We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Billy Giordano. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Billy below.

Billy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

Coming from the restaurant industry, we wanted to build a tool that supported the industry, not just profited off of it. Did we build a company to make money? Of course we did. This isn’t a hobby. Do we prioritize revenue/profits as our number one metric? Absolutely not.

Since day one, our goal has always been to provide exponentially more value than our cost of service. We believe that building tools that people like using and that actually work, and charging a fair if not discounted rate for service will establish trust and long term adoption of our product/service. We want to help our operators not only stay in business, but thrive through building great teams in less time, with less effort, at a cost that makes sense. Better teams and well staffed operations only help operators continue to grow and make money, and we love hearing how happy our service makes the people who use it.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My co-founder and I JP (Jeremy Phillips) have known each other for 25 years and started working together in the hospitality industry 20+ years ago. We respectively managed multiple locations until opening up Room 38 Restaurant & Lounge in 2008. We’ve both gone on to open and manage multiple businesses since, but StaffedUp was created out of a need for a better way to hire in our industry in 2016.

The company was founded to make hiring processes easier for restaurant owners and managers while focussing on ease of use for the applicant and employer. Our goal has always been to provide a service that our customers appreciate and enjoy using that’s affordable and helps people like ourselves run better operations. We still use StaffedUp to run our businesses to this day and will continue to improve our systems to make hiring the easiest part of running your business. We’re sincere when we say we appreciate the opportunity to help every single one of our customers. We’re tirelessly dedicated to their success just as much as we are ours.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

We started the company with personal funds we had saved from other ventures, and then entered a startup competition to validate the idea and start building a network. From there, we created our MVP and proof of concept and began pitching to investor groups. Through a ton of traveling, networking, pitching, and of course diligence, we raised the capital needed to grow, and found a group of individual angel investors that believed in our vision and now comprise our board.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Absolutely. Dan Martel’s “Buy Back your Time” was massively influential in helping me prioritize my own growth as a founder and team lead. It helped me realize the value of my own time and the importance of focusing on the tasks that I not only excel in, but that serve me. Through this I was able to find a happier and more productive day to day, while also building a team around me that thrives in situations that aren’t my strong suit. I’ve been able to focus more on growing my company vs. being overwhelmed by trying to do everything myself.

Contact Info:

• Website: staffedup.com
• Instagram: instagram/staffedup
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/staffedup
• Linkedin: https://www.instagram.com/staffedup/
• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/getstaffedup/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@staffed-up