Wahaca - Mark Selby

0:03Mark Selby:Hello there and welcome to episode 128 of People Doing Things. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Mark Selby, the co-founder and CEO of Oaxaca, the brand that sparked the UK's Mexican food revolution. The big bland problem. Back in 2007, the UK was stuck in a Tex-Mex time warp. Think heavy cheese, stodgy nachos and sombreros. It was a caricature of a culture that deserved better. Mark and his co-founder, Thomasina Myers, saw this gap and turned it into a movement, bringing the vibrant, fresh, zesty, market-style food of Oweka to the streets of London. Today, it's much more than just a restaurant.

0:43Mark Selby:It's a blueprint for regenerative hospitality. But as the group has grown to 14 sites with 40 million turnover, it has ran into a new kind of problem, the chain stigma. Mark has been very vocal about the noose around his neck, the struggle of being a high street innovator in a world worth chain has become a dirty word to the younger generations in this episode we'll dig into the vision for oaxaca 2.0 with their killer new flagship restaurant in paddington square the brutal resilience needed to survive the ups and downs of the hospitality world and how chance encounters can change your life tuck in mark welcome to people doing things how's it going it's going very well thank you for having me.

1:24Mark Selby:I'm excited for this one and it was a great recommendation from Christian from Roots. Yeah. So thank you for coming on. So first question, competitive yet caring, commercial yet creative, resilient yet reflective. What would you say deep, deep down drives you? I'm kind of curious where all those different descriptions came from. But I think my overarching one word would be a deep sense of pride. And I think everything has kind of driven me has been around wanting to be anything I do, I want to be proud of. And it doesn't really matter what that looks like. And there's a pride in the way you come across, the way you run a business, the way you treat the people that work there, and the way the consumer kind of interacts with you.

2:18And that ultimately happens if I'm playing a competitive game of football or tennis or whatever it is, it's not necessarily the final outcome. It's the bit at the end of the game. It's a bit at the end of the conversation, the bit at the end of someone's feedback where you sit there and write, did I feel proud of what just happened? How I played, did I give it my best? And I think I always say to our kind of marketing team, I say, guys, there is no point in doing anything if we're not giving ourselves a nine or a 10 out of 10.

2:43Mark Selby:What is the point? And within Oaxaca, whether it comes to kind of food quality or customer service, I think that's the biggest driver. And for me personally, I think that real thing of just, as long as you're proud of what you, not in an arrogant pride point of view, but as long as you're proud of what you achieved, and I think that's kind of the biggest driver. Is it about like a sense of sportsmanship, like playing the game, or is it about let's only do it if we can win? I think it's probably a blend. I think it's not really let's only do it if we can win, but I am definitely very competitive and I want to win.

3:19but if you take the football analogy i'll want to win but i'll be incredibly happy at the end if i go actually that was just that was a seriously good game and you also don't want to win if you cheat and you don't want to win if you cheat exactly i think that sense of achievement is like look we did it for the right reasons you know and again from a business point of view we always say you know do the right thing even if no one's looking and it's it's that sort of just that edge of I don't really care in business. Well, I do care. I want everything to succeed, but I would never run a business that didn't serve great food where my family came in

3:55Mark Selby:or my friends came in. You know, I know lots of people and certainly when we started in 2007, there were a lot of restaurants out there whose sole purpose was to make a profit. And you go around and you go, this food is unbelievably bad. but you know there were good businesses there were successful businesses and there's still quite a few of them out there and I think I just would never be able personally to run a business where I wasn't really proud of the food and the experience and how does that show up I guess both in your personal life and in your professional life like are there mantras you know that you like practice or or like I guess places you hold yourself accountable I think very much on And it was sort of certainly professionally, I think I am even difficult conversations, whatever it is, I think standing up and facing the music to a degree and being like, right, in a difficult conversation, in a difficult negotiation, in an element of you've got to make a difficult decision somewhere.

5:01I think as long as I come out of that personally and I'm feeling, okay, I did that the right way. And to your point, I didn't lie. You might sail close to the wind at stages, but you're like, no, I'm feeling there's an integrity in how I've done that. I'm going to play hard at certain times and things are not always easy and decisions aren't always easy. But I think as long as there's that real underlying integrity at the back of it.

