How Cooper’s Hawk Grew to 70+ Locations Without Sacrificing Consistency or Culture

Overview

As Cooper’s Hawk rapidly grew to nearly 70 locations, it faced a critical challenge: how to maintain operational consistency and a strong team member experience across all stores — without sacrificing the culture that made them successful. 

With over 75,000 Wine Club members and a growing national footprint, Cooper’s Hawk needed a scalable solution to support its high hospitality standards and simplify labor management for managers and teams. 

Challenge

Manual scheduling processes created bottlenecks for managers and inconsistencies in labor spend, compliance, and service delivery, putting the brand’s reputation at risk. 

To continue delivering an excellent guest and team experience, Cooper’s Hawk needed to: 

• Standardize scheduling and labor practices to ensure optimal labor spend and compliance across 70 locations 

• Free up managers’ time to focus on coaching and hospitality 

• Seamlessly integrate with existing POS and tech infrastructure 

• Partner with a provider capable of innovation with their growth needs, including advanced tools like AI Forecasting & Labor Optimization 

“The biggest challenge for us has been consistency, making sure every team member’s experience is the same from one store to the next.” 

— Joey Slawinski, Manager of Enterprise Architecture 

Solution

To support their growth and simplify labor management, Cooper’s Hawk adopted the Fourth’s HotSchedules with Labor Management and AI Forecasting. 

Key capabilities included: 

• Scheduling: Empowered team members to manage their schedules autonomously — picking up, swapping, or dropping shifts as needed. 

• Labor Management Tools: Provided managers and corporate teams with real-time visibility into scheduling performance across all locations. 
• Labor Forecasting: Enabled finance and operations to align staffing with demand, improving efficiency and reducing overstaffing 

Result

Partnering with Fourth helped Cooper’s Hawk: 

• Ensure consistency in scheduling and operations across 70+ locations 

• Save time — each manager reclaimed 2–6+ hours per week previously spent on manual scheduling (that’s 420+ hours/week enterprise-wide) 

• Boost retention with intuitive, team-friendly tools 

• Increase autonomy and morale among hourly team members 

• Improve profitability through demand-driven staffing with more accurate AI sales forecasting 

• Protect culture by giving managers more time to engage with their teams and guests 

“Our culture is what keeps people coming back. Fourth helps us protect that by giving time back to our managers.”

– Joey Slawinski, Manager of Enterprise Architecture