It is hard to believe that a restaurant chain as popular as Chick-fil-A could manage to serve its food within minutes. It is even harder to believe they can keep that speed going during the dinner rush, and harder still to believe the staff members rarely make mistakes on an order. How do they do it? James Finlinson, founder of OneClick App, is the answer.

Hatching the idea

Finlinson started working at Chick-fil-A as a high schooler and said, “I saw my leaders do some really dumb things to take care of their employees,” from writing shift members’ names on a whiteboard to keep track of job rotation to spending three hours at a time copying data from their phones to their laptops. Finlinson found a problem he could solve. He decided to create software that let shift leaders copy data from one source to another with one click — hence the name.

James found a business partner, Mike Alvarez, who took the lead on the business while Finlinson served a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When Finlinson returned, users and revenues had increased a hundredfold.

Expanding the program

After another few years’ work and coding, OneClick now manages shift assignments and job rotations, training checklists, break scheduling and more. “Chick-fil-A does four things: They serve a lot of food to a lot of people really fast and with good customer service,” Finlinson said. This is in part due to the 30 to 40 employees who work each meal rush, but it is also in huge part thanks to the help of OneClick, which streamlines the process as much as possible.

In the past, shift leaders wrote employees’ names on a whiteboard for each job of the night, only to erase and rewrite them all when it was time to rotate jobs. Now, in an instant, the job rotation is shuffled and ready to go. It’s no wonder we’re incredulous to learn that each meal shift is run by more than 30 employees.

What’s next?

As he works on this business, Finlinson is also pursuing his goal of finishing his college degree. Provo sees many young entrepreneurs who create successful businesses and then leave their college degree behind to work on these businesses. Finlinson says he believes education needs to come first and the financial reward will follow. However, OneClick App proudly serves one in 10 Chick-fil-A locations nationwide.

When asked about expanding to other businesses, Finlinson said, “Right now, we only serve Chick-fil-A, and that’s intentional.” OneClick’s next goal is to serve one in five Chick-fil-A locations; it will then move on to other restaurants and businesses. So, if you’re a Chick-fil-A manager who’s tired of whiteboards and manual data entry, this software’s for you.

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