Espresso: Rory Sutherland vs. The Devonshire Founder: 38 Secret Unique Selling Points of a Pub

0:02This was a real jump into a dark chasm for me because it hadn't been a pub for 12 years and obviously we were taking this big step into the dark you know going very retro very old school lots of people in the industry who knew the old Devonshire which closed in the 2010s always said it was a dog of a sight and never worked and no one drank this end of Piccadilly and it would be a disaster I literally spent four months every time I closed my eyes I had a vision of myself behind the bar there on my own and nobody coming in. And it was a recurring dream. Of course. It wouldn't go away until I got the bloody thing open.

0:47And it got to the stage where when we were a month away from opening, I was just like, fucking get it open for Christ's sake, because I can't sleep and I can't think straight. And all I want to do is pour pints and serve customers, even if there's only a few of them. But for me, it was... And what was the take-off like in terms of a graph? Was it a kind of sigmoid curve with a slow at first? It was like, shh, it was a hurricane. It was a hurricane. Yeah, it was. It really was like, do you remember those old videos when Harrods used to do a sale in the 80s and they'd always have the TV camera inside and they'd open the door and the whole street would rush in.

1:23It was like that. It was like that. Yeah, so quite the opposite of me standing alone behind the bar happened, which brought another load of complications and problems, but we dealt with it and it's doing all right. Thank goodness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. what's the because I think when we had lunch I think Charlie was talking like I don't know if you purposely did this but didn't you write a list of like really hard things down yeah that almost would kind of no one else would be able to do yeah so there was because I think that's a really good in terms of getting people in do things that no one else would bother doing because then you're automatically different well there were our unique selling points you can see that picture there you can see the beer taps are the Czech ones they run at twice the speed of the UK ones and for us to get then plumbed in was a huge thing.

2:09Right. You know, we've spoken about the Guinness. You know about how we burn the wood for the Ember Grill. You know about the butchery. We bake all the bread on site. We've had our own steak knives. Steak knives, steak knives. All of those. There was actually 38. 38 unique selling points. And I had a really fraught and anxious conversation with Charlie probably about two months before we opened, going, we can't do all of these things. we need to cut this at least by a third. And in his charismatic and measured and brilliant way, he just went, no, we're doing all with it. And we did. What was the hardest couple to get over the line?

2:54The ovens must have been. The ovens is still quite a thing. I mean, we're burning half a ton of oak a week in the middle of Piccadilly. So getting all the filtration and the cleaning and passing by the council, which we thankfully have has been a thing. The butchery thing, which is now a big thing because we own the whole sort of chain from when it leaves the abattoir to, when it goes to on the place. And that's five to six weeks now. Wow. And so we have that much stock all the time. The wine list, the amount of wine, the Guinness, the logistics of getting the beer in and out and having it fresh and beautiful.

3:33You know, the staffing, all the stuff. but I love it yeah yeah yeah but I think none of it's been none of it's been I think the idea of writing down a list of really hard things and running it hard is a great way to create like a massive gap between you and like competition is there what's the equivalent of that Rory in terms of a client where you've basically wrote a list of things that are like I suppose it's an offspring of reverse benchmarking but like when you write a list I don't know with any client it could be Coca-Cola it could be whoever where you've said right this competition are going to struggle to do this uh differentiation always requires you to do something that's a little bit bonkers doesn't it yeah in other words it's the thing you do that you don't have to do that carries the weight of the this is where finance people are a catastrophe in marketing you see because they go well you know the classic example is the double tree hotel cookies okay there is no you know nobody ever goes to a hotel and goes i found that hotel experience very disappointing they didn't give me free warm cookies on check-in okay so those are the things that the finance people will always cut.

4:36But in the process, what they do is they make everything more and more alike to its competitors. And therefore, the things that you do that aren't actually necessary, the discretionary things, are the things that carry by far the greater part of the weight of communicating what makes you valuable. Two months free. Yeah, that's what Espresso sponsors Unleashed are offering. They are supply chain gurus and offer inventory management that talks to your e-com and accounting software. It's helped Ireland's cut admin time in half, get granular clarity on your margins, know where your stock is, don't miss availability.

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