Founder Stories: Beth Hussey from Shifty

Every second Monday, we share a story from a Midwest founder: breaking down their path to entrepreneurship, and hopefully what led them to success in order to inspire others. Today, we share the story of Beth Hussey, co-founder and CEO of the restaurant training and communications app, Shifty.

"Still to this day, that business plan you put together is the best business plan that's ever come across my desk."

This was a bank manager, speaking recently to Shifty co-founder Beth Hussey about her request in 2019 for a loan to open her (now-famous) Birmingham, Michigan restaurant, Hazels.

“I just always assumed I couldn't open my own place because I would need some big money behind me. You know they [the banks] don't like loaning money to restaurants, but it was [because of] my reputation and my business plan.”

Many of the most lauded stories in startup history concern founders raising with little more than an idea on the back of a napkin. Very few start with an actual restaurant. Or more specifically, even fewer begin with decades of serious toil in almost every part of the service industry, before becoming a restaurant owner just prior to a global pandemic, then learning to code to understand how to build the software that would become Shifty, during the first lockdowns.

Waiting tables, but not waiting around.

There’s a difference between people who talk about building a business and those who can’t help but just go and actually do it.

Beth Hussey is the latter. 

She grew up as the youngest of seven children, mostly brothers, in Michigan. As the youngest, she says her brothers would often be sniffing around her plate at the dinner table, which she thinks led her to the restaurant business. “I think I wanted to always have food around me,” she says, laughing. “That might explain it.”

At 15, she was peeling garlic at a spaghetti factory in Phoenix. At 17, she headed to California and then spent most of 20’s following seasonal work around some of the nicest resorts in the country. Little to zero safety net. Just hustle. Just action.

The word action might be the key to understanding everything she’s built since.

Her advice to potential entrepreneurs follows that arc: “Don't wait. If you don't ask the question, you'll never get the yes, so if you want to do it, do it. Just take action. So many people hear my story, and they're like ‘I had the best idea for an app, I want to do that too,’ and it's like, well, what’s stopping you?”

Which brings us to Shifty, Beth's startup. Shifty is a training, engagement and scheduling app that's designed to enhance the capabilities of restaurant owners and managers by helping them to onboard, train, manage, and communicate more effectively with their staff. 

Shifty just closed a $1.5 million seed round, bringing their total funds raised to more than $2 million, including friends, family, and early angel rounds. The most recent fundraise includes involvement from top-tier Midwest VCs, with Invest Detroit and VC 414 in Milwaukee both writing checks.

The Super Bowl of Training

Of course, Beth didn’t invent training in restaurants. She just created a way that worked well for her and her team.

Early in her career, she worked at her family's restaurant. While trying to earn a seat at the table alongside her elder brothers, who were already managing the operation, she offered to run the training. That’s when she began shaping the method she’d use across the next 30+ years and more than 20 restaurant openings. Structured daily learning. Flashcards instead of final tests. One-on-one sit-downs with managers that actually felt like a moment of care, something she says is rare in the restaurant business but can make a huge difference to employee engagement and retention. The ‘employee experience’ is key to the Shifty ethos.

“You treat your employees the way you want them to treat your customers. That’s always been my mantra.”  

She describes opening restaurants as the “Super Bowl of training”: hundreds of hires at once, no room for chaos. 

But after helping create two of Detroit’s most successful venues, One-Eyed Betty’s and Pops for Italian, she did something she never thought she would: she opened her own restaurant.

A Cocktail Napkin and a Lobster

Beth had always assumed you needed a large chunk of capital to open a restaurant or a ‘money man’. Before that bank meeting in 2019, she had neither. But she did have that killer business plan and the reputation earned from the years of hard work and from building two previous restaurants. 

Armed with both, the bank gave her a loan with little drama.

That restaurant became Hazel’s, which is a seafood spot in a large, hard-to-crack location in Birmingham. But just months after opening, there were issues. The original name was wrong. The neighborhood was unresponsive. And then spring break hit.

“Our sales dropped 40% overnight. I was terrified. And then I remembered, we don’t even have a patio. Summer’s going to be worse.”

Most people might have pivoted gently. Beth and her business partner went all in. 

She found a tiny lobster outfit in Maine, negotiated direct-to-restaurant delivery, and scrapped the previous menu. Hazel’s became a Lobster Pound for a four-week summer takeover. With some help from a local publicist, newspapers covered it, and the phone rang off the hook. People lined up at lunch on weekdays, and revenue quadrupled.

“We didn’t discount. And we got out of debt in eight weeks.”

Hazel’s kept doing takeovers: Florida stone crab, Maryland blue crab, king crab. What began as a desperate move became a business model. And when COVID hit, they pivoted again; they knew that lobster rolls and fried chicken traveled well, so with no ability to seat diners, they focused on those for carry-out customers. “The first day we were open, we sold 1,000 lobster rolls. It was crazy.”

Hazel’s came out of COVID stronger than it went in.

Flashcards, Software, and Survival

But Beth had a bigger idea brewing.

She didn’t just want to run great restaurants. She wanted to scale the training philosophy she’d built over decades by turning it into something more people could access.

With more time spent at home, away from people during the early days of COVID, she taught herself to code so she could better understand how what would become Shifty could be built. 

Eventually, she hired a tech team. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. 

“At one point, I had one and a half employees and no funds. My CTO offered to take another job. I said no. I just refused to let that happen.”

So she did what the best founders do and found a way to keep going.

And today, Shifty is a team of nine with 700 individual locations as customers, and 30% q-on-q growth. They’re helping restaurants train their teams the way Beth always has: in a structured, human, efficient, and natural way. It’s just that now, they can do so at scale.

There are currently a million restaurants in the United States that could be Shifty customers, and her hopes are that it can reach the point that it becomes a verb: “It’s already part of the language at Hazel’s. “People say ‘Check Shifty,’ or ‘What does Shifty say?’” she says.

You Can’t Wait

There are plenty of startup stories that follow a similar arc. A founder spots a problem, builds a solution, raises a round, and tells their story.

As we’ve already mentioned, Beth’s is different.

She lived with the problem for 30 years. She didn’t have to imagine or even interview the customer. She trained them. Fed them. Paid them. Hustled beside them. Her product is soaked in hard-won empathy. It’s not just another restaurant SaaS play.

And above all else, she didn’t wait.

She took action.

And now, if her vision plays out, Shifty might become the next Michigan-built, founder-led startup you didn’t see coming.