About the company
Hidden Ships Distillery opened in 2023, serving custom vodka, rum, gin, bourbon and small-batch specialty spirits.
Location
Topsail Island, NC
Number of concepts
1
Service type
Cocktail bar and distillery
In 2019, Andy and Amy Szwejbka visited a craft distillery in Asheville — and it changed their lives for good. The excellent service and smooth spirits inspired Andy to bring the same experience to their hometown of Topsail Island, North Carolina.
Seeing the success of craft breweries over the past decade, Andy Szwejbka realized he had an opportunity to get in early in the craft distillery space. Two years later, Andy graduated from the University of Louisville’s distilled spirits program and retired from the Marine Corps after 21 years of service. He took a leap of faith to sign a lease, secured funding, and less than a year later, Hidden Ships Distillery was born.
At Hidden Ships, mixing intricate craft cocktails takes a bit longer than pouring a rum and Coke at your local dive bar. Instead of customers languishing in bar lines or waiting for their drinks, customers leave their order at the bar and a cocktail runner delivers their drinks to their table when ready.
When Andy devised this system, he knew he wanted to pool tips and distribute them fairly among bartenders and cocktail runners — but there didn’t seem to be an easy way to do that.
Maggie, Hidden Ships’ “accountant extraordinaire,” often found herself buried in spreadsheets, manually entering tips and managing employee clock-ins to sort out their tip distribution on a weekly basis.
Even with Maggie’s excel proficiency, Andy knew this wasn’t an efficient system — and worse, it provided little transparency to employees. Frequently, staff would come into the office with questions about how tips were split, so they’d have to go through the giant excel sheet together to explain.
Andy thought that a tip distribution system tailored to his business was nothing more than a pipe dream, and instead focused on choosing a strong POS partner that Maggie could use to build her spreadsheets. But when he realized he could activate the Kickfin-Square integration — well, his tip pooling dreams came true.
Kickfin integrates with POS systems to provide time-saving tip calculation and distribution software and complete visibility for employees and owners alike. Kickfin’s Square integration gives customers like Hidden Ships easy-to-implement technology that allows them to build out custom tip policies — no matter how complex they might be — to fully automate the tip distribution process. Once tips are calculated, managers can instantly send tip payouts directly to their employees’ bank of choice.
“Kickfin had the solutions. You simply create your rules. This is your tip pool. This person is designated a runner. While they’re clocked in, they get 20%. I called three other big payroll companies that don’t do that. Kickfin does.”
Owner of Hidden Ships
Implementing new technology isn’t always smooth sailing, but the Hidden Ships team knew that they could rely on Kickfin’s customer support team to help them navigate troubled waters.
Every Kickfin integration user gets 24/7 access to our robust customer support network, including assistance with setting up your tip rules and personalized training for your management teams.
“I had a fantastic experience. I can’t speak highly enough about the team that got me through the onboarding process,” says Andy about his onboarding experience.
Goodbye, spreadsheets!
The team at Hidden Ships estimates that using Kickfin is saving her at least an hour and a half each week, in addition to other major perks, like:
Want to cut out cash and delete your spreadsheets at your own restaurant? Get a demo of Kickfin today to see the future of gratuity management in action.