5:31Mark Selby:I think that obviously comes from knowing who you are. Was that something that you've always had or did you ever have to work on it at stages of your career? I think I've always been a massive worrier. So all the way through my life, I kind of, and I worried about probably not achieving what I thought I might be able to achieve. and so I always push myself and I've got this sort of inherent sort of drive to like always be striving to be better and I think that is to achieve a sense of sort of pride and I think at some stage somewhere that worry probably sort of morphed a little bit more into okay well actually you're never going to be the best at everything that's just not going to happen but if you can come out of it feeling I did everything I could in that situation and I did it, spent my best of my ability and I'm proud of that result.

6:26And you're not always going to be proud of your results. But I think probably that internal competitiveness. I remember having a profile done on me many years ago, I think in banking, and it was like Mark's the type of person that inwardly competes with himself to achieve things. And I think that's probably not a great place to be. So I think actually trying to tone that down a little bit, it's probably a good thing.

6:50Mark Selby:You know, there's definitely been a few people where I've asked this question and there is a sense of, we were speaking about Jono earlier, you know, his answer was like fear of working for someone else. Yeah. You know, and I definitely find like what drives you is a bit of fear of stopping, like a fear of stagnating. I think it can be destructive, obviously, that internal competitiveness, but it can also be a driver to do a little bit more than you might otherwise do. I think so. And I think there's, you know, with it and with that sort of competitive nature, I think there's always that sort of, I always have this question of, can something more be done?

7:29Have we done everything? You know, and I think that is, my wife goes mad because she'll call up a restaurant and go, oh, they're fully booked.

7:36Mark Selby:and I go, give me the phone. And then, because I'm always like pushing, going, I'm sure there's a way, you know. And I think that definitely with people who set up their own businesses, it's kind of essential, I think. But that sort of almost excitement that comes with, I think you're right on that movement side. It's like, I don't like it when there's a block. It's like, how do you get around that block? And then when you do, you feel this sort of, ah, good, I've made it. And it's an internal one. There's nothing you're showing off about. You just think, okay, great. You know, I like, and it drives people mad at work because people, oh no, we can't do that.

8:12And I say, okay, let me have a work with this.

8:14Mark Selby:And it's not me trying to show them up. It's just I actually genuinely like challenges where there's a no and you're like, okay, let's see, let's see. So interesting, you're talking about being a warrior. Can I say that? No, a warrior as in someone that worries. A warrior, a warrior. But you've had some pretty mega highs, but also some pretty big lows over the last 20 years from struggling to find staff in the very early days and I also read a story about running out of chicken at one point to being oversubscribed after a big bit of press the norovirus outbreak in 2016 that forced you to close 25 restaurants overnight and then also being hit by COVID with a number of like central London locations leaving you especially vulnerable the cva uh through to now oaxaca 2.0 yeah what have been the you know highest highs and and lowest lows and how did you deal with them across the period i think my biggest overall kind of high was obviously the whole and the emotion of my wife always gets very annoyed when i sort of didn't cry at sort of the birth of our children or our wedding or anything but was in tears the first morning we opened Oaxaca because the sort of the exhaustion and just getting this thing open after a year and a half of trying but um I think the biggest high of all of that was you know we went through as you were saying we couldn't find the staff we we opened the first doors and within half an hour on that Friday lunch time we had to close them because the whole kitchen had backed up with sewage and it was just like nightmare after nightmare.

9:54And then three months in, we suddenly got this massive queue out the door. And when I say massive, it was about a three hour queue going up the stairs of Covent Garden out over the road. And I think the high of that just going, Jesus, we've done it. We've done something pretty amazing here. So that was probably the single high. And I think that the low, again, you've sort of alluded to it, but when we had our norovirus outbreak in 2016, which effectively in short summary was a virus that came into all of our 28 restaurants overnight. We think, although it's still never been proved, Public Health England looked at it for a year, we think it came in from some chilies from Mexico, like a chili paste.

10:35There was literally nothing we could do about it. There's nowhere telling and it was nothing to do with any of our health and safety policies. But nonetheless I remember just being I was actually away on the weekend I got a call on a Friday going by the way we've got a problem we've got about half of our staff have called in saying they can't come into work I was like that's so weird well you know talk me through it and we try to work it out and people were being sick but no customers had called up at this stage so we're like how this is how's this working this is only hitting our teams but it's not hitting customers.

