Espresso: GAIL's Founder - The Genius Way GAIL's Picks a New Location

0:02One of the things I think you guys have done incredibly well, I'd love to get into the weeds of this is you've managed to keep... So, for example, and it's not me sort of lambasting five guys, but five guys are just like, you rinse and repeat, you know what you're getting. Yeah, yeah. And they're amazing burgers, don't you get me wrong? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then what I think with you guys is I go to the Isha store or the Cobham store, which is my local one, and they're totally different stores. The one in Canada downstairs, completely different. Right. What is, first part of the question, what's the blueprint?

0:30So you go in, you know, this is going to work. And then what is the... I think, I love what you said earlier, like we need to get the bakers right, but then we'll let them play jazz. And what's the nuance between different areas is the jazz, is the playing the jazz. Like talk me through that. I think that's interesting. Well, I always thought that like, you know, architecture and property drove a lot of my decisions early on. It's like, if I loved the site, I'd say, it doesn't matter about the neighborhood, really. Is there an example of that? Well, like Hempstead. I was just like, you know, I don't know, why would you go to Hempstead?

1:02It's like, there was nothing there. There were already, it's like a few bakeries or two bakeries there, but I loved the corner site, right? So I did that. Then at Notting Hill, we were only going to do one, but I fell in love with the Notting Hill Portobello one. You know, I knew the guy. It was an art. It was something before, and then it was an art thing, but he was failing. But it was such a cool building on the corner. I was like, oh, shit, you know, something needs to happen in this space. And so I fell in love with the property and said, okay, well, we'll make something fun out of this beautiful property.

1:31So I love, I do love, you know, buildings. and I think, gosh, in London, there's just so many full character buildings, right? So I think that's one thing is like, sometimes we just start with the building, not the neighborhood. As we get bigger, we kind of think, okay, you know, it's a neighborhood. Can we find a nice building in there? And we always like the challenge of that. So do you look at the neighborhood? Like how, because you're opening, I think I read somewhere three to four, I don't know how many, there's a lot more sites basically. Yeah, yeah, we did like 30, over 30 last year. Like what's the process to say, right, we think this is going to work or this?

2:03yeah it's a good look it's it's kind of half math and half half art because i mean you can do some we've got some algorithms that i kind of we've built with some guys which is a creative process it's kind of saying what's what we said at the beginning science and art the same thing same thing right so i mean i want to put science into it right because i want to free my mind in the space to really think about the place are those algorithms so those algorithms we we built it i mean it's probably eight years we've been building it's like why why would somebody want a bakery in in every neighborhood.

2:31And basically, we ended up with an algorithm that can tell you kind of every postcode in the country what we might be able to do there based on what we've done. Now, it's just math, right? So you still have to get your head into that neighborhood, ask some questions, feel it, get, you know, what side of the street? What, you know, is it a building you love? Is it this kind of thing? But, you know, yeah, I get half of it to be science. And that was a creative process. It's like, why would somebody be there? Well, you know, maybe it's a little bit about schools, right? And it's a little bit about, you know...

2:58Schools as in like actual schools. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, how many schools are around there? You know, how many churches are around there? Like, you know, how far are you from the tube? You know, but what I find is that our sites are, you know, Gales can exist. One can exist because there's lots of people around near a tube, you know, and wealthy, right? And then one can do really well because it's, you know, it's basically in a community that they don't have much. and they have to drive somewhere else and there's not much footfall and I don't know, it could be one school or something. When you say the maths of the algorithm, just swim into those lanes a bit more please.

3:40Well, it's been developed over a couple of years. I did it with a friend of mine, my son's, he was a data scientist. Now he's our chief technology officer and we started working on this thing trying to answer the question like what does make a good place And we realized that it's just not like if it's wealthy, it works. Or if it's high football, it works. Or it's near a tube, it works. It's not a correlation, right? It's a complex, you know, set of inputs. And one input could be at 100 and one could be at 20. But then another one could be at 30. And then another site, those three inputs could be at different measurements.

