experience. If labor drops a little and tips/reviews hold, you may be fine. If it flips, add labor back.

Rev Cianco:
Has retention gotten harder since COVID?

Anthony Presley:
Yes. Retention is harder now. Priorities shifted with Gen A and Gen Z. Benefits matter, sometimes in surprising ways. Earned wage access changed expectations—Uber and Amazon made immediate pay feel normal.

Rev Cianco:
Is retention as simple as paying everybody more?

Anthony Presley:
Pay matters. A recent report talked about Costco raising wages significantly because great employees take care of guests better than SOPs. You see it in table service: servers making strong money don’t leave. A big portion of workers live near the poverty line—raising wages would change retention.

Rev Cianco:
How do you manage employee satisfaction?

Anthony Presley:
Great managers walk around and talk. You can also use technology: when someone clocks out, ask a quick question. If it was a bad shift, ask why.

Anthony Presley:
But you have to act on it. Tell them you heard them. It’s like customer surveys—closing the loop matters.

Rev Cianco:
Do people get shocked when they see those first results?

Anthony Presley:
Some do. Forward-thinking teams aren’t shocked. Others think they’re crushing it and find out they’re not. It’s like 360 feedback.

Rev Cianco:
For an independent restaurant, whose responsibility is forecasting and employee sentiment?

Anthony Presley:
Nobody opens a restaurant because they love dealing with this. In SMB it often falls to finance or payroll. But I’d give it to marketing. You’re doing external marketing—turn similar tools on your internal team.

Rev Cianco:
What’s the best way to find you?

Anthony Presley:
LinkedIn—type my name. Or timeforge.com.

Rev Cianco:
What do restaurants like most about the platform?

Anthony Presley:
Change management is hard. Sometimes it helps to “blame the tool” when hours change. That makes it easier to adjust long-standing habits.

Anthony Presley:
Second is enforcing the schedule. A lot of the industry still doesn’t use electronic scheduling and enforcement. Do those basics and you’ll make back one or two points of labor.

Rev Cianco:
That’s all the time we have today. Thanks, Anthony. If you have questions, reach out to Anthony. Please hit subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you listen. Thank you so much.