About Shifty
Built by a restaurateur who got tired of watching good training fall apart the moment it left her head.
Shifty was built on the floor, not in a focus group. Thirty years of restaurant operations, distilled into the operating system she always wished existed.
Origin story
Built from the floor up.
Beth Hussey spent decades in the restaurant industry. She worked her way through resorts, bars, and concepts across the country before returning to Michigan to run Mesquite Creek, a restaurant her family founded in Clarkston.
Over the years, she became a sweat equity partner in some of metro Detroit's most beloved spots, One-Eyed Betty's and Pop's for Italian in Ferndale, before co-founding her own place, Hazel's, a seasonal seafood restaurant in Birmingham, in 2018.
Along the way, she developed a training system that worked. It was consistent, repeatable, and actually stuck with staff. But like most great restaurant processes, it lived in her head, in binders, and in the people she'd trained personally. The moment she wasn't in the room, things drifted.
When the pandemic hit in 2020 and restaurants went quiet, Beth finally had the one thing she'd never had: time. She used it to build the tool she'd always wished existed. She taught herself to code, assembled a team, and spent two years developing Shifty. The platform launched in 2022.
"It was a passion project I'd always dreamed of doing, but just never had the time or the money. I knew the problem inside and out. I just needed the chance to build the solution."
Traction & credibility
A small team building something the industry actually needs.
Headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, Shifty is purpose-built with the same care Beth brought to her restaurants, and the industry is taking notice.
Traction
Credibility
Shifty has raised $2.1 million in investment, including backing from Invest Detroit and Milwaukee-based VC 414. We're also an endorsed partner of the Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association, whose 5,600 member locations represent some of the most respected operators in the state.
What makes Shifty different
Training that sticks. Standards that hold. A system your team actually uses.
There are a lot of restaurant technology platforms. Most of them were built by software companies who studied the restaurant industry. Shifty was built by someone who ran restaurants for 30 years.
That difference shapes everything. It's why Shifty is designed to be used on the floor during a real shift, not just reviewed in a corporate dashboard. It's why the onboarding process is structured enough to produce consistent results and flexible enough to fit the way your operation actually runs. And it's why training completion, standards documentation, and compliance tracking are built in from the start, not bolted on as an afterthought.
We built Shifty to help operators run a better restaurant. That means training that actually gets done. Checklists that actually get followed. And standards that hold whether you're in the building or not.
Our mission
Why we do this.
That's how often the average restaurant loses an employee. Turnover isn't an exception. It's the operating environment.
Hiring, training, lost productivity, mistakes during ramp. Every departed teammate writes that check.
That's not just an HR problem. It's a training problem. When onboarding is inconsistent, when standards live in people's heads, when managers are too busy to train and too tired to repeat themselves again, turnover becomes inevitable.
Shifty exists to change that. With a mobile-first, operator-designed platform that makes consistent, compliant training possible for every shift, every location, and every new hire. Not as a project to implement. As a system that runs.
What we believe
Restaurants are built by people who care. Our job is to give those people better tools.
Simple over complicated
If your staff won't use it, it doesn't work. Every feature is judged on the floor, not in a demo.
Built from experience
We're not guessing at your problems. We've lived them, through openings, rushes, and bad Saturdays.
Operators first
Every feature we build starts with a real problem from a real restaurant, not a roadmap meeting.
Effective and compliant
Training should prepare your team and protect your operation. Both, not one or the other.
Consistency is culture
Training isn't separate from your brand. It is your brand. That's what guests remember.
If your team can feel it in a shift, we built it right.
See the platformReady to see what Shifty can do for your team?
A 30-minute call with a real product person, not a closer. We'll walk through your current setup, show you how Shifty fits your locations, and answer questions about rollout, adoption, and results. Setup typically takes days, not months.