TPG Growth and Instawares Holding Company announced the launch of Red Book Connect, the first-of-its-kind comprehensive, cloud-based technology platform for the restaurant, hospitality, and retail industries.

The Red Book Connect platform joins industry leaders Red Book Solutions, MacromatiX, My Recruiting Center, HotSchedules, and SchooX to offer best-in-class technology with the financial firepower of global investment firm TPG.  

The company will be led by John Chidsey, former CEO and chairman of Burger King, and backed by an ownership group with an impressive track record for innovation and disruption in the technology and service industries.

“Our community is starved for a single-source platform like Red Book Connectto run more effective and efficient operations across single and multi-location organizations,” says Chidsey, executive chairman of Red Book Connect.

“Combined under one brand, Red Book Connect is now the largest cloud-based technology-solutions company in the industry,” he says. “By acquiring or partnering with additional industry leaders in the future, we are committed to meeting our customers’ evolving needs with the latest technology and solutions.”

The offerings of the combined companies will help managerssolve complex managerial challenges, increase operational efficiency, and improve profitability. Many of the most common management tasks—including hiring-application processing, labor scheduling, recruiting and onboarding, and inventory management—have historically been accomplished through disparate systems or manually implemented processes.

With the creation of Red Book Connect, all of these activities will be consolidated into one integrated platform.

The innovative solutions that embody this new scalable venture are:

• Red Book Solutions: The nation’s premier provider of management playbooks for more than 20 years, with a complete suite of tools designed to help individual units realize their performance objectives by addressing consistency around task management, communication, key metric evaluation, crisis management, and training. Red Book Solutions serves 75 percent of the top 20 quick-service restaurants, 80 percent of the top restaurant chain–management companies, and 100 percent of the top 10 largest hotel chains—reaching more than 325,000 managers in more than 100,000 locations across the globe. Within this new endeavor, Red Book Solutions’ flagship tool, The Manager’s Red Book, will be offered in a new digital format in 2013 in response to client demand, along with the popular print version.
• MacromatiX: The global leader in cloud-based retail and hospitality management solutions designed to increase productivity and operational excellence, including the MacromatiX Retail Operating System, a complete inventory and supply chain–management tool.
• My Recruiting Center: A comprehensive pre-employment SaaS platform designed for smaller businesses, which provides access to products and solutions typically available only to large enterprises.
• HotSchedules: Through its minority ownership of HotSchedules, Red Book Connect offers HotSchedules’ suite of intuitive mobile and Web-based shift scheduling, forecasting, and digital-hiring solutions that streamline the employee scheduling process, and help reduce labor costs and increase employee retention. It reaches 850,000 active users with 23 million monthly logins. Its mobile apps are consistently rated by AppToday as one of the Top 10 Business Apps.
• SchooX: Red Book Connect also has an agreement to deliver SchooX’s online social-learning platform, which offers a wide range of courses developed by expert knowledge providers from both within and outside an organization.

The environment can be adjusted to reflect a company’s curriculum structure in its own Corporate Academy. For example, restaurants, hotels, and other franchises can simply and affordably provide a continuous learning and training platform to all of its employees and locations, helping to boost compliance, training, succession programs, and self-learning.

“We are thrilled to provide these industry-leading solutions under the experienced leadership of John Chidsey, who successfully led Burger King for six years,” says William McGlashan, Jr., TPG growth managing partner. “Red Book Connect will be the go-to platform for back-of-house needs, allowing those in the service industry to remain focused on what they do best—serving their customers.”

The Red Book Connect Board of Directors consists of McGlashan and Ransom Langford (TPG Growth); Chidsey (Red Book Connect); Cam Lanier (Instawares Holding); and Ray Pawlikowski (HotSchedules).