Upserve doubles their leads and traffic with Teamwork

Upserve offers an all-in-one restaurant management software solution that provides a point of sale, payment processing, reservation systems, inventory management, and valuable insights that help guide restaurants as they make better decisions for their guests and their bottom line. The team at Upserve operates out of offices in Providence and Denver (USA).

Upserve has been using Teamwork to help manage over 90 active projects that their marketing team uses to serve over 9,000 independent restaurants across America. We spoke with SEO manager Seth Steinman to find out how they use Teamwork to track the details, better serve restaurateurs, and keep expanding their business.

Numerous platforms

Upserve was founded as an all-purpose payment processing company that any business could use. After finding their niche in the restaurant business, the company developed leading-edge software and hardware for full-service restaurateurs who wanted an all-in-one management platform.

When Seth joined the company in January 2018, he noticed that team members often had tasks spread across three or four different project management platforms, which made locating and sharing files complicated, to say the least. “There were a lot of emails, Slack messages, and meetings to learn the status of projects. Plus, it was difficult to develop best practices when everyone had their own preferred organization tool,” said Seth.

No one intended to have so many platforms. When Upserve’s team and restaurant base was small, it wasn’t a big deal for everyone to have their own system for organizing their work. However, while Upserve’s success enabled them to tackle more projects and increase the scope of their work, all while adding stakeholders, agencies, freelancers, and contractors, it also meant that their mish-mash of project management platforms wasn’t scalable.

Something more substantial

Fortunately, Seth had used Teamwork in his previous job at another agency, Attorneysync. He knew how much more effective the entire company could be on a single platform, so he started lobbying his own team: marketing.

The marketing team now uses Teamwork to help coordinate two types of projects: ongoing activities such as content creation and development requests, and one-off projects like interactive tools, website improvements, and data reports (like their annual Industry Trends report).

One of their favorite features is task lists, which lets them break down each individual step of an entire project so that everything is spelled out clearly. Then, instead of building each project from scratch, these task lists can be turned into templates that can do much of the work and keep processes consistent across all projects.

Once a project is up and running, team members can use the different viewing options to keep track of their work. The communications team depends on calendar view to stay on top of email sends and content publication dates, while the portfolio view allows the best overview for everyone to examine during meetings.

Upserve has had the most success adding stakeholders as users, not collaborators. This level of access gives freelancers and contractors the best access to, and visibility over, the materials they need. It also allows freelancers to track time, which makes billing a breeze, since this is the basis of their monthly invoices.

Accomplishing more

A little more than a year later, Upserve’s marketing team has seen transparency and collaboration increase as they’ve consolidated their projects into Teamwork. Projects are completed in less time because everyone knows exactly what they need to do next at every stage of the process. Collaboration is up because it’s so much simpler to exchange information and ideas.

As project management has been simplified, each team member has been able to accomplish more, and they’ve been able to utilize freelancers more effectively. The payoff has been more than incremental.

More restaurants are discovering the value of Upserve software and services, which means that the company’s growth will continue. Even as the Upserve software expands and their customer base grows, Teamwork continues to adapt to Upserve’s changing needs.