Case Study: Upward Projects achieves rapid hiring and 30% workforce growth with Paylocity

Restaurant Group Prioritizes People to Achieve Massive Growth

Upward Projects is a growing restaurant group (Postino and others) with 1,300+ employees and 22 locations that needed an end-to-end HR solution to support rapid expansion and a people-first culture. Their legacy mix of Paychex and BambooHR left recruiting, onboarding, payroll, benefits, and performance management fragmented, so Upward Projects selected Paylocity’s all-in-one HCM platform to streamline those processes and better support managers and employees.

Paylocity implemented automated recruiting and mobile-friendly onboarding, integrated payroll and benefits, and Performance Management tools (including Journals) to centralize employee data and ongoing development. The result: faster hiring and onboarding (800+ hires per year), reduced manual HR work, and rapid scale from about 300 to 1,300 employees with a roughly 30% annual growth rate—positioning Upward Projects to continue expanding toward its 55-location goal with Paylocity.

Upward Projects

Sam Foos

Vice President of People & Culture