Espresso: One Quote HONEST Burger Live By to Build Their Restaurant Empire

0:06you can pick up and eat his thing you can't pick up and eat culture a behavior yeah that's so true you'd a burger so you just admitted that my side of business is harder than it is or what side of it um harder for me to do because I can't do it yeah yeah so one thing you did say back on that on I think it was one of the podcasts you said simple is not easy and I thought that was a sick quote because as you say like the word simple implies like doing less and thereby making things it's like the easier part we used to always say that our food was simple we'd be like it's easy it's simple man it's fucking there's only like 10 burgers we had this spiphany together recently though wasn't it it was a couple of years ago we were like we've got to start saying the word easy yeah that's a complete disservice to our guys in the kitchens and on the floor who are knocking out 300 burgers in two hours in the city yeah and that's the thing that is not easy so if you compare if you compare our kitchen to say Coat which you know Coat has an infinitely more complicated menu than we do and their kitchen has you know probably five times the ingredients or Wagamama is one of those they have so much more ingredients more stations more things like that but they've also got three times as many chefs in there and this kitchen's probably three times the size of ours like what we do is focused and it should be because you're a burger restaurant and most people are sort of bacon cheeseburger like that's that's the best seller of any burger restaurant in the world of any menu in the world it's a bacon cheeseburger right and that's what we want that's why the honest burger is that and well obviously we've grown a little bit and we've tweaked the rest of the menu um as we've grown but we do still like to think the essence is simple but the execution is never easy because there's a lot of shit to do.

1:42And like we said a minute ago, you know, cooking a frozen chip, that is easy. You can, no, no, that's both. Cooking a frozen chip is simple and easy. Like you could fully automate that with a robot and it would be just dink, three minutes, down, up. That's that. Ours, yeah, we do cook-offs every morning. So every single time we get a new batch of chips into our restaurant, every single day they'll cook a portion of chips and work out how long it takes to cook and it could be you know depending on the variety and this is you know god's honest truth our cook time on chips could go up by a total cook time could be three minutes one season could be six minutes another season just because of the dry matter in our potatoes and different varieties and that is something that the chefs have to just deal with yeah i think i've sort of again more recent of if it needs to use you can articulate your visits better the longer you've been in it that's a really obvious thing to say I always feel like honest, if I come back to two things I'm like it should be a simple place to work it's not going to be easy, because I think we told ourselves it was going to be an easy place to work, we're totally setting them up for a fall, like it's totally unreasonable and unfair I do think we fucked up with that in the past by saying by not having a really rigorous training programme and we still we're just about putting in a really rigorous training program because we're like it's fucking easy look the menu's just there you know there's only that many burgers really coleslaw and chips oh it's easy but actually you want our people to know every single thing about our menu i want them to know about regenerative farming and we could spend days talking about that like there are things that we've definitely got wrong around that around that simple easy quote which there's another mistake he's saying it's mine fuck off I said simple not easy no mistake you just highlighted oh right wait so you said Phil you said it could boil down you said honest could boil down for two things it should be a simple place to work and for customers it should be a simple place to eat and I love that I love the idea that a customer doesn't have to come in and do this with the menu through five pages and a huge wine list it's like you're coming in you're having a burger and actually there's only eight of them yeah but ten but some people still it baffles my mind when people will look at our menu and don't get it I think we've got the simplest menu ever but some people do look at it and they're just like yeah but so it's simple but what I'm learning from you is simple is hard or simple is not easy right because there's a lot of on the surface it looks simple but there's actually a lot of depth and texture so the fact that correct me if I'm wrong but each branch to have that sort of local feel has it's own unique burger like that is really complicated that's not easy but it's simple but it's like oh yeah because you know i walk into tooting and it's like what was the uh was tooting the one is he done like a jerk yeah yeah it's like oh yeah so i feel like this isn't some like huge like five guys for example it's a small if there's something intimate about that yeah looks really simple but i bet you that's We've got like 40 restaurants with 40 local suppliers.

4:54Our finance team hates it. That's not fair. They don't hate it, I think. But they would make their lives easier. And they're buying, you know, because there's only one burger in one restaurant, you're buying tiny amounts. You know, invoices that will eat like 30 quid or something. Fuck yeah, do you know what I mean? Like we don't run the business from the finance department. So, you know. Quick one, guys. Espresso's got a brand new sponsor, Unleashed. Unleashed is inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software. we use Unleashed daily at Ireland I bloody love it, we've got our admin time in half, saving approximately 30k a year why use it?

