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Founded by a longtime restaurant operator, Shifty is rethinking how restaurants support and retain frontline teams through better training.
On paper, the restaurant industry looks like a machine built for constant motion: new menus, new faces, new trends. Behind the scenes, though, that motion often masks a costly reality—chronic turnover that leaves both workers and owners frustrated.
In the U.S., the average restaurant worker stays on the job for less than two months—meaning many restaurants replace roughly 75 percent of their staff each year, with some cycling through their entire workforce more than once. According to estimates from the National Restaurant Association, replacing a single frontline employee can cost nearly $6,000 in lost productivity, training, and operational strain. Each departure quietly erodes the business, draining time, money, and momentum long before the damage shows up on a balance sheet.
For Beth Hussey, those statistics aren’t abstract. They’re personal.
A Problem You Can Hear Across the Dining Room
Hussey has spent more than three decades in full-service restaurant operations. She’s opened more than 20 restaurants, trained thousands of hospitality workers, and built a reputation for strong teams and strong culture. Training, she says, has always been her passion.
But passion alone didn’t save her when she opened her first solo restaurant, a large seafood concept in Birmingham, Michigan, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic. One day, as the business struggled to find its footing, Hussey overheard a server describing the menu to guests. The information was wrong. The story wasn’t on brand. Instead of admitting uncertainty, the employee filled the gaps with guesses.
“It felt like he had my life in his hands,” Hussey says. “And I realized—I didn’t do a good job training him.”
For someone who had spent her career preaching the importance of training, that moment landed hard.
Paper binders, shadow shifts, and word-of-mouth knowledge transfer simply weren’t keeping up with modern restaurants or modern workers. Menus change constantly. Allergens matter. Social media accelerates trends. And younger workers expect information instantly, on their phones.
From Paper Binders to a Platform Built for the Floor
Hussey didn’t come to this realization as a tech founder looking for a market. She came to it as an operator who needed a better way to run her own business.
Years earlier, she had developed a paper-based training system that helped restaurants standardize onboarding and reduce confusion. During the early days of the pandemic—when her restaurant was temporarily closed—she finally had the time to rethink that system for a digital world.
The result became Shifty: a mobile-first training, engagement, and operations platform designed specifically for frontline restaurant teams.
Rather than replacing human interaction, Shifty reinforces it. Training still happens shoulder-to-shoulder, through shadow shifts and real conversations. The difference is structure.
Interactive checklists guide trainers and new hires through exactly what needs to be covered. Flashcards deliver critical knowledge in short, digestible bursts. Quizzes reinforce learning without overwhelming attention spans. A searchable menu catalog puts answers—ingredients, allergens, preparation details—into employees’ pockets, right when they need them.
“It doesn’t ask restaurants to reinvent how they train,” Hussey explains. “It just makes the way they already train more effective.”
That simplicity matters in an industry where managers don’t have time to learn or manage complex software systems. Tools that feel like extra work rarely gain adoption.
When the Numbers Start to Agree with the Story
Shifty launched quietly, testing with a handful of restaurants before adding paying customers one location at a time. After its first year, the platform reached 100 locations. By the end of 2025, it had grown to more than 900.
During that period, the company was supported by the MSU Research Foundation, including investment through Michigan Rise, one of the Foundation’s venture funds. The timing coincided with Hussey closing a new funding round after years of relying on angel investors.
She worked closely with Moody Mattan, a venture associate at the MSU Research Foundation, who spent time with both Hussey and her development team to understand the technology and help pressure-test the platform as the company prepared for its next chapter.
“It was night and day,” Hussey says. “Having someone to go to for questions—and who was willing to really dig into the product—made a huge difference.”
Along the way, the platform began capturing something most restaurants never see clearly: their own retention data.
For the first time, operators could track turnover trends over time and compare them to how actively teams were using the platform. The early signal was unmistakable.
“The restaurants with the highest engagement in Shifty are the ones seeing turnover go down,” Hussey says. “The more active the managers and employees are, the better the retention.”
Employees, it turns out, don’t resist structure. They crave it. Even the most experienced servers at Hussey’s own restaurant—career professionals who already know the menu inside and out, some earning up to six-figure incomes—open the menu catalog multiple times per shift.
“They don’t want to get caught at a table without the right answer,” she says. “Shifty gives them confidence.”
Perhaps the strongest validation came unexpectedly. When a multi-location restaurant group using Shifty closed its doors, hundreds of displaced employees moved on to new jobs—and told their new managers about the platform that had trained them.
Shifty’s sales spiked.
“When the people on the floor are advocating for your product,” Hussey says, “you know you’re onto something.”
A Better Experience for an Industry That Runs on People
Shifty starts with how restaurants actually operate and builds tools that support the people doing the work.
If Hussey’s vision succeeds, training won’t feel like guesswork. Employees will know what’s expected of them. Managers will spend less time correcting mistakes and more time leading teams. And turnover, one of the industry’s most expensive realities, may no longer feel inevitable.
“The restaurant industry will always be fast-paced,” Hussey says. “But it doesn’t have to be chaotic.”
Shifty’s growth has been driven largely by word of mouth among operators and frontline staff. The platform has also been endorsed by the Michigan Restaurant & Lodging Association and recognized by the Wisconsin Restaurant Association, with conversations underway in other states. For restaurant owners rethinking how training and retention work together, more information is available at shiftyinc.com