11:10Anyway, that whole weekend, just we were staying with some friends and I mean, I was working till two in the morning, up at six, couldn't eat, couldn't, it was just like sort of crisis after crisis kept on coming that more staff weren't coming in. And then on the Saturday morning, started getting complaints from customers going up being sick all night. We had people in Edinburgh who their entire wedding party had to be sort of, I think that one bride was literally walking down the aisle, was sick. I mean, all these stories coming in and then you're thinking press you're thinking what's my responsibility as the owner of this business how am I supposed to deal with it and I was literally sitting in this sort of attic in France sort of trying to navigate it all and trying to get information from people without knowing what it was was it food poisoning we'd never even heard of neurovirus really at the time and just the panic of all of that and then the preceding two or three weeks where we then found out it was neurovirus and we then had a situation of just what happens if someone dies what happens if you know none of this was anything we had done but clearly all that responsibility was ours and you couldn't really write it but that Wednesday we had a huge festival we were putting on which was Day of the Dead which was just sort of utterly ironic and you're sitting there going and we'd probably spent I don't know a hundred thousand pounds on putting this thing together we had people flying in from Mexico, artists and stuff.

12:33And on the Tuesday evening, I had to pull that and I had to say, guys, we just can't do this because if something goes wrong. So we had half the office, we've been working on this for six months in tears off the back of that. And I think that, you know, the really, the biggest struggle of it was I was at home, you know, seeing your kind of business crumbling effectively and feeling pretty panicked about it and then had to go into the office the next day and be the positive one. I had to be the one going, everything's going to be okay. This is the plan. This is how we're going to do it. And I literally remember standing each morning kind of outside going, right, in we go.

13:09And then be like, right, here's the plan. What are we doing? Boom, boom, boom. You know, and then you see your sales fall off 40 % and, you know, build its way. But I think that one week of just exhaustion and just trying to navigate something you have no idea. No one has experienced anything like it. I don't think in the UK before in terms of an outbreak like that and closing and opening and going if we I literally had for about a week I had a lawyer right by my side every single moment going you know because if we kept a restaurant open and it kept on coming back this is the problem the neurovirus doesn't go away it's like one person can pass it to another person within you know just a little sneeze and just being in the air but we couldn't afford if we'd kept each restaurant closed the business would have just folded completely and as it happened we started to put millions and millions of pounds back in but we yeah I had this lawyer basically if I open a restaurant someone dies I am going to be personally liable so every decision I made I was like this is why I'm making this decision this is the point this is the facts I'm relying on which was coming in from the restaurants on who'd been ill when was the last time we had a recorded thing in that restaurant anyway so how many did you have to close for how long So we closed, it was the 28th, I think we closed 25 at various times.

14:28I think the longest was probably, I think, three or four days. And then we opened for two days and had to close for another three or four days because another case came in. So it was over about a four-week period. We literally, every, I think three times a day, we had calls on, are we keeping this restaurant open tonight? What's happening with the staff? Have we got enough staff to cover? All of this stuff. And it was weirdly, with hindsight, or actually sort of once, probably the initial two or three weeks, once everything had just been like, right, this is the process we're going to go through to get through this.

15:06I actually quite enjoyed the experience because it was almost like a little kind of MBA of crisis management. It was like everything thrown at you. And we had to protect the brand. That was the big. It wasn't like a hidden brand. We had all the news channels literally parked outside our restaurants. I don't know what was happening that week. It seemed to be not much news because we were sort of number two news on the BBC for two days. We were front page news on every single regional newspaper for about two or three days. And so we were sort of fielding the brand and how do we keep the brand going after this?

15:42What do we need to do? So we were constantly thinking about how do we, you know, we had insurance people saying you can't apologise because then you're going to be liable. we're going we have to apologize we can't just sit there and put our heads in the sand so all these kind of brand decisions we were making and then you know teams who were going to work but no one was coming in the restaurants because this had got out to everyone and everyone had been told by the helpful news channels it was food poisoning which it wasn't but obviously you know it's quite hard to try and explain to people how a virus works and that was nothing to do with us but anyway so that's a long answer of probably my low my low point I imagine like you must have been feeling pretty good up until that yeah yeah I mean I again going back to that worry point you know I still worried every day about the business was like what happens if what happens if and then your sort of worst nightmare did happen how do you recover from something like that I think the great thing is almost anyone that worked for us during that period I think has huge love for us as a business the way we kind of work with our teams and we're like look we're going to look at the pay you got through tips and everything else over the last 12 weeks prior to that and we will pay those going forward even though we've got literally 40 50 60 percent less people coming into the restaurants customers who were ill we kind of wrote handwritten letters to them you know we had like three and a half thousand people at one stage when i say we wrote we sort of hand signed and did lots of nice and rather than just pay them money we got these which were quite novel at the time we found these sort of sheets of paper which were had loads of wildflower seeds sort of put inside them and we just wrote this like look we can't nothing we can say or do we'll kind of apologize for what you felt for 48 hours but please just read this put it in the garden and in six months time hopefully there'll be some some sprouting wildflowers which will just remind you of our apology and and where we've been kind of thing and i did things like you know i don't know quite know why I did this, but I flew out to Edinburgh to the party and sort of went and apologised directly to them.