5:27Save money, save headaches save stress, get granular clarity on your margins, know where your stock is don't miss availability look, your favourite brands literally use Unleashed as their backbone Candy Kids, Tiny Rebel, Trip always religiously look, there's a link in the show notes, please feel free to book a call with Josh, he's a wonderful sales team at Unleashed. They're amazing. Even nothing comes of it. And even better news, you'll get your first month free if you reference Hungary. Thank you. So I'm liking this theme of like doing things that look ostensibly sort of simple, if that's the right word.

5:59Yes, simple, but actually behind the surface, they're actually pretty complicated. So what, obviously the chips, the localised burgers per branch, what else is like look simple, but it's actually really fucking hard for you guys to bring that experience alive? Everything. Well, I think a lot of the stuff we talked about this morning you know if you want to not give people you know staff scripts a huge long list of service steps you know and you're going to let them wear what they want and honestly I would say like nothing we do is easy at this scale now yeah that's true and you know I'm not trying to kind of get the violin out but yeah hospitality is not fucking easy right now like I honestly sometimes I like sort of drift off and think about the good old days where we just have to worry about Brexit.

6:47And we thought that was like the biggest grenade the industry has ever seen. It's like, I would do anything to just deal with fucking Brexit than the shit the industry does with now. So I think anyone listening to this who works in Australia would probably agree that nothing is easy right now. And from a customer perspective, going in, paying for some food, eating it and walking out, that should be a simple process. But even that's quite difficult, right? When you go into a restaurant that's understaffed or their delivery's been fucked because, you know, the courier company's understaffed, wherever it is.

7:19Like, there's just all these layers of complication now that I don't feel like they were as big a deal 10 years ago. And now they're just constantly happening. It feels like there's not a lot of joy at the moment in the hospitality industry. A lot of the fun stuff, you know, seems to have been diminished and there's a lot more stuff that we have to deal with. I feel like it's starting to come back a bit, but definitely i think this christmas is feeding we've got a really nice vibe at the moment and you know really great life for like sales but i mean utilities yeah utilities is crippling businesses like we signed up to a two-year contract because at the time that felt like the right thing to do because the kid you said he was doing that and now you know i hear stories of businesses big you know branded very successful businesses that are scaling back their rollout because they can't afford to because their utilities are so outrageous and they're locked in for another 18 months or whatever.

8:18It's shit like that. The government should be supporting people like that. Why should us buying gas and electric today because we signed up to a contract 12 months ago and we tried to hedge our bets in a, I fucking hate this word, but unprecedented environment. And we're getting shafted and the people who are selling us the fucking gas and electric are making so much money even though their costs have come right down now because we hedged our bets we're getting fucked yeah

8:51it's rough in terms of like a lot of our listeners I think to relate to founders that have have not like made it but who've scaled big businesses right I always think as the business scales the founder has to scale and or like scale with their skill set, right? Or like change slightly. What are some of the weaknesses you've had to work on from going from like when you're that one store, one restaurant in Brixton to 40 now? Like what are the weaknesses you really have to hack at to... Personally. Yeah. Being fucking immature. I think both of us, I would say I was quite immature. Yeah. Stubborn.

9:30We're both still stubborn, but I think you've, you've, you've, you've grown, man. But I think we both have. honestly if you if you'd have interviewed us 10 years ago we'd be very different people how so well we discussed earlier like i don't drink anymore like drinking was a big part of my kind of personality i thought it was anyway it's obviously it's not but back then it was it was uh it's something now where i was like i need to take my life more seriously i need to take my career more seriously and god drinking in hospitality is very easy um it can be very damaging so yeah i think for me that was you know being far more self-aware and self-reflective is important because yeah when you're trying to grow a business and you've got people that depend on you and you know this is it's an old one but it's a goodie like lead by example yeah you talk about culture like culture is fucking meaningless if your leaders aren't leading by example over the smallest thing and and you're gone and i hear stories about people that have been on your podcast and i'm like really they've they said that i'm like honestly they've done that and but they're like yeah man fucking rock and roll that's what founders get away with i don't think we've been that bad probably done a few things yeah we've done a couple of these things i think we realized you know i think definitely at the stages of business growing and realising that some of the stuff that we were doing wasn't fit for purpose anymore.

11:02I remember being massively behind sort of this obstetric where I'm trying to grow the business between like, I was forgetting now, like 14 and 25, which is a really tough phase for me. I felt like... As in 14? Besides. Besides, yeah. The business, my ability had been outstripped by the business. You know, the business had got bigger than my skill level at that point. Thank you so, so much for listening. It honestly means the world to me. I hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day. Let's be having ya If you want the full episode It will be in the show notes Thank you so much Please say friends as well It means the world to me