ALF Insight On Brand Podcast - Rory Sutherland with Shamil Thakrar

[Music] rory and shamil i'm gonna hand over now to you thank you so much everyone thanks for listening and hope to see you all spray soon right now because this is a podcast being recorded live i've got to start um i assume i don't have to wait for the countdown clock is that fair uh i i don't know rory i think it's uh i i think we're okay i think that's counting down our sessions i think we're live it's now counting down our session i i thought i might have committed a huge gaffe there but i think we're okay now this is an extraordinary case i've just got to start with a little podcast introduction because uh it's required for people listening later so i've got to say before i start fanboying like crazy i mean the previous speaker the announcer just said we've all missed human contact to actually be honest i haven't very much i'm a bit of an introvert the two things like the only two things i've really missed during lockdown are pubs and indian restaurants you know sitting with a load of people in an open plan office to be quite honest i can take it or leave it but pubs and indian restaurants are the only two things you can't really replace in the virtual world i'm sure there are people currently trying but um hello and welcome to rory sutherland's on brand brought to you by alfinsite in each episode we'll be bringing together big names from the world of advertising marketing and media to dissect and debate success ingenuity and the future possibilities for our industry and today as part of the mad anywhere virtual event we're talking to shamil shakra who's the co-founder of shoot not worthy okay now the interesting thing is it's not really as actually i mean the whole concept of indian restaurant uh is very weird because much of the food we experience and describe as indian is for example highly atypical of indian food and your food is also slightly an outlier in the sense that it's as much iranian or zoroastrian in its origins as it is originally indian is that fair um it is we do have a lot of irani food on our menus um which but it's it's not strictly iranian hashem it is our aspirin and we also serve an awful lot of the food of bombay um in in general i think our menu probably could is bombay comfort food and in fact even the food that is served in irani cafes that we we serve especially for breakfast for example is is really indian you know i mean it's now sort of assimilated into bombay and i think we've always taken sort of inspiration from um finding those really good dishes in bombay which may not be mainstream in the uk but have really we love and we want to bring um somehow the best versions of the ones we've tasted so we think hard about where all the different dishes are and then bring them to you and and i think it's probably all bombay comfort food in the end it's the stuff that certainly gives us comfort and part of your motivation for founding the chain uh well it was founded as a single restaurant garden uh which i've been to many many times uh you've now got four in london i think you've got edinburgh birmingham and um manchester as well so for all you sort of metropolitan snowflakes out of there you now know you can actually leave london and still get um you know assured uh decent food so that's good news for all you folks um uh now the interesting thing is you started as a single wrestler in covent garden and you were partly driven i suppose by an irrational hatred of flock wallpaper weren't you that you felt that the presentation of kind of indian culture in in britain had become rather tired and hackneyed and part of your motivation was to kind of fight against this you know rather lazy stereotype that had emerged um yeah how do you do it um i i think that's true although i have to acknowledge a massive debt to flock wallpaper because i i think that what we do stands very firmly on the shoulders of of curry houses and the curry house tradition because i think that it's it's only because of the familiarity of indian cuisine and it is indian cuisine although you know there's some stories around the silhes and and and being bangladeshi food it is mughlai cuisine um we stand on those shoulders and i think the familiarity with the ingredients and the familiarity with the taste means that we can do what we do and it is therefore something that people like and i think that um certainly when we were first thinking about for me a lot of it is cultural as much as food and thinking about the representation of india in popular culture in the uk and today we might say they were tropes that's a that's sort of quite a fashionable word so so the tropes were curry house bollywood cricket days of the raj palaces you know that's that's sort of it bollywood maybe did i say that and and i think there was there was no room for other more sort of uh sensible understanding or nuanced understanding of indian culture and there was so much to be said about about bombay particularly about indian food and indian culture in general and so i wanted to find those dishes that you can't find on on british curry house menus i wanted to find that way of speaking about our culture um and and in a way it was a discovery for my own heritage as well uh and understanding myself in the context of of me coming me being here in the uk as someone of indian origin but but bringing that together and and sort of then challenging the perceptions of indian culture and saying there is look there's a lot more to be said and this whole idea of irani cafes and the heritage of immigrants coming from iran uh you know persia back then zoroastrians to bombay settling there in the early 20th century and welcoming iran in it seems just a lovely platform to use to tell stories about bombay tell stories about heritage about the food and to bring people in and it felt felt sort of good