17:43I just thought, you know, we've got to do everything we can to A, say sorry, B, keep the brand kind of there. And then, you know, the actual rebuild of that, I'd argue we're almost still doing it. I think actually in a weird way, COVID was helpful. Yeah, but I think there was, you know, we were at the time, we were the number one restaurant brand in the UK in terms of sort of success and brand popularity. And we just went from being front of mind to just back of mind. And the amount of people over the following three or four years, you'd meet and you go, you know, oh, Oaxaca, I used to go to Oaxaca.

18:18I love Oaxaca. And you're like, so you haven't been there?

18:21Mark Selby:No, I don't know. I just, no, just haven't been. And this weird psyche just changed in terms of people's heads of this was the place to go to. oh no I used to really like going there which you know we are today you know part of our kind of the reimagined we call it sort of Oaxaca which is slightly elevated which I'm sure we'll talk about but when people come back in they go oh god this is great I remember Oaxaca but our challenge has been for the last sort of you know eight nine years getting people back in and when they do come back in it's it's they predominantly you know 90 percent of the time 95 percent of the time had a great time having been so close to food culture over the last 20 years how would you say that it's changed and how have you had to like maybe change with it the food around now is is incredible and everyone knows that you know and and i think when we started i think we've been credited as being the sort of people that bought street food into the restaurants you know the idea that you would take a sort of a cuisine from around the world and go right how do you bring that into a restaurant environment you know tacos very much street food led things and sort of package them up in a certain way and now there are hundreds of great taco restaurants in London but there's hundreds of great Indian street foods and Thai street foods and all that world has just exploded with it and with it has been a an understanding and sophistication I think with our food you know When we first started, we cooked our food.

19:59And then what's traditional with Mexican is people would put their own salsas on because people would understand. So we had these lovely salsa pots, which had all these wonderful salsas you could put on. But then certain people just would be like, oh, the food's bland. You go, yeah, you've got to put some salsa on. And people just wouldn't really understand that's how you did it. Whereas now I think people have much more of an understanding of things like that. But also, I think just people's understanding of Mexican food has moved on considerably. And I think we've done a pretty good job of moving that along in the Mexican space.

20:32I think where the big difference as well is actually on a design point of view. So I think both from a branding and a kind of restaurant design, you know, we very much designed the brand to be feeling like you were sitting on a street corner in Mexico. and as more and more street food restaurants came in they sort of took a similar approach and suddenly it was like a lot of brands looked very like us but just might be Indian or might be Thai or whatever it might be you know Bangkok street food or whatever and then some other brands like I sort of named the likes of Las Iguanas which you know from a food quality and drinks quality point of view were nowhere near us were then very much sort of copying what we were doing so their website would look identical to our website every time we changed it which you know some say is flattering others which particularly us would say was highly annoying particularly as we were then beginning to go into areas where they were and it was just like god we can't actually there was a site where i can't take that site because lasaguanas is there and they look exactly like we would look so i think about two or three years ago really sort of forced us to go okay we've actually got to we've got to reimagine what oaxaca is and every year we've taken sort of members of our team we took uh you know typically take about 25 30 people out to oaxaca and i think actually what's quite interesting is oaxaca itself is a city and a state has weirdly really matured in the design and food world as well it's sort of i mean i first went there when i was 18 but But it's unrecognisable now from what it was before with the sophistication of the food in Oaxaca.

22:14And I think that actually sort of really excited us to say, actually, let's bring this sort of, you call it Oaxaca 2.0, but let's bring a slightly more elevated form of Oaxaca to our restaurants, particularly on the design side. We cook with 300 fresh ingredients every day. You know, we're probably one of the most sustainable sourcing restaurants in the UK. we were charging about 50 % less than a lot of restaurants who were not even sourcing remotely, kind of sustainably, or from sort of organic sources or whatever it was. So we just said, actually, we've got to slightly change the way we are now to stand out from these guys.

