About Pilla: Why we believe consistency wins

Hi, I’m Liam, Founder of the Pilla App. I really appreciate you stopping by and wanting to learn a little about our mission here.

For over a decade I’ve worked with businesses in industries like hospitality, retail, warehousing, manufacturing, cleaning and other environments where teams are always on the go and very busy. And throughout that time, I noticed that there’s always one big challenge and blocker to success, and that’s consistency.

Regardless of what your short or long term objectives are for your business, the only way to get there is by making it really easy for your staff to arrive on time and get the correct things done, in the correct way.

If your business needs higher sales then you need staff to consistently upsell, if your business needs to improve its hygiene then you need staff to consistently monitor cleaning — no matter what you need to improve, the only way to do it in an employee-first fashion is through improved consistency.

Why is consistency such a problem in these industries?

It’s not because staff are any worse in these industries. Some of the most impressive people I’ve met have worked in industries like hospitality, cleaning or nursing, but these industries face more difficult challenges than most.

In industries that employ shift workers, a fragmented workload often comes with it. Every day is fragmented with thousands of mini-tasks as opposed to several hours of deep work, and the labour force in general is fragmented as more people come and go in the business. Both of these things make consistency incredibly hard to maintain.

Staff turnover is high. Training gets forgotten quickly. Managers are stretched across sites, shifts, and a dozen different systems. Instructions are given verbally and never followed up. There’s no clear way to measure whether things are actually getting done — let alone reward the teams that are doing it well. Every single one of these things chips away at consistency.

The tools that exist today all solve part of the problem. Shift scheduling apps tell staff when to work but not what to do. Task apps aren’t built for teams who are on their feet. Paper checklists get ticked but then lost. You end up spending more time chasing updates than leading your team. And consistency suffers because no single tool joins it all together.

When teams have hundreds of small tasks to carry out every day, it’s super easy to forget to do that one important thing.

I’ve spent years around deskless teams and helped set up countless operational systems.

I’ve seen managers juggle shift scheduling, compliance logs, cleaning schedules, training records, maintenance issues, incident reports, customer complaints, WhatsApp groups, paper checklists, spreadsheets, email threads.

All while trying to actually run the business.

Generally when we speak to leaders who need help improving consistency, they will fall into one of two categories:

1. They aren’t using a system and nothing is organised
2. They are using too many different systems and things are disjointed

In both of these scenarios, it’s not easy for staff to understand where they need to be or what they need to do.

No systems means staff literally have no way of getting the information that they need, so consistency is impossible from the start. On the other end of the spectrum, if you are providing information to staff but through several different systems, staff will disengage because they don’t have the time or will to keep up with which system is used for what. Either way, consistency breaks down.

The only reliable way forward that I have found is to provide all the information that staff need in one simple system. That’s how you build consistency that actually lasts.

Give staff all the tools they need to be consistent

So we built the Pilla App. The idea is simple — give your staff one app that has everything they need to do their job well. Their shift schedule, their tasks for the day, training videos, and a team chat. All in one place, all on their phone.

This matters more than people realise. When training lives in one system, shifts live in another, tasks are on a clipboard, and communication happens over WhatsApp, you’re asking staff to piece it all together themselves. Most won’t. Not because they don’t care, but because it’s too much friction. And when there’s friction, consistency is the first thing to go.

With Pilla, a staff member opens the app and can immediately see when they’re working, what needs to be done on that shift, and step-by-step instructions showing exactly how to do it. They can watch training videos that have been assigned to them. They can clock in and out. They can chat with their team. It’s all there.

The whole point is to remove the guesswork. When doing the right thing is the easy thing, people do it consistently. That’s not a hope — that’s just how it works when you set things up properly.

Give managers the helping hand they need to coach and supervise

Here’s the other side of the problem. Even if you give staff the right tools, someone still needs to follow up. Someone needs to check that the training was actually watched, that the tasks were actually completed, that the staff member who’s been late three Mondays in a row gets a conversation about it.

In most businesses, that someone is a manager who’s already stretched thin. They’re covering shifts, dealing with customers, handling complaints, ordering stock — and consistent coaching and supervision of their team is supposed to happen on top of all that. It rarely does, and it’s nobody’s fault. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

That’s why we built Poppi, Pilla’s AI assistant. Poppi is like having an extra pair of eyes that never clocks off. She monitors what’s happening across your teams 24/7 and flags the things that matter.

If someone hasn’t watched a training video, Poppi nudges them. If a closing checklist keeps getting missed on the evening shift, Poppi lets you know. If a team member is consistently late, Poppi spots the pattern and brings it to your attention before it becomes a bigger issue.

She also does the positive stuff. When a team hits a milestone — say 100 consecutive punctual shifts — Poppi celebrates it in the team chat. Teams compete on a leaderboard, earning points for completing work on time and clocking in punctually. It sounds simple but it works. People start caring about consistency because it’s visible and it’s rewarded.

The result is that managers get to spend less time chasing and more time leading. Staff get the feedback and recognition they deserve, whether there’s a manager standing next to them or not. And consistency improves because it’s no longer dependent on one person remembering to follow up.

Consistency wins

I genuinely believe that consistency is the single biggest lever for any deskless business. Not a new strategy, not a rebrand, not another hire. Just getting the basics done properly, every single day.

Pilla isn’t for everyone. It’s for leaders who know that their team is capable of more, and who want to give them the tools and the support to prove it.

If that sounds like you, I’d love to have a chat. No sales pitch, just a conversation about what you’re trying to achieve and whether Pilla can help you get there.

Thanks for reading.

— Liam