and fresh and different and you've certainly done that i mean you have a really interesting approach to opening every new restaurant which is you create a kind of backstory about who the founder might be who his family might be so you actually in the same way that a character in a hollywood movie might have a backstory written none of which ever appears on screen but it's to help the actor understand the character you do the same when you create a new restaurant if i'm right that's astonishing tell me a bit more yeah we well i i think i do it because i like doing it i'm not sure if it's i think it is helpful of course but well we we believe it is um i i think that uh if you're trying to express something if you're expressing you know you're trying to create a design um in a way it's much better to use something which is detailed and nuanced even though the it may not be visible to to guests and customers who either just i don't think it really matters and and what we do is i will always think of a fictional protagonist um someone uh who might have done something or been somewhere or one of these iranis who's created an iranian cafe or has come in some circumstances in the irani cafe and then we use that story to build the restaurant so the design the designers get that brief uh the build is everywhere everyone sees that brief and then we communicate it and um for example our king's cross restaurant we imagine a guy who's wandering around in bombay in 1928 and he's around victoria terminus uh which is which is similar to um king's cross you know pancras rather which is a big gothic building and he's wandering around there in 1928 he's just arrived maybe fresh off the boat he's quite entrepreneurial has this sort of energy he sees this big sort of warehouse which is what our kings cross restaurant was in the 1860s in the uk as built as and he sees this warehouse and thinks here are men and machines and animals there's stuff i can sell chai here so so he he bribes a guard sell some chai maybe he bribes him again a few weeks later builds a kitchen you know builds a little seating area and eventually 20 years later he's taken over the whole place and what what is nice about that for me is that i get to tell the story of indian independence because those were the predominant events between 1928 and 1948 when we imagine this restaurant cafe takes over this big warehouse space and and i really like the idea of telling the story of independence in a space which was built in 1860 a real space which is the good shed in king's cross that was used to interchange goods from railroad and and sort of uh uh canal um for the empire essentially so this was a sort of a place where empire happened and now i i quite like building this this cafe in there which was in the empire but but what we've done then is is the whole stories that we tell uh the artwork is all anti-colonial so there's there's graffiti on indian independence that there's a big a huge sign which is five meters high saying go back simon which is a protest against the simon commission of 1928 which we found in archives it's a big uh contemporaneous 1928 piece of graffiti so all of this comes alive and as you say maybe people don't know it but i love the irony of having a five meter piece of anti-colonial graffiti in what was essentially a colonial building in 1860 and maybe it's just fun for me but it does i think give you a very different sense of space and being somewhere even though you might not be consciously realizing it it is the extraordinary space and uh very very different from any indian restaurant you've ever encountered before indeed i'd recommend you go there and have a look around even if you don't like indian food obviously if you don't like indian food you lose quite a lot of my respect and any employment prospects with me but nonetheless even if you don't like indian food uh it's absolutely worth visiting and what it also does which i think is interesting is one of the things that used to drive me nuts okay was there was a kind of artificial ceiling placed on what you could charge for different cuisines so with french food for some reason which is not nearly as good as indian food as we all know okay the sky was the limit you know people would regard it as perfectly reasonable to go out and spend three figures on a a french meal and yet with indian food they just had this artificial mental ceiling around the sort of 25 30 pound ahead mark now what you've done i think is very interesting because you haven't gone wildly up market um it's undoubtedly a premium price restaurant you know they're probably limits to how far you can scale realistically but nonetheless you've you've also managed to scale and you know and and break through that price ceiling i think incredibly successfully which was i think something that was long overdue because i always found it a problem with client entertaining because you know you can't quite take a really senior client to an inexpensive carry house not because it isn't good but because it doesn't seem expensive enough and you've finally provided me with a gorgeous outlet here where i can actually get some decent food while i'm providing someone with hospitality and the way you've done it i think is truly magnificent because they're little details in that king's cross restaurant i think they're little graffitos as well aren't there kind of in the toilets and so forth which are kind of um yeah you know pre-independence era graffiti appears and then they're lovely little kind of echoes of kind of previous laws and social norms and other messages and it is it is a very very rich uh experience i i absolutely love it so what are your plans interestingly i had a conversation with and he was also of indian origin actually the marketing director of yum brands and pizza hut and his dream has always been or his great question is why has