St. Petersbark have more time to play thanks to Deputy

Inspired out of founder Krista Schmidt’s love for all things dogs, St. Petersbark is a natural pet market offering everything from hand-selected natural dog and cat food, treats (including the store’s own all-natural, dehydrated treats), pet accessories, and services like nail trimmings and obedience training to pets in St. Petersburg, Florida. Launched in 2014, Krista began selling St. Petersbark’s homemade dog treats at local farmers’ markets. After a year of success, she opened the St. Petersbark natural pet market in January 2015 and hired her first employees the same year.

As the founder of a fairly new small business, it’s no surprise that Krista was responsible for all the daily tasks to keep the market running, including everything from accounting to IT to inventory management to helping customers and more. With these tasks piling up and the business thriving, Krista soon realized it was time to hire employees. However, she knew that completing the hiring process, providing efficient training, and effectively managing her team would even add more to her workload.

Before St. Petersbark hired its first employee, Krista began looking into workforce management solutions that would help her manage her workload and employees right out of the gate. She hoped with the right solution that she would be able to streamline processes, allowing her to begin taking a step back, and maybe even enjoy some much needed Saturdays off.

After coming across a variety of solutions, Krista decided to implement Deputy at St. Petersbark due to its cost-effectiveness, ability to help train and manage first-time hires, and its capability to ease admin processes, including a high-level of integration with the market’s existing payroll provider, Gusto.

The Benefits

Quick, Seamless Scheduling for Employees

By using Deputy from the get-go, Krista never had to deal with the headaches that often come with paper scheduling. In fact, she says she doesn’t even have to think about scheduling. With employees’ availability accessible within a click in Deputy’s interface, Krista can set a time to do her scheduling for the week and complete it within minutes straight from her phone. She notes, “Many of my employees are still in school. I love that they can upload their class schedules and availability straight into Deputy where I can easily access it for scheduling, rather than sifting through paper notes and emails.”

Enhanced Team Communication and Training

With Deputy’s News Feed and Tasking features, the St. Petersbark team is able to stay in constant communication with each other. Whether it’s posting a message inquiring about one’s schedule, asking someone to switch shifts, providing a company update on growth, sending status updates on how the day went at the store and more, the team never misses a beat. For example, if the store is out of stock on a product, Krista can utilize the News Feed feature to educate employees on the proper alternatives to recommend to customers. The Tasking feature also helps Krista streamline communication between employees for training purposes.

Superior Team Culture

In addition to enhanced communication and training, Deputy also helps Krista maintain a superior level of team culture at St. Petersbark. In fact, she mentions that the team posts Happy Birthday messages to one another via the News Feed and that she uses the platform as a way to share positive feedback and reinforce her appreciation to her team.

Streamlined Accuracy of Payroll Processing

Deputy’s integration with Gusto also enables Krista to automatically maintain accurate employee time by instantly rolling up employee timesheets gathered in Deputy into Gusto’s payroll process. According to Krista, “The process is so simple. Rather than carving out time to do payroll on Sundays, I can run payroll on Saturdays after everyone clocks out in just about 10 minutes. It saves me so much time and mental energy, and I’ve never had any issues.”

Improved Daily Workflow and Peace of Mind with Mobile

With Deputy’s mobile access, Krista is able to ensure tasks and processes are more streamlined and completed efficiently. For instance, while the store is the main focus of the business, the team still attends local farmers’ markets and events at other locations. Employees can then use the Deputy mobile app to clock in and clock out no matter where they may be, rather than emailing Krista to update their timesheets. Further, mobile access also helps give Krista peace of mind.

“I’m beginning to step back and give myself more time off,” says Krista. “It can be scary, but with Deputy, I know my employees are doing what they are supposed to, and I can quickly be contacted if needed. It definitely gives me peace of mind knowing that the store is running properly when I’m not physically there.”

The Results

By engaging with Deputy as soon as St. Petersbark’s first employees were hired, Krista was able to avoid the pain points most businesses typically face, including spending hours upon hours manually setting schedules, transferring timesheets into payroll, scrambling to find last-minute workers to cover shifts and more. Instead, Deputy ensured a seamless transition from running a solo business to managing a team of employees. Ultimately, Krista, along with all of St. Petersbark employees enjoys the benefits of the platform including:

• Streamlined scheduling, saving founder time and money.
• Enhanced team communication, trainings, and culture through Deputy’s News Feed and Tasking features.
• Efficient, error-free payroll reporting process and insight into analytics through Deputy’s integration with Gusto.
• Improved daily workflow and peace of mind with Deputy’s mobile app capabilities.