Espresso: The Devonshire Founder 7 INSANE Leadership Lessons You've Probably Never Heard

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0:24I think it's up to us as leaders to explain why we're doing things and how we do them. and you know our why is we're in the business of making people feel comfortable safe happy and well looked after sure and how we do it is a million different things you know if i have a group of staff and we're doing a bit of training one of my ones is i'll just go right everybody point north and they'll go you need to make a decision point north and everybody will go there there, there, there, there. And I'll go, well, let me tell you something. North is that way, right? Now, everyone point north.

1:13So when they know where it is and what it is, they're much more likely, in fact, 99%, to do what they're supposed to do. but if you don't tell them and they don't know then you're going to get 10 different results yeah i interviewed um margo henderson she was saying that one of fergus's things like how he got saint john going in the day it was tell them tell them again tell them again and it's that same thing as your north yeah north pointing north what happens if say everyone was pointing north and this is moving the salt shaker and then suddenly you know you're in the chaos of a pub it's cacophony of like craziness and people's fucking north star starts moving well how do you like how do you tweak that like is that a thing i i i think really the answer to that one is you've got to give them as much help and information as you can sure and there comes a stage when a member of staff becomes trustworthy in terms of what they do you know obviously someone comes in who's worked somewhere else and has their own ways of doing things they're going to take weeks to become trustworthy and once you reach the trustworthy threshold where I'm confident that you're doing the right thing most of the time and that you get it and you understand how the flow works and you understand how things work and you're likely to have juniors asking you questions and you're likely to give them the right answer what I say to people at that level is i now trust you to make decisions so when you need to make a decision about how to do something what i want you to do is think what do you think osh would do and do that and if you're totally wrong i'm still going to back your decision but we're going to discuss it and if you're right brilliant so crack on is there and that empowers people to just get on with things is there an example i mean obviously not no names or anything of where that has happened because that's a beautiful uh nuance or leadership principle of you build the trust and i think and you you give it you give it you give it to them yeah and then and then if they if they balls it up it's that's it gives them the freedom to say right whatever decision i make is right but if it goes wrong like what's the nuance there of how you correct that and i suppose you support the decision that's the most important thing okay even if it's completely fucking wrong Is there an example?

3:44I think things like an easy one is we don't take tables more than eight people unless they're on a feasting menu. Yeah. Sometimes people don't want a feasting menu so you can make a judgment and go a la carte for nine people. That's fine. But sometimes you look and you go, oh, fuck me. There's an a la carte here of 12 people. What's happened? and then you go and find out and they say oh they really pressurized me and they want me to do it and i spoke to kitchen and that's okay and you know that sort of thing's okay as long as kitchen's okay with it the table's okay you're not too busy at the same time and you're able to do it and that that's an example of someone you know using their initiative to get on with it and working outside the rules to make the guests feel looked after and happy and fine and i think that's great how How important is it to say no to a guest?

4:39Because the whole thing about, you know, the customer's always right, all that shit. But I think it does, if you say yes to, sorry, saying no is actually important because, as you say, it could be suddenly nine people or 10 people or 12 people on the a la carte menu. That could actually have a knock-on effect to the rest of how everyone else feels. Exactly. How important is it to actually, like, train your team to say no? Or not necessarily no, but like. I think they're good at it. I mean the thing about saying no is it's a red line stuff you know the most likely person you're going to say no to is someone who's rude or horrid or too drunk or badly behaved or something like that and once they step over there and for example a customer tells you to fuck off which happens believe it or not yeah yeah yeah occasionally you just got to be able to just go no you fuck off that's that you're going you're not getting served I'm really sorry our relationship's over now catch you later see you later mate yeah that's amazing well that happens believe it or not in post even here people are just very occasionally not as often as you might think but it does happen occasionally who said you're not good enough oof I don't I can't think of that being an issue for me I just always wanted to push to be better I pretty much ignore people who who are negative or diss me in any way.

6:05I worked in corporate for pub companies for 30-odd years, and I can't think of a time when people said I wasn't good enough. People might have said, I don't agree with you, and I think you're a mentalist, but I always tried to prove those people wrong by continuing on the track I was doing, and I managed to prove myself through sales and profitability and happy customers. What's the example when people said you're a mentalist?