no one actually created a sort of chain out of indian food so you have this incredibly innovative uh sector where uh one of my favorite indian restaurants keeps it it's takeaway menu is only a partial representation of the of the full menu because they don't want other restaurants stealing their signature dishes for example so you have this incredibly syncretic culture where people are borrowing stealing inventing experimenting all over the place and yet it's always remained at sort of one two or three outlets at most and often not under the same brand where do you think yeah and young brands are always asking this question could we do the same thing essentially and do this at some larger scale what do you think the potential is there or do you think it will always remain something which is an artisan um an artisan uh restaurant essentially um well for us we i guess i i really love every time we open a restaurant to to deepen the idea of the brand and what we do and i think i think there's two different routes you could go down and i think branding is surely um at some level it's economic right so so the reason i have a brand is because i can do do the work do the design work do the positioning work and next time i open a restaurant um that the brand is is resonant with people so they can come in and i don't have to do all that work again or build up the reputation but they will come in because it is that brand and before long you've got 300 of these things and and you scale because you put the investment into the brand so i think a brand is there's a huge economic incentive to build a brand but we don't use that as our motivation we don't exploit that because every time we open a restaurant we have to do this flipping work of uh creating a new story and and so it doesn't work that way so you could so you could take one approach which is what uh jeremy king does at corbyn king's amazing writes a story every time and bills fishes builds the woolsey builds the delaney and i hadn't realized he does stories too until much later and we've discussed them quite a lot it's they're brilliant but what we do is take the same brand and deepen it every time and i think that that means that it obviously puts a bottleneck on how fast we can do things but um we got rid of logos i think they're really old school i don't like them we have a different typeface for every single restaurant which is which makes sense in the context of that story um and then for example i don't know if you you came to it but we did the immersive theater production into shim kensington where the protagonist was a guy called cyrus irani who's a cross between uh carlito from carlito's way and rick from casablanca and he leaves prison and he's a bit of a rogue uh but he's a lovely guy he leaves prison having made some money he's got he's got his money he buys an old cinema which is defunct turns that into a jazz club come restaurant has a beautiful girlfriend who sings jazz and opening night he greets you for the first two weeks we didn't open as a restaurant we opened as an immersive theater production we had some punch drunk people write the script and help us with all the production and so you walk into this story and literally you spent two hours in the company of cyrus irani who would greet you bring you in give you drinks the cops might interrogate you there was some violence and some stuff we wrote music for it but i think that what i love about that is that every time we do something we get to we get to deepen it a bit deepen it more so so i think we'll always be a bit artisanal because we love doing that but at the same time i think what's quite nice about it is that we get to to put all sorts of things into the brand all sorts of stories attached into the brand um that we released a record with dashim karnaby which is 1960's music um and we spent a lot of time with the musicians who made music in in bombay at the time um and that that was great fun too and quite deep into that and we've got other ideas to do this thing but this this storytelling thing i think it's something that's very resonant and very deep and i think allows you to take branding in a very very different uh sort of feeling and direction so for me it really hangs on hangs on that for us you know that we can sort of manage to grow not that fast and we'll keep it fairly fairly sort of contained but we can we can deepen it as we go i don't know if i answered your question but i enjoyed talking about the immersive theater production no i mean i i i just think that possibly you know in the areas the catchment areas around london there's a huge opportunity for um uh exactly this kind of food which is it's very interesting actually i i'm sorry to digress a little bit but the spectator asked me about a year ago when they had their 10 000th edition to go and review all the advertising from the spectator um uh over the you know from its foundation in 1828 yeah and one of the most extraordinary things i noticed i'd always thought of the indian restaurant as 1950s phenomenon when my father was at university there was one indian restaurant he became a lifetime convert and then it of course occurred to me that restaurants to some extent uh weren't actually that numerous in the 19th century what i discovered in the spectator going back to the early 19th century was an unbelievable profusion of advertisements for indian spices condiments and herbs and i realized that actually this tradition of english people eating indian food is much much older than we think because there must have been a whole bunch of raj returnees who are going going comfy eating this eating this blood crap for the rest of my life and so there was this market you read that it's very good oh glorious yeah that's that coming back from india and being faced with a lifetime of pretty bland overboiled vegetables must have been like