22:57So we've got to elevate the design and we've got to present our food in a slightly different way. So people actually begin to realise and sort of appreciate. Yeah, exactly. appreciate the quality of our food and I think we're still on that journey you know we're always on our toes kind of looking and you know in the old days again from you know you get terrified when a new Mexican restaurant open and be like oh my god and I go and look to be the first customer in there going what are they doing and whereas now I'm sort of more kind of sanguine about just like you know what we're in our place we're doing a good job we just need to keep getting more customers

23:30Mark Selby:in people like it when they come in so yeah what was the sort of school if I know it's 2007 when you launched but like what was the school of the 2010s who were your sort of peers in other restaurants or other it's a good question actually we i mean it was the likes of coat uh tortilla sort of opened about the same time as us um we had uh jamie's italian they were opening up a lot was that pre or post it's a was julian it's who was there yeah it's but not there you know they're more kind of fast new qsr qsr e bills was growing bills bills had to probably four or five and then was growing off the back of that because there was then a wave of like pizza pilgrims and exactly yeah well baron probably started about two or three baron were probably more our generation and then yeah paddy and bun pizza pilgrims assumed to a degree and then i think flat iron came to a little bit later so yeah there was a did you used to trade notes with other so charlie set up flat iron used to work with us at oaxaca and know charlie really well so did a lot with him the guys that roses tie our commercial director went and ran roses tie pizza pilgrims our ops director went and ran pizza pilgrims so actually got this sort of caravan so my old md went and ran that so that network and caravan was another one that was sort of starting about the same time as us again I think I learned at the beginning I think I was quite like you know having come from banking and being very competitive like no no this is we're protecting ourselves here but actually very quickly realized hospitality is a very generous space and I think everyone is really up for sort of helping each other out it doesn't really work if you're not there to help people you will always need some help at some stage so I think everyone's very willing and yeah swapping notes I think but we were quite standing you know we weren't no one else was doing Mexican you know there's tortilla here but that you know as burritos but we were sort of forging a a world where you know I very much looked at wags and said look wagamama's created this market of of that kind of noodle ramen kind of space and for like five ten years there was no one else doing it I think in Mexican probably about six seven years we were we were very similar and it was hard to work out right what do we you know we love bringing huiclococcio which is a fungus that grows grows on corn you and we'd bring that in, and we loved it, but not many people ordered it, and it was quite difficult explaining to them this is a fungus, and people, why do I want to eat a fungus?

26:09So it was hard, but exciting at the same time, going back to my point, I wanted to be different. I liked the fact that Oaxaca was different, and the weird research we always did was like, people kind of said, oh, I want to go out for an Italian, so I go to Jamie's, or I go to Pizza Pilgrims, whatever. I want to go to chicken, I go to Nandes, I want to go to noodles, I go here. if I want to go to Mexican I go to these places and weirdly we didn't really come into that but it was like and then there's Oaxaca yeah and it was this weird thing where people didn't really it wasn't because they wanted a Mexican it wasn't because they wanted to share with sort of this vibe that we'd created which certainly up to 2016 was quite unique and people kind of really but it was a weird one because it was very hard to kind of know okay who do we who we like and And how can we forge sort of this world and keep growing?

26:59But with that, it was exciting because you could keep being innovative and hopefully keep being different.

27:04Mark Selby:And a lot of those businesses, Jamie's Italian's kind of gone now, right? A lot of those businesses don't last. It's really hard to last 20 years, essentially, as a business, but as a restaurant. In a world where most restaurants don't last more than like a year or something. Well, particularly, I think, as I used to work for the founders of Nando's. And I think, you know, they were very, I mean, they're brilliant at what they do, but they were very lucky in terms of when, you know, not many brands get it through. I always remember them saying to me, when you get to 10, you've kind of made it, you know, you've proved yourself.

27:37And so when we did get to 10, I was like, God, thank God. But they got to 150 before anyone realized they were a chain because they started in the early 90s and have the social media thing. So it was very much like, oh, we've got this very cool local little chicken place, which is quite original. So they built this sort of very localized love of the brand. Whereas now I think we love, you know, we've always loved to hate brands in this country for some reason, you know. And at times for good reason, going back to that point of, okay, are people just building a business to make money or are they building it because they really care about it?

