The challenge: Good practices, no paper trail.

For the first two years, Bryan did nearly every job in the building. Jeff moved into an advisory role within the first year, and Bryan was running the company and managing the restaurant at the same time.

"I was learning the industry from the ground up," he says. "For those two years, I was the prep cook, the dishwasher, the salesperson, the delivery guy, the accountant. I was doing everything, and just learning how to make a profitable food business work."

Early on he asked another Bay Area restaurant owner what she wished she'd known before opening. Her answer was HR. In San Francisco, the labor rules are strict and the penalties for getting them wrong are real.

"As much as you don't want to micromanage, there are things that you legally actually need to micromanage in order to protect yourself as a business," Bryan says.

Kitava was doing the right things. Bryan just couldn't track it all easily. Hours, breaks, tips, write-ups, and performance conversations lived across Google Sheets, Excel docs, and his own memory. Schedules were built by hand in a spreadsheet, and every callout and shift change came straight to him.

"Early on in a business, you're just trying to survive," he says. "But the systems we had were not robust enough to feel like they were something I could go back and reference in an evergreen way."

“We needed software that could back up our practices to prove that we’re doing the right thing,” he says. “To show that everyone’s time is being tracked, their breaks are encouraged and enforced, and that people are paid for what they work.”

— Bryan Tublin, Co-Founder of Kitava Kitchen

The solution: Scheduling tools with HR guardrails.

Bryan narrowed what he needed in a team management software down to four things: break management, time tracking, accurate pay, and scheduling with availability built in.

"We needed software that could back up our practices as proof and evidence that we were doing the right things," he says.

The tool Kitava had previously been using covered one of the four. "It basically was just a scheduling tool. That was it," Bryan says. There was no break management, no team messaging, and no way for people to set their own availability.

With Homebase, scheduling changed first. Instead of rebuilding the week from scratch in a spreadsheet, Bryan could copy last week's schedule forward, adjust for who was available, and publish it. He estimates that took his weekly scheduling time from about 1 hour down to 20 or 25 minutes.

“I would spend an hour each week making the schedule from scratch. Now, with Homebase, I can do it in 20 or 25 minutes.”

— Bryan Tublin, Co-Founder of Kitava Kitchen

Time tracking needed a bigger fix. "It was a trust-based system," Bryan says, "and there weren't good guardrails around being able to verify accuracy, or giving folks tools to clarify if something happened that was off schedule." Those guardrails came from Homebase, too.

Now the team clocks in and out on a tablet in the office, and breaks are tracked against San Francisco's rules. When a time card needs a correction, whoever makes it leaves a note explaining why, and the edit history holds onto the record. If someone forgets to clock out, Homebase catches it.

Coverage was the last piece. Before, a callout meant a text to Bryan and a scramble to fill the shift. Now team members can ask each other for coverage and offer to pick up shifts, with a manager approving every swap.

That turned an informal habit into a rule Bryan could teach.

"At onboarding and in performance review conversations, we can say: 'Hey, this is the rule. If you're going to call out, this is what you do. You have to attempt to find coverage. If you find coverage, you have to propose it. Then it gets approved by the manager,'" he says. "Having the systems in place with that software makes it easier to enforce the rules at a higher level."

The impact: Four locations running the same way.

Kitava grew slowly at first, then quickly. In fall 2020, Bryan took over the kitchen at a gluten-free brewery in Oakland, which let him test a second location without building one from scratch. Two years later, the Oakland business had outgrown that kitchen and Kitava opened an independent store in Temescal. Albany followed in March 2025, and Walnut Creek opened in spring 2026.

That growth was possible because each store runs the same way. Every street-facing location has its own Homebase, its own manager, and its own front of house, back of house, and full-team group chats. Team members and managers see the details for their store. Bryan can switch between all four to check schedules, review time cards, and export timesheets when it's time to run payroll.

And every week, Bryan checks one thing across all four locations: labor cost against sales. If that's in line and the food and reviews are good, he leaves his managers alone.

"I give the managers leeway to manage their staff the way that they see fit, so I'm not the bottleneck," he says. "They're able to just do that because they have access to their location's Homebase."

Labor cost reports split by front of house, back of house, and management feed into the revenue system Kitava built, so Bryan isn't flying blind between accounting cycles.

"How do we make sure that we're making money each day, week, month, year, and having the tools in place to try to get that accurate data," he says, "without having to wait for the end of the month plus two weeks for our accountant to tell us whether or not we made money."

Homebase catches errors too. A time card showing a 21-hour day isn't a mystery, it's a missed clock-out, and Bryan can show the manager how to spot and fix it themselves.

"We have the tools for them to do the work, and then I have the tools to verify that the ultimate financial results are what they need to be," he says.

That's what made growth repeatable: Each new location opened on a system that already worked.

“In an ideal case, Homebase allows me to focus on the things only I can do. Homebase has the tools managers need to do the work; I have the tools to verify that the ultimate financial results are where they need to be. Having a place where all the information lives, as opposed to pen-and-paper records, allows everything to be much more scalable.”

— Bryan Tublin, Co-Founder of Kitava Kitchen

“We have a foundation on how to run Kitava.”

Bryan is careful not to oversell it. The processes are documented and the tools are in place, but a new location still depends on the person running it.

"We have a foundation on how to run Kitava," he says. "But there are ways of doing things that we've figured out over time. After a period of growth, there's an opportunity to go back and fine-tune the processes so it's easier for managers to do their jobs and for future locations to run smoothly."

That's the priority right now: making sure Albany and Walnut Creek are steady, operationally and financially, and making the training easier for the next manager who takes one on.

Then Kitava looks at where to go.

"There are lots of communities that need access to healthy, real food. It's just a matter of us choosing where we want to take the next leap, and growing the team so they're ready for that, too."

— Bryan Tublin, Co-Founder of Kitava Kitchen