a kind of purgatory and the whole spectator was packed with these ads for extraordinary exotic i mean actually worcester sauce emerged from an indian recipe that the guy brought back he he retired to worcester took a recipe to his local chemist who were called lee and perrins and got and he got to make it out and it was apparently totally disgusting and so they forgot all about it and then they left a barrel in the cellar and ten years later they tried it and it was it was to source essentially and so you realize that this is actually much much older and i think the latent demand here is for a different kind of food and a different kind of dining experience is colossal do you get tempted i mean there's always the danger of over expansion but do you get tempted to sort of dream of 100 outlets or 150 or do you think that there's only so far you can stretch we do do certainly think about it uh and and i think there's there's a couple of issues for that with us i think i mean orthodoxy back in 2014 in restaurants and we're not in 2014 we're in 2021 which is really really different for all sorts of reasons but was raise a lot of cash simplify your concept and expand it and and you know all the clever people said that you've got a great concept now you've got a couple of outlets you should simplify you know scale it and sell it and and and we we just decided not to do that and i think that um so i think i think actually in this particular case what happened was we were so committed to making sure that the experience was wonderful for both team member and customer and that we wanted to sort of let's monetize that let's let's make it brilliant but then monetize that let's not be focused on the profit so let's make money by focusing on on sort of the quality of the experience um that i think that became our culture and i think in this particular case culture just trumps strategy you know i'd like to say it was strategic that we grew slowly and and but i don't think it was i think it was because we couldn't face opening terrible restaurants and i wanted to write a story every time and make them wonderful because it is a bit of a process and i think in the end um possibly if you take people from our vintage um some really really great brands you know things like byron or pulpo which i used to love but you know brands that did try and scale and expand and i think in the end we ended up um doing a decent job of getting quite big revenue-wise but without that many outlets and and i think we're sort of managing to you know touch wood is really difficult and i love those businesses um but we're managing to sustain what we do so i don't think we paid a penalty in the end on on actual growth i mean i think we hit before the pandemic we were up at about 55 million of revenue and i think we'll hopefully hit that again you know post post the pandemic and uh so i think we managed to sort of do do that the mantra that really helped us to slow down but at the same time to make sure that our sales per square foot were brilliant our restaurants were really really busy was deepen don't dilute so it's deep in with a comma deep in common don't dilute and so every time we open every time we design a restaurant every time we serve a dish every time we have a service experience we think it should be better than the last one and if we can achieve that then i think we we can grow actually very well but it might appear slow in terms of units but i didn't really mind that that wasn't what we were after in the first place so there are definitely siren calls um you know to get funded and grow fast but we we resist them because it doesn't work for us and of course in terms of revenue you've cracked something which was pretty much to mix religious metaphors the holy grail of of the indian restaurant industry which was your full three times a day essentially now this business of introducing breakfast um my my harness is a sort of behavioral science nerd is that it has a knock-on effect that one of the reasons indian restaurants are empty at lunchtime is because they're empty at lunchtime you look in they're empty you think well i bet not go in there and you know we you know quite a lot of these instinctive things now one of the interesting things is by offering what is arguably i think actually you know undoubtedly one of london's best breakfasts if anybody hasn't had breakfast at the shoot you're missing out okay but one of the interesting things it seems to do is it seems to pump prime um people going in because the always the assumption was um annette king lost a lot of my respect by saying nobody eats indian food at lunch time to which i pointed out that 1.4 billion indians seem to manage to do it quite satisfactorily um but um one of the interesting things you've managed to do is the three me you know effectively you you you each restaurant which is in quite expensive real estate is pretty packed out for breakfast it's pretty full for lunch and is obviously extremely full in many cases there's a queue at dinner time now do you think that was the breakfast thing that was actually a killer there that there was a kind of path dependency of filling the restaurant because you know the great curse of an indian restaurant i once said as a graduate question for graduate applicants to ogilvy which is how can you get people to eat at indian restaurants in lunchtime at lunchtime and um i i you you seem to be the only place that's really solved that i i'm intrigued to know more well the answer is is is if you want to fill an indian restaurant at lunch you serve them breakfast uh and and i know that people um i think people in 2008 when i was thinking about starting the shim thought i was an idiot because why would i leave my secure employment at you know bain and company to do something like launch an indian restaurant i know friends in my father were like uh you