Mint uses Deputy's recipe for success to nourish and manage their growing business

Serving a menu of locally grown produce, and nutritious, balanced meals, Mint Organics has quickly found its groove in Cronulla’s cafe scene. Founded just months ago in March 2014 by Deputy Co-founder Steve Shelley and his partner Kylie Daly, Mint’s mission is simple: to provide healthy, organic whole foods to locals. “We focus on healthy dishes and great flavours,” explains Daly.“

On the menu, you’ll find a delicious array of healthy food such as veggie lentil burgers, home baked vegetable salads, wholesome chicken and salad Paninis. There are also scrumptious Paleo muffins and healthy raw desserts, cold-pressed juices and smoothies, and a range of organic teas and coffee.

Open seven days a week from 7:00am, the cafe is busiest between 8:30am and 2:00pm and has already established a loyal following. In the mornings, organic egg and bacon rolls are a firm favourite with the commuter coffee crowd. While after-school drop-offs, mums go for the smashed avocado and organic poached eggs on sourdough with their daily fix of organic coffee.

Serving an average of 250 customers each day, Mint employs a team of 23 people to prepare and serve the food and provide customer service. While there are only 4 different levels of seniority and pay grades from customer service up to supervisor, Mint has to manage significant differences in hourly rates depending on the age of the employee.

Operating and succeeding in Sydney’s sophisticated coffee scene, means serving the finest espresso, every time. As consistent 100% quality is critical to customer loyalty, Mint’s trained baristas have perfected a pour that’s as smooth as silk and sweet as honey.

While great coffee, delicious organic food, and friendly service keep customers coming back, behind the scenes, Mint employs the best of breed, cloud-based management tools to keep the business ticking along.

Fortunately for the founders of Mint, they have never had to endure the pain of scheduling rosters in the traditional manual way. “As the co-founder of Deputy, running Mint on the Deputy platform from the get-go was a no-brainer,” comments Shelley. We’ve never had to resort to using manual tools like Excel, the phone, a pencil and pad, and a calculator to run Mint’s roster.”

“You see, even though Mint only has six or seven shifts per day, we still need to consider the various roles and responsibilities and pair them with staff availability, cost, training, stress levels and specific skill sets. And as we have a broad range of ages within our team, performing all the required payroll calculations is very involved.”

“Deputy does all of these things for us. Deputy seamlessly performs all the behind the scenes payroll calculations and award interpretations so I never need to worry about who is getting paid what and for when. It’s very simple.”

Daly agrees. “Rostering with Deputy means that the right person is always recommended for the right job. Deputy automatically takes cost, training, stress levels and availability of our staff into consideration and makes sure the right person is matched to the task. Once we complete our rosters, we simply hit the publish button and all our employees are instantly informed of their next roster period and when and where they will be working.”

Enhanced efficiency

Deputy’s intelligent rostering solution also saves the business time. “Approving time sheets, recording and managing staff performance, allocating tasks and communicating with our team are all very easy to do,” comments Daly. “With Deputy, it’s all incredibly smooth, efficient and entirely paperless.

“In addition, our employees love using Deputy. They all have the Deputy App on their smartphones and can see when they are scheduled to work and in what area, and whether any particular tasks have been assigned to them. Everyone has full access to their rosters as well as their pending or approved timesheets. They can self-manage their own profile information, unavailability and leave requests.”

Daly adds, “Communication on Deputy is excellent. Everyone is well informed and therefore highly reliable. Our time and attendance records are minute perfect.”

Easy integration

As a cloud-based tool, Deputy collaborates with other leading cloud solutions which give Mint an integrated business management platform. Shelley comments, “Deputy Integrates with our Point of Sale (POS) system Kounta, allowing us to track our real-time sales information. This helps us to roster the right number of staff members to service the sales that we are expecting at particular times of the day. This data ensures our staff overheads never exceed our expected sales. We use Xero for Financials and Payroll which Deputy’s timesheet data feeds directly into and we also use Tyro for credit card payments, which syncs into our POS.

“Our complete setup was quick, with virtually nothing to install and, other than the credit card terminal and the iPad for POS, there was no additional hardware required.”

The experience of becoming a customer of Deputy has been an important one for Shelley. “Using Deputy in our organic café and takeaway food business has been a unique opportunity for me to experience Deputy from a customer’s point of view. Kylie and I now are now living the life of a typical Deputy customer. We understand the many challenges of running a hospitality business, and can also see firsthand the value that Deputy provides.”

Future plans

While Mint is still just a fledgling business, Shelley sees the setup as a blueprint for future growth. “If we choose to expand and build additional Mint Cafés in the future, replicating our current operation could not be easier.”

“In addition,” says Daly, “By using the insights we obtain from our cloud platform, we will be able to use them to guide us to improve our operations and gain more business efficiencies.”