Rapha uses Deputy to keep their business spinning and their team performing their best.

Rapha Racing is a high-end cycling brand inspired by heroes like Fausto Coppi (Il Campionissimo: the champion of champions) and Eddy Merckx (winner of 11 Tours): riders who pushed themselves and their gear to the limits up precipitous mountains to fly down the other side, faster and stronger than anyone else.

Launched in the UK in 2004 with just three staff, Rapha now operates a booming ecommerce and cycling media channel, sponsors hundreds of events worldwide and even runs its own cycling adventure tours; though perhaps the smartest move was to hire nearly 400 cycling enthusiasts to operate Rapha Clubhouses in 20+ cities from Amsterdam to Tokyo.

Each Clubhouse has a ride-up café at the front of its retail space where the local team hosts weekly events, including cycling film nights, workshops and plenty of guided rides; plus Rapha frequently sends crews with pop stores to race meets across the state.

“We are a performance brand and sometimes that leads to being seen as elitist but we want to appeal to absolutely everybody who rides a bike,” explains Josh Hunnisett, Assistant Manager at Rapha’s Sydney Clubhouse in Surry Hills. “We produce everything from race wear through to comfortable city wear that you can ride a bike in and then get straight into your job.”

Josh Hunnisett confesses he enjoys working with numbers and formulas, though in his old management roles he was frustrated with clunky ways of tracking employees’ time.

One previous workplace had a time-keeping program that sat on just one computer, so Josh had to export hours into a spreadsheet and manually create a report he could email to payroll.

“Every week someone would forget to clock their hours and I’ve have to call them,” he recalls. “I’d also have to forward an image of the roster to staff – a screenshot off the phone – then text everyone at the end of the week about their timesheets. Obviously wasting everyone’s time.”

Although Josh had the skills to set up formulas in a spreadsheet for pay scales (including public holiday and weekend rates), he found the process incredibly inefficient:

“I used to spend half a day a week (3-5 hours) making sure hours were correct, then amalgamating them by pay bracket into a document for our payroll company. Half a day that would be better spent with the team.”

Fortunately, when Josh started working at the Rapha Sydney Clubhouse the company had Deputy to help manage its team of 16 cyclists working across multiple roles.

“We hire for culture,” Josh explains. “Every staff member at Rapha is passionate about cycling. It’s my intention everyone can fulfil any role from barista to being out on the floor talking about Rapha kit. You can teach someone how to make a coffee or operate the till but you can’t teach someone to be enthusiastic about something. That comes from the heart.”

Josh notes a big benefit of having a multi-skilled team is he can readily set up extra shifts for special events and get them filled without having to chase around:

“__There’s a great feature in Deputy where you can create an open shift and a message will go out in the app to all staff members so whoever gets there first can take it.”

The Rapha Sydney team operates to three schedules, depending on the sales forecast. Josh set up Winter, Summer, and Sales schedule templates in Deputy, which he can quickly copy in a matter of seconds. Each schedule optimises the number of staff members based on previous sales volumes.

The Sale template, for example, has extra retail shifts on the weekend and extra café shifts in the mornings to handle big rides coming into the Rapha Clubhouse to look at sales stock.

Josh has also set up parameters for each staff profile in Deputy to help manage individual requirements including:

• Specialist skills (e.g. barista) and training plans – “When you do a busy café roster for example, Deputy prompts you to make sure you have someone with coffee making skills”.
• Recommended hours for the week – “There’ll be a warning triangle if someone is over-rostered telling us this person might become stressed”.
• Availability for extra shifts or if an employee has blocked out time for other commitments – “It’s especially useful for casuals who might be working two or three jobs or anyone with study or family commitments”.

Rapha Sydney Clubhouse team members like the convenience of the Deputy app for managing their work lives, including seeing upcoming shifts, being able to request fewer or more shifts, and the simplicity of clicking a button to track hours and location.

“Deputy makes life so much simpler than any other method I’ve used,” says Josh. “Obviously I have absolute trust in my staff, though having GPS location recorded when someone clocks on or off means I can confirm someone is working offsite at an event such as L’Etape, or if they’ve forgotten to clock off.”

“Approving everyone’s hours at the end of the week is just a five-minute job. When I check the timesheets I can see the GPS dot of where they’ve worked, make sure everything is correct and it will export those hours out to our payroll program all at the click of a button. I do love spreadsheets though I love the time I save using Deputy.”