4:18What are some of the inputs? Yeah, we would have like, we have this thing called like retail, well, retail density. I look at like, you know, how many sites are there? And how many would be associated, which I would call kind of nice brands, and how many disassociated, right? So disassociated would be like… Are the cafes there, is what I'm saying? Yeah, we do a thing on competition, competitive landscape. But actually, the impact of competitive landscape is actually pretty small. But you kind of want to know that there is something there. There is competition, right? That's kind of what we found is that we want to go to a place that is competitive.

4:52So you look at competitive landscape, you look at the footfall, you look at the spend that people have available to them, so demographics. And we've put them into a model that kind of learns on its own about like, okay, so every new site I have, I put in there. And we say, okay, what did we do? And it feeds the model, right? Is this all AI as well? Yeah, now it's becoming, I mean, AI is basically, you know, now it's more advanced, but it's the same kind of thinking where you just keep on feeding a model and the model can tell you, hey, I think you should be, you might look at this area. I think that this might work.

5:32And then that at least gets us that beginning that we can say, hey, okay, let's use the science. Now we need to use our brain. That's 50 % of the answer. Now let's go to that neighborhood if we don't know it, let's say. Yeah. And you start asking questions. And that's the art. And that's the art. Yes. Yeah. And one without the other is like, you know, making art without any science in this case is really time consuming. It doesn't let you refine stuff. It makes you're doing a lot of brute force work. Whereas what the math does is it says, like, I can go through tons of data and, you know, you tell me what you think is important.

6:07And I'll tell you what kind of matches that. And then we say, OK, good. Send, you know, identify places that we might work. and then we go out and ask ourselves, will it? What we said at the beginning about art and science being two sides of the same coin and what you're saying with this algorithm is a piece of art, really. And I think if you actually look at it, take a step back, coding. I write a lot. I write pretty much every day. Writing and coding is basically the same thing. Whether someone's taking a word out and then re-putting a word in and then you create this thing, whether that's a book or an art, piece of art.

6:44coding you're taking bits out taking bits in putting but you know and then it creates some sort of um you know app or whatever but it is the same thing and i love what you've yeah you've created this sort of um this algorithm then as we swim to sort of from coding here to to say you know the art stuff how are you making um uh the like people fall in love with the brand and making it feel like kind of unique to that to that place what was the place you went to i I think you spelt the name wrong. You gave out free tea or something like that. Well, I remember Neil Bankside, we gave out free bread for like four days because I just wanted everybody to try it.

7:25Yes. You know, what I found is that, you know, people would, you know, go in line. We were spending more time serving people on bread than we did anything else. But we still do that. We still basically go into a community and say, hey, look, we're here. And, you know, and we'd say, you know, have a loaf of bread because that's what we do. you know and just enjoy it on us it's a gift it's a gift and then what about the actual physical stores and then them well everyone is uh you know is designed by you know by us by and you know me and roy are still uh you know we go through the process we bespoke each one about what's the design what's the look we start out with the our process is basically first now we're in a little bit then we go looking around and we see one and then we go design the sites it's always the first starting point is what is this neighborhood about and the architects all know that we said this is like old georgian neighborhood it basically got built back in you know time um you know what over the time this has kind of happened to it okay how can so now we know what's what this community has gone through when it was built what it's gone through what's the major stuff and some of the stuff is that locals wouldn't even know like a cinema is there an example of yeah like in bristol we're doing one and it's got a, one of the first cinema houses on one end and like, you know, some other beautiful building like Roman building that has got an interesting history.

8:50And we try to combine both of those into the design of that. And then we talk about it. So you can almost like... So you've got cinema and Roman building. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We just said, okay, how do we use those two things that are in its past, you know, to create something today? Thank you so much for listening to That Espresso. I hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and are ready for the day. Let's be having you, boy. And please do subscribe, follow the podcast, share this espresso on WhatsApp if you liked it. And also there's a link to our newsletter in the show description. I spend 15 hours toiling and writing this bad boy.

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