Juggling a bunch of schedules at a hotel or restaurant can be a hassle – and inefficient. But a company in the Dallas area has carved out a slice of the business software space to tackle those headaches.
UniFocus in Carrollton is helping customers around the world by offering digital tools, along with consultative smarts, to assign the right amount of workers to the right amount of hours on any given day, according to the CEO Mark Heymann.
“It’s a very complex algorithm, but we make it simple for the manager,” he said. “Once the manager says this is how much business we expect to do, the next thing the manager sees is a proposed schedule.”
The company, started in 1998, has built up a loyal following in the hotel industry, Heymann said. Now, he’s looking at new markets, especially restaurants and casinos in the coming year.
To help with next chapter of expansion, Heymann is considering an equity funding round that would likely be somewhere between 25 percent and 30 percent of the business. UniFocus has used some debt tied to equity in the past, but this would be the first pure investment with equity.
“We’ve been very fortunate in our competitive adventures in the market, but there’s a lot more we can do,” Heymann said.
UniFocus has been talking to some parties about an equity investment, he said.
Some of the investments include more sales folks and programming teams. In addition, he’d like to open a new office in Western Europe, adding to locales that include Denver and Croatia. There are 100 countries where the company's services are used, he said.
The company has attracted an impressive list of customers, including some Four Seasons and Ritz-Carltons hotels.
It is set to grow sales, likely expanding by about 30 percent by the end of 2020 from the end of 2018, he said. Revenue grew by about 38 percent over the past five years.
UniFocus' employee count — it currently has about 100 — could grow by about 20 percent in the next couple of years.
It’s not as if there aren’t a lot of human resources- software companies out there. But UniFocus has found a sweet spot, he said.
It’s a much simpler process for managers in a hotel or restaurant. That person just needs to tell the system how much business is expected.
It “calculates the amount of staff you need, the number of hours you need, by period of the day," he said. “It then determines an array of shift that are needed and then schedules all your people automatically.”
In addition, there’s an analysis piece of the business that breaks down a customers’ most crucial needs.
Efficiencies are there to be gained, he said. He pointed to an example with a customer that could use fewer workers by reducing the frequency in mowing. The grass looked just fine – and the savings went to the client.
The company has continued to improve its technology as well. That includes a shift to the cloud and a mobile service that lets workers – say servers at a restaurant – update the system with their own availability from their smartphones.
He said there are also opportunities ahead as managers face labor pressure. Maybe they think they need 10 people on a day for a particular job, but that may not be completely possible.
“If the best you’re ever going to have is seven, then you have two choices,” he said. “You can either continue with the perspective that I’m always understaffed and then thereby diminish your service quality, or you can rethink what you do.”