know this is ridiculous you're gonna open a curry house that's regressing you've been educated and you're doing stuff and now you're going backwards to opening a curry house trust me there is no way you can benefit humanity more than by leaving a management consultancy to open an indian restaurant there's there's nothing that touches that in terms of uh public public good i think so congratulations for that yeah well i love it i learned a lot of stuff but but so so then when i tell them that i'm opening a i want to open an indian restaurant that say fine you know that's pretty stupid it's 2008 lehman's just crashed why would you do that like we don't need more indian restaurants and then eventually i tell them that we're going to have a really busy breakfast they would write me off of course because because it made no sense i mean on the face of it um having a business plan with a breakfast in it i don't know if the business might have breakfast in a bit but thinking you were going to launch a business breakfast an indian breakfast seems insane but i think maybe a couple of things um were behind it one was definitely the thinking that if you managed to get people in for breakfast you'll fill the whole place there was this very you know big taboo around indian food for lunch that we were consistently warned about that people won't come in because it's smelly it's the office and why we've got to smell that way so they're lower than vermin i know i come across this all the time it's ridiculous but carry on yeah yeah well we were sort of humbled and understood it and or tried to and took it on board and said well what we could do is persuade them to come in for breakfast and we'll we'll invest in really good extract which we did we overspecified the extract so the place smelled fine you like it what didn't have that stale smell that you do get sometimes after spices and so we over-invested in there and we wanted the place to feel like a cafe that was really important so irani cafes were cafes and this was not curry house it was cafe and cafe was a place that was all day bustling serving doing stuff and then when you hit breakfast um it repositioned i think and i think people were like this does breakfast i wouldn't eat in a curry house for breakfast therefore this isn't the curry house and i mean honestly though it was me and my you know co-founder covey sitting in the restaurant for months and weeks on end staring at our bacon on rolls just the two of us and eventually we we sort of got to um i think we got to a thousand pounds a week was our break even cash-wise which we told ourselves it was i don't know what it was um and we did some sort of probably spurious calculations and my sort of wildest dreams was two thousand pounds a week this is our first restaurant in covent garden and eventually i think we got up to to sort of 15 or i think 20 thousand maybe twenty thousand pounds so fully twenty percent of our customers now come in for breakfast maybe a bit more than that twenty five percent i think we do about fifty five percent of our trade before five or six pm um which which is really really weird for an indian restaurant um but i think it was it was i don't know if it was it wasn't a guaranteed thing you know we had to really work hard at it and be persistent and it was quite humbling it took a while i must add that to my list actually of of things that don't make sense except in retrospect which is i always have this problem with actually i suppose this is one of the things that you know coming from a bain background it must have been difficult for you to do something counterintuitive because all the markets um all the market analysis would suggest there is no market for indian food at breakfast and at lunchtime and so you know in the best consulting tradition you're supposed to respond to that and i always argue that there are far more good ideas out there that you can post rationalize and there are good ideas you can pre-rationalize and that some sort of you know what you might call fairly um dedicated experimentation as you did there genuinely paid off i mean you know i mean you know nobody as far as i know has yet replicated it but it's an extraordinary thing because it changes the whole economics of the business um it's brilliant yeah and the positioning of differentiation we did so much marketing around i mean we don't do real marketing we just plugged the bacon on roll a lot and it really resonated and i think that because because we got so much sort of pr out of that and so many people came along and said wow this is like a national dish but somehow you managed to reinvent it with and we cheated of course because all naan is made to order so it's very very fresh we put some chili jam into it and some cream cheese and and it tasted fantastic and suddenly everyone was like this is really cheap and lovely and we can just go there regularly i might come back for dinner okay there's been less on the description so i'm starting to make pervy facial expressions now at you describing this thing um i can actually um actually follow this is rather a nice segue uh which is that my pa actually bought her husband for his 50th birthday um a i think it's the bacon naan roll neat she managed to have it delivered now i understand you've effectively under locked down not only have you by the way and and i want to say this because um i know that you're probably too modest to mention you cook an unbelievable number of meals for the nhs under lockdown if that's right yeah yeah we haven't stopped volunteering as a health worker knowing that i didn't know so tell us about that and also tell us about how you had to kind of essentially invent a delivery business which was never part of your intention and also a food kit business which i think is really interesting yeah we've been pivoting like crazy like like basketball players i