Golden Lion Group

Established in the early 1980's, family-run pub company Golden Lion Group began life as The Longman of Wilmington. It has since grown to be a group of 7 pubs based across Brighton and Hove.

The group prides itself on delivering high standards of service across the business, and something that influences this heavily is having the right number of staff with the right skillset working at the right times.

When Golden Lion Group first started out they were using spreadsheets to schedule staff time. But this proved ineffective at ensuring the perfect level of staff were on hand to meet demand; especially as the business began to grow. Rotas were being copied from previous weeks and forecasting sales was done based purely on intuition, rather than past data or upcoming trends.

The group wanted to move on from this laborious approach and be able to build more informed staff schedules. At the same time they wanted to give employees a way to easily view their upcoming shifts and generally give the business greater control and visibility over staff rotas. So they set about finding a cloud-based solution to help them build more accurate rotas and in less time, without over complicating the scheduling process for managers.

Selecting the perfect partner

After considering a number of suppliers Golden Lion Group decided to partner with Rotaready.

Rotaready is the perfect balance between intelligence and simplicity. This combined with the transparency they provide over their development pipeline gave us great confidence it was a scalable solution that would be able to grow with us. They were the obvious choice when it came to selecting our workforce management partner.

Wanting to reap the benefits of Rotaready as quickly as possible, the group chose an internal champion to work alongside Rotaready's customer success team. The result was a seamless rollout with all 7 sites up and running in one week.

Above and beyond expectations

Golden Lion Group's initial ambitions were to build more informed staff schedules and give employees a way of viewing their upcoming shifts, but it soon became apparent that Rotaready could deliver on far more.

Managers were saving a huge amount of time when building and sharing staff rotas and tracking attendance, employees embraced the Rotaready app to view and manage their upcoming shifts from wherever they were, and head office were benefiting greatly from increased visibility over the availability of General Managers and Rotaready's advanced cost control tools. The benefits that came with Rotaready were above and beyond what the group had expected.

Since implementing Rotaready the business has seen a vast improvement in its labour percentage thanks to accurate attendance monitoring. Staff retention has also improved, and crucially wage overspend is under control thanks to accurate sales forecasts. The combination of all of these factors is saving the business over £350 every week.

Not only has Rotaready has helped us save a significant amount on unnecessary wage spend, we've been able to better deploy over 16 hours per week across the business through smarter processes and also boost our revenue through better visibility of forecasts. As a result we've seen a 577% return on our investment.

Integrating systems across the business

Rotaready are continuing to work closely with Golden Lion Group as they grow. Next on the agenda is enabling some of Rotaready's free integrations. Golden Lion Group use Flow as its training system and ICRTouch for EPOS, both of whom Rotaready have already built real-time integrations with.

Switching on Flow will mean employee accounts in Rotaready will automatically sync to Flow, removing the need to manually update new joiners and leavers in both systems. For ICRTouch, hourly sales data will automatically feed into Rotaready for every venue and revenue stream, and be immediately available across all of Rotaready's cost and labour control tools.