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About PTL Events
Founder and director of PTL Events, Seth Whalen, runs one of the most sophisticated full-service catering and event staffing companies in the United States. PTL's services stretch all the way from New York to Los Angeles, handling all of the event logistics and staffing needs of their clients.
Seth first realized PTL needed a solution like Ubeya around 6 years ago. After a journey of trial-and-error and investigating the employee management solutions in the marketplace, PTL finally switched over to Ubeya.
Today Ubeya saves PTL time and money on staff management operations, helping the event staffing agency grow by 30% a year.
Ubeya saves us time, which in turn saves us money. It takes away the human error and repetitiveness."
Seth Whalen
Founder & Director, PTL Events
The Challenge
PTL's event staffing company provides a variety of different jobs to its part-time employees: from doormen to greeters, promotional models and brand ambassadors. With the amount of events they staff per year, PTL Events have got their hands full with juggling all of their clients and a roster of thousands of on-demand staff.
Back in 2007 when PTL was just founded, things were a bit different. The event staffing agency was managing its business and employees the good ol' fashioned way - communicating through emails and phone calls, and tracking through countless Excel spreadsheets. But it wasn't meant to last forever.
As PTL's success skyrocketed and numbers grew, keeping track of everyone and everything was proving to be difficult. It became clear to Seth that they needed a much more efficient way to manage, recruit, train, schedule and track their 1000+ temporary and part-time employees.
Every month, employees would come and go depending on availability and the jobs being offered. Just keeping track of who was even available to work was extremely time consuming for the PTL team.
Hours a week were being spent just on manually scheduling staff and trying to get confirmations. Seth would contact staff through all possible means - emails, texts and phone calls, just shy of door-to-door knocking. It worked when the roster was a lot smaller, but with thousands of employees, it was a lot of time and repetitiveness that ate up their energy and money, Seth says. They put in a lot of effort into tracking staff down and booking them for work; from many, they never even heard back.
Seth knew he would have to implement a smarter way to manage and schedule their employees. He created his own in-house system that worked for a while, but it just wasn't scalable.
PTL turned their search towards staff management softwares and online solutions. However, they found that other softwares didn't meet the level of efficiency that PTL needed.
"We were using multiple softwares at the same time just to cover our needs - one for scheduling, one for time tracking, one for payroll. It was exhausting."
"It wasn't worth the money and it wasn't worth the time," says Seth. He needed a software that would expedite PTL Event's staff management operations while taking into account the specific processes of working with hourly employees. Other software solutions weren't tailored to the event staffing industry. They were a close fit, but they weren't enough.
Seth found himself using multiple softwares at the same time in order to accommodate all of PTL's needs instead having one fully encompassing solution.
"It took me five or six years to actually find the right solution," says Seth. The time, effort and research he put into finding the perfect solution for his very specific event staffing company paid off when PTL Events found Ubeya.
The Solution
Seth's research led him to book a demo with Ubeya. The team wanted to be able to see how PTL Events could use the system to recruit, schedule, deploy, communicate, track and manage staff all from one place.
The Ubeya customer success team guided PTL through their free trial and enabled the staffing agency to get the full picture of how Ubeya would work with PTL Events.
When PTL Events decided to make the switch, Ubeya's customer success team handled the migration and integration of the employee data. Ubeya imported their staff roster, their events calendar and other important data directly into the software.
"One of the most daunting changes for a company is changing to a new system," says Seth. "Ubeya made that process smooth and worry-free. I didn't have to worry about changing my entire workflow."
All of the previous complications of finding, booking and communicating with staff became automated with Ubeya. Seth found that one of his biggest challenges - booking employees for work - had suddenly become very simple.
"All they have to do is push a button and they are available, or not."
Seth could forget about the days of wasting endless hours on tracking down employees, making and re-making schedules, and finding who was available to work.
The Results
PTL Events saved hundreds of hours a year on time that was previously spent on staff management operations. The staffing agency spent over 75% less time on booking and scheduling staff. Using Ubeya has helped PTL Events to grow 30% each year.
The amount of time Seth and his team saved was a huge boost of efficiency, productivity and success for the company. More so was how Ubeya's system helped PTL Events grow as a company.
"Ubeya is the ultimate solution for staffing agencies because it helps companies grow with the system," says Seth. "There are systems for scheduling, and systems for timesheets, and they work well, but -
"Ubeya is the only software solution to help me grow my staffing business like this."
When a company is limited by employee operations like keeping track of timesheets, payroll, finances and putting in too much time and effort into finding and scheduling staff, then company growth is limited as well. PTL Events saw that through using Ubeya, their staff management operations were no longer a limitation for the company.
“Ubeya helped our business grow by 30% each year because our staffing operations were no longer a limit.”
Finally, another huge improvement for Seth and his team was the fact that PTL was now able to keep the entire roster of all the staff that ever worked for them in Ubeya's single organized database. They don't even need to worry about deleting or disabling employees who haven't worked in a while. While it may seem trivial, with an event staffing agency like PTL Events, employees go as quickly as they come, and "a system like Ubeya is a breath of fresh air for staffing companies."
All of the event logistics and staffing needs that PTL used to manage manually back then by what felt like a million other softwares, Seth says, is today now completely managed through Ubeya.
Why Would You Recommend Ubeya
The first thing that really stood out to PTL Events about Ubeya, says Seth, was:
"The usability of the app"
In his market research of staff management tools, Seth was unable to find a functioning mobile app made specifically for employers and managers of shift-based businesses that would enable him to create events, schedule shifts and manage his business on-the-go. Ubeya provides a mobile app not only for PTL's employees to apply for shifts, clock in and out of work and confirm reminders, but an app designated for employers like Seth.
Seth and his team are able to schedule and track employees from both their desktop software and mobile phones. This is one of the reasons Seth felt that Ubeya was designed and tailored to his line of staffing business - Ubeya understands the needs of both employers and employees.
In addition, Seth says that Ubeya's "customer success is extremely helpful and far surpasses the experience we've had with other companies." Ubeya helped guide PTL Events through every step of the process, from their free trial to data migration, employee on-boarding and provides ongoing support with the platform.
"It's the first time the account managers of a software that I'm working with actually understand my business."