mean it's um you know i've come to resent that word uh pivot it sounds so easy uh and it's really not um i mean on the first bit i think when when the pandemic first hit uh we obviously had to think about safety of our customers and safety of our team and once you address that you think about cash and whether you're going to die and then we thought once we've addressed that we obviously do have to think strategically but we can help here so we got involved pretty fast and um we on the first pandemic we did a lot of cooking for the nhs and just sent stuff to hospitals this time around we'd be doing even more and in touch with individual hospitals and individual vaccination centers where we've just sort of sent them food just dumped food on them and that sometimes it's uh they haven't been able to process it with their sort of health and safety requirements but generally they've loved it and been able to receive it i think we're up to 20 or 30 000 meals you know just just in the last few months that they've sort of been eating and i think it really helps because it's pretty miserable in the nhs it's better now but it's been bad um we've also hit a milestone it's quite quite deep for us we hit a milestone of um for every meal we serve in the restaurants we donate a meal to a child either in the uk or in india and we did that from 2015 so we've just passed 10 million meals um to children over the last five years which is a sort of wonderful milestone that we passed during the pandemic but once we sort of stabilize the business sort of well at least thought we had enough cash which i don't know if we you know did it was quite hairy we thought right what should we do here to be to be creative and create more cash for ourselves and potentially have a business that we could keep and delivery was was a difficult decision in some ways easy and others because i just never wanted to do delivery i thought what we do is we provide experiences to people who come into the restaurant in fact we're going to go the other way the strategy was to go in the absolute opposite direction and not do delivery and bring people into a physical space which is beautiful and we serve them and yet in the pandemic the logic of delivery was very compelling we had to reduce our cash firm um which was not insignificant we were burning an enormous amount i think at one point um you know the run rate burn of about 10 million pounds a year so that was sort of the worst point before we were managing to to do any generation of um revenue and mitigate that so so we we ended up opening we've opened delivery kitchens we've opened eight delivery kitchens and the thinking has been that look we can't get to you so we're gonna bring you awesome food at home uh during the pandemic and we are gonna make sure that what we're giving you is a wonderful delivery experience uh which brings you back into the restaurant and fundamentally the restaurants of what we do but um creating a fantastic taste of what we do uh we're working very hard on the experience um and i we did a lot of benchmarking from around the world we've looked at delivery in south korea in melbourne in san francisco l.a berlin and looked at all the best ideas and said let's knit those into what we do and use that also as an opportunity for storytelling for engaging so we're still working quite hard on the packaging and the experience and we also chopped off all the dishes that didn't travel so it's quite a reduced menu um so it's much smaller but those dishes that we send you do travel well so dal is maybe even better out of delivery and it's even better the next day actually the chicken curry is delicious the biryanis are delicious we're not sending you grills because that tastes terrible um none we do send you but we might start sending you little dough balls which you can make your own non so you can choose which one to have like the naan kit and and the business has been it's taken off it's really good so now we're we're thinking about how to think about the cannibalization different channels can both businesses exist together i think our conclusion is we could keep the business on the other side but it's got to be brilliant you know it can't it's got to be a window into the restaurant it's got to seduce you into the restaurant i think we can make that happen and then the meal kits business again it's another another sort of pivot um we thought what fun to make a bacon on roll at home and if you can make a naan on your pan and under your grill uh it's fairly simple but it's really good fun it's quite theatrical there's none billows up uh and then you put bacon on it and and it's working pretty well we're um we're now i think we're doing half of our revenue in a lockdown state as we were in an open state uh and i think we're almost close to covering all of our cash flow so so we're just through these these couple of new businesses which are which is working working pretty well so i suppose the possibility exists to create the one of these dark kitchens which seem to be all the rage at the moment where essentially you're a delivery only business and that the kitchen doesn't need to occupy the same expensive real estate and so you can create a kind of you know very different kind of business that way because i think also the meal kits um i've been quite a gusto convert under lockdown i have to say and meal kits are particularly well suited to ethnic food because they often require small quantities of a very large range of ingredients and so the whole question of food waste and and just and the the you know the depth of the flavor is is something you can achieve very well there so i mean i i'd love to see that business continue i have to say just like for purely selfish reasons but the fact that it's making 50 of what you made when restaurants were allowed to open is really testament to how much i think