The customer: Meet KitchenSync
KitchenSync helps restaurants across the United States with back office management, such as payroll, human resources, accounting, and marketing. They help restaurants grow by using industry-leading technology to manage both people and profits in one place.
With around 130 employees, KitchenSync is primarily remote, including workers across the United States, Latin America, and India.
Emilia Ceballos has served as the Chief of Staff since 2023, working closely with the CEO and managing business operations. She was given the direction to find a meeting and task management solution that would provide more structure and guidance.
Emilia’s Challenge: Turn meeting chaos into productive sessions
When Emilia first joined KitchenSync, there were meeting guidelines in place, but they weren’t quite working.
Team members were expected to create meeting agendas and share notes using Slack, but that’s not what Slack is built for. When a tool isn’t purpose-built, that creates a barrier to use, so that meant meeting prep wasn’t always completed and follow-ups didn’t always happen.
This meant that subsequent meetings were increasingly ineffective. Without proper preparation, meetings would go off-topic conversations and actual priorities would fall by the wayside.
The overarching issue plaguing KitchenSync’s meetings was a distinct lack of centralization. Without a single, thorough source of truth for every meeting, decisions would be made and then lost the next moment. Despite best efforts, the lack of process made it difficult for employees to know how to best focus their time.
Before discovering Fellow, Emilia tried to use KitchenSync’s existing tech stack to address their meeting problem.
First, they considered solutions like Trello or Monday, but found there were limitations, as these tools are built for project management, but not meeting management. Next, they tried doing everything in Teams, but it was too hard an adjustment. They tried Slack again, but it just didn’t have the features and centralization they were looking for.
Leaving the task of organization up to individuals just wasn’t cutting it.
Emila’s Solution: The org-wide adoption of a purpose-built solution for structured meetings and follow-up
KitchenSync started with Fellow as a pilot program with just the US-based employees before rolling Fellow out organization-wide. It didn’t take long for everyone to jump on board.
That has shown up in allowing managers insight into their direct reports’ notes and agendas, as well as providing a centralized view on interviews for new hires.
As an operations leader who’s responsible for creating processes that improve employee efficiency and cultural consistency, Emilia immediately saw the benefits of Fellow’s large meeting template library. She used them to start creating her own custom templates, ensuring every meeting type had a pre-built meeting agenda outline. Plus, Fellow integrated seamlessly with KitchenSync’s other tools, such as Hubspot and Slack.
Adoption has been high because Fellow makes meeting management frictionless. Even employees who were resistant to organization tools happily started using Fellow. For Emilia, that signaled that they had chosen the right solution that was easy to use and filled a gap in KitchenSync’s processes.
Results: All things meetings, all in one place
Now, instead of a mishmash of ways of managing meetings, all of KitchenSync’s meeting context was in one place, with notes and agendas preserved indefinitely.
The biggest impact is that Fellow has provided a focal point for organization. Getting everyone on the same page, using Fellow, has shifted KitchenSync’s culture by aligning employees on a mission of getting more done. Now, KitchenSync employees use Fellow on a daily basis.
Fellow also allowed KitchenSync to assess which meetings were actually necessary. No template? No agenda? Recurring with no purpose? Those are the ones to cut.
Fellow is also continually adding value to KitchenSync with new features like AI suggestions, private notes, and hashtags. One of Emilia’s personal favorite features is formatting agendas with sections for designated attendees to fill in, so everyone does their part. She’s even been able to streamline the hiring process with a Fellow workflow.