28:14And I think, Tommy, my objective was always to prove you could build a sustainable and sustainable from a sustainability point of view, but also a kind of a long term sustainable business in the restaurant space where you did kind of care about the planet and you did care about your people. And, you know, definitely would have been easier. We didn't put those principles there, but it's bloody hard to keep the quality and to keep true to your roots. I think what we have done and a lot of those businesses I mentioned before they're great businesses but I wouldn't say I'd be super proud of their food whereas today I can sit here and go I am very proud of the food we serve and I think it's very hard to scale and to be able to continually say that not many not many businesses manage to do that and I think part of the ones

29:02Mark Selby:that have succeeded, they do reinvent themselves, like pop stars. Yes. You know, they reinvent themselves. Yes, although I think WAGs did that. And, you know, arguably they've lost the people that loved them back in the day, but they have sort of gained a whole new audience who kind of love them for different reasons. And they're really great at doing that. I'd argue probably Nando weirdly has never had to reinvent itself. It's just been very good at just learning a little bit more, changing very quietly and subtly but ultimately it's kind of relatively true to what it's always been they bring in a bit of menu innovation they upgrade the sites the look and feel and they're great on the sort of digital social side at the same time i think nando's does a good job it understands its core audience really well and it's core product yeah matches them up and then has cultural conversations you're very much so yeah yeah you know with with itself with its products yeah but that's only been in the last probably 15 15 years yeah you know their first or even less or even less probably yeah and in the other bit with us where because we have properly trained chefs and properly fresh food the consistency is very difficult and that's where if you're being true to your product and you're trying to grow it is very difficult having a consistently good fresh food product with as we have quite a lot of variety on the menu yeah and the likes of flat iron have been very clever and really good at keeping it a very tight simple menu unfortunately we chose a sort of a cuisine of a country which is quite varied and we're passionate sort of foodie people who want to have a really interesting variety of food and flavors but that does bring with it a lot of a lot of complexity now that we're on the topic of like food and you suggested is it pozole that i had today pozole that was very delicious what have been the best dishes you've ever had if you're going to take me to mexico what would you say the best is is probably in mexico in oaxaca there's a market called the essential de Abastos in Oaxaca which is this incredible market and you know I must have been there 18 19 times and every time you go you can get completely lost in it but it is just the most crazy thing you've ever you've got people buying wedding dresses next door to pork butchers next door to kids toys next door to electronics next door to snake it's just like it's nuts but But within that are some incredible food stands.

31:42And there's one which actually it's been on. We actually went there before, but it's now been made famous on Netflix. But it's the Mamelas from Donna Vali. And Donna Vali is sort of she's now like a grandmother in there. She must be like 80 and she's still there. And it's this tiny little counter. And she makes these Mamelas, which is this thick corn dough. and then she has on it these sort of um pork lard beans cheese you know they have a like very thin kind of steak or pork knuckle uh and salsa and you just sit around and they're freshly cooked in front of you and back and it's just like the best thing you've ever i mean the she makes this incredible fiery salsa that goes with it and it's just we always take all of our teams there and go this is the best food you will ever have and she sort of you know she's a great character and that's

32:31Mark Selby:a great experience one of the things that i wanted to touch on was just around the like the state of hospitality at the moment yeah especially in london but more broadly in the uk apprentice levies business rates decreased migration rising food prices cost of living like what is happening to restaurants and hospitality how can they manage it how do you guys think about it i mean touching on various points i think that the sort of lack of migration point i think we've we've sort of managed to tackle to a broad degree. I mean, still, you know, there is across the wider sector, whether it's sort of care and all those things, there's definitely a problem with that and farming in particular.

33:11I think within hospitality and certainly within our business, that's slightly settled down, but at great expense of investment and not actually funnily enough investing in paying stupid salaries, whereas coming out of COVID, it was just like the cost inflation of employing people was just so crazy because no one could get anyone so everyone was just promising the world to everyone else and we actually again stayed very true to our values and we're like we'd prefer to close the restaurants by not having people than to over promote overpay someone that's not good enough and that's not going to give the right quality to our customers i mean that was seriously hard again it was just day in day out people leaving because they've been offered 30 percent more pay by someone down the road who was promoting them to assistant manager and you really you've only just we've only just trained you to be a duty manager you're on our training program we're going to keep investing in you they won't you're just going to go there anyway sure enough people left and then a lot of people came back which actually was a real good value but we basically so we didn't want to tackle with pay but what we thought is there is going to be this continuing crisis so we've put in a lot of sort of extra benefits like you stay with us for two years we send you to Mexico we buy you a ticket out there we put on this big festival every year we close down all of our restaurants which cost us 200 grand a year for one day you know we do all these things which we're trying to create the best place to work in hospitality so we've actually managed you know our labor turnovers is fantastic and our people team have done a brilliant job on that I think there's a lot of independents find it really really difficult because it is, you know, they can't necessarily invest in the same way as we have.