people were missing you apart from things it's really that's really extraordinary it's it's really lovely i'm i'm sort of humble about it because i think it may not stay uh so we've sort of we're investing in it now we're working on increasing that business i have no doubt that it will take a decline uh when we get out of restaurants i hope we fill up the restaurants again but um but equally it seems to be working now we're investing in it we're going to bring out new skus we've just launched a mimosa kit so you can have a sausage a bacon on roll plus mimosas it's a grapefruit marmalade mimosa it's delicious so and it it seems to be getting traction i really i really hope it stays i think it's um it's a nice nice thing to have as a consumer as well any chance of a gimlet kit he said selfishly that's one of your yeah that's one of my all-time favorites yeah the gimlet i was just suggesting you know that uh a few of those might be worth worth uh you know good good high margin stuff and um i'll be your first customer happily for that that sounds fantastic no you're too late could you be the first customer we've already done it so i'm going to send i'm going to send you it's a gimlet negroni an old-fashioned kit it's just bottle cocktails they're pretty nice yeah oh as i said this is astonishing i mean [Music] i mean what i mean the interesting thing is a little bit of your family story is very interesting because you've got an mba from harvard um and so i can just imagine what it must be like in a family where you've got a harvard mba and you say i'm going into the restaurant industry i can imagine as you said that might achieve a little bit of a little bit of pushback um originally you you came from india via uganda uh which was one of those cases where idiyar means loss was our gain of which there are probably you know 50 000 such examples i would argue and then you ended up i think the family was in leicester for a time is that right where your uncle started is he right tilde rice is that right my father and my grandfather and father and uncles yeah indeed yes and so um and then um so you worked there then then it was harvard business school is that right then bain is that right well you had been before hbs for a bit before this afternoon yes yeah it's a bit bit bigger but more or less yes i learned some stuff then came to till it but then then decided i had a sort of urge of my own to to create something fresh and i think i mean business school and bain are wonderful experiences uh and they teach you a lot i think they're very my view they're very good slaves very good tools but less good masters they don't tell you um what to do or where to go but it really is very good at helping you think through how to execute things to giving you a sort of ready set of tools to understand to analyze but but i think that sort of um for me fundamentally and rory some of your stuff has been very helpful on this business is about the way you make somebody feel it's about the emotional connection you create i think both with your team member and also your guests and reframing how somebody feels when they enter a space or when they eat some food is is is the is the power is how you get people there there's an author friend of mine who says that you read a book and you say with a book because you like the author's voice and and you stay with that voice you love the voice i think it's the same with the business actually you like the voice of the business and if i can do all the little things around the place that reframe how you feel and you enjoy that and you might call it voice then i think you'll keep coming back and i think that has to be for the team member and for the employee and and for the guest and somehow i didn't learn that at business school bain but if once you've got that and you put that at the center there's an awful lot of very useful tools that will help you to express that and to scale that into into you know eight restaurants with a thousand people no i think that's very interesting which is i suppose there's always a dangerous tendency in um business schools to function on what is easily quant focus on what is easily quantified and of course those things like tone of voice actually we have to give i think we probably agree richard caring as a restaurateur deserves credit for that as well that every time you know he takes over a place it's very fashionable i'm sure within the restaurant industry to dislike him because he takes over venerable brands and kind of scales them up but i always notice that uh somehow he manages to maintain that kind of tonality which is very very hard to quantify but it really makes the difference between a good restaurant and a great one i think and one of the things i i always remember drayton bird saying to me something very surprising which i you never expect to hear in ad agency drayton said once he said he said to be honest he said i find the communications to the trade are more effective than communications to the consumer and communications to your own staff are the most important of all right and um actually caring would be the same there your relationship with the team members is probably very very different to that which commonly pertains in you know london restaurant uh scene where you tend to have i think you know longer tenure and you know some sort of sense of real security and and a real relationship and the consumer notices that i think even if it's very hard to put on a spreadsheet what anything particularly any tips you give us in terms of how you how you arrange that i think i i do i've got a couple of thoughts one one very conceptual so one is that i think if you want to make money and maximize profit you shouldn't be thinking about maximizing profit maybe there's a book called obliquity which i haven't read uh which says that you know it's fantastic it's good i've got