6:35um i mean i mean if you go back to the guinea and i said i went to them and i said during the pandemic the pizza express has gone bust across the road can't we just speak to the landlord to get the bloody keys and and run it and they basically said that's not what we do you can't do that so i went personally the landlord uh on so you're going to run the pizza express as a pizza no we ran it as the guinea so basically we got the keys of the place put white tableclots on on the whole thing set up a service station and we were running the food from the guinea kitchen across the road and serving people in there and we did it for a year really successfully and like when i said we were doing that and we're going to be i mean we imagine bringing plates of food across the brunton place in the rain with umbrellas you know it sounds fucking stupid and daft and a bit like off the wall but we did it and it was really profitable and you know when i said it first to the guys the guys there they went that ain't happening mate that is just not normal behavior and and you want the landlord won't give you the place anyway and you won't be able to do it because of xyz and a b and c i just went i would do it anyway and how did you how did you convince them to like did you just go and how because i think a lot of people i think pushing against the grain or doing things differently is a real strength but i think people can have the idea but either lack the bravery to do it or or up selling people on the idea i think selling people ideas is a is a super mile it's what danny mayer does so well yeah but how do you how do you do that if what would your advice be for someone who's like you've got this amazing idea but they can't push against it do you mean um so i was having a conversation about this this morning i think some of the best leadership and the best ideas come from a single place they don't come from a committee of people making a decision and i think pubs are good for that when when you're the landlord because i'll just go right this carpet's got to go and change the carpet i'm going to do a design for the carpet and the carpet's going to be different and you crack on you do it and you live with the decision and you continue to live with that decision and you make it work and you make it look nice i'm not sure carpet's the best idea but you know i think when you go and look at when you go and look at pubs for example you look at a i don't want to name a particular chain or whatever but you look at a pub belonging to a company that's got 300 pubs or 2 000 pubs and you go in there you can see and feel that the decision making has been made by committee that there's that everything is kind of lacking in spirit and style it's very flat it's very similar to the other ones that they do.

9:21The pictures on the wall, while they look like they might be interesting when you go really close, they're not fantastic iterations of what they are. The lighting's never right. The way that people flow through the building always feels slightly uncontiguous there's there's a feeling that you know the space isn't right and and i think a lot of that comes from the fact that it's not done by a single person that it's done by loads of people it feels like you kind of had your own sort of free reign in that when you're working for those big corporates how did you get yourself in that situation i did it over years and years by just um being pretty pig-headed about doing what i wanted to do and proving i was right by increasing sales and by the end they were just like just like just fucking leave them alone it's not it's not worth it i remember a boss saying to me uh a long time ago about 15 years ago thing about you is if you see a door you always kick it open you know i thought that was a good analogy for what i would what i'm like as to manage you know always just fucking want to see what's on the other side and barge through and try and try and do it i love the idea of of an idea comes from a single person and last time we talked about sort of top-down leadership which yeah you're like like you're you're you ashley and charlie like the order uh chaos and perfection is like how how a tree goes down and i suppose that's your north pointing pointing north is your example of that but then i love businesses that really encourage bottom-up ideas you know like the Starbucks, the Starbucks writing on the cup was one single person.

11:03That didn't come from the top down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was one single person said, right, the queue's fucked. I mean, it needs to create a moment of magic. Yeah. I'm going to write someone's name on the cup. Yeah. And bang, there you go. Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, says he would have made way more money if he just patented that cup, the cup that everyone fucking uses now. Yeah, yeah. But he was saying, so that was the cup was a top down thing. you were doing bottom-up innovation in young's you were saying right we're going to go and rip open pizza express i'm going to do it you know that works single single people single moments of genius how do you encourage your team i'm always watching out for that here and so do you do you how do you how do you encourage it though because i think it's so easy it's all about empowering you know and you know you know when you make that decision you do what you think i would do then that stuff actually happens by itself i remember when we opened first i think we were only open a couple of days in november last year and uh we'd had a busy night everybody left and the bar team were at the bar and i've just gone to congratulate them and uh one of the guys said to me he said what is it about shots and i said what do you mean he said these people coming in ordering like eight sambucas or five tequilas or ten slippery nipples what's that about and this is what a lad who's come over from dublin who hasn't really seen this culturally before yeah i said well you know it's just a thing people have shots he says but if you don't have shots in dublin is that not really a thing not particularly not not in the pubs these guys worked right and uh so i said well what's the problem he said every time they do it they're they're dickheads when they ask or they become dickheads straight after and i said maybe he said yeah i'm telling you they're all shouting at each other and doing this on the other and i don't get it and i said well what do you think we should do he said we shouldn't sell them and i've gone okay let's give it a go and do you know what we don't sell shots and it completely changes the mood of the place i think and i think it was a seminal moment for that it there's something about the fact that we don't do we don't really do cocktails either that most people have what you might call proper drinks the pints glass of wine gin and tonic so they're slow drinking there's none of that frenetic let's get pissed attitude and that completely changes the environment daniel kahneman who's a behavioral economist uh behavioral economist which is basically what Rory does.

13:40And he basically says, the moment of an experience, our satisfaction levels are greatest at the peak, which is in the middle, and the end. Yeah. It's that peak and rule, and he says - Yeah, the peak and rule, that's, there's a lot of people think about that in restaurants. Yeah, what would you say yours are? Yeah. The souffle, I mean, is pretty, pretty, pretty cool, I think. And, you know, we spend a lot of time making sure that those desserts are pretty amazing. And also the whole, the bill thing, I mean, one of the things that annoys me in a restaurant is when you order the bill and they bring you the bill and then they disappear again yeah that's so fucking annoying i mean why so i mean it's always been since we've done it that when you bring a bill to table you've got the pdq machine because when someone orders a bill guess what they want to do they want to go you know i mean seems so bloody obvious but i think probably 70 80 percent of restaurants you ask for the bill they bring you the bill and fuck off again leave you there too what are you supposed to do yeah yeah yeah just look because you've eaten everything yeah you've probably got nothing left you actually ask for the book because you want to pay yeah you know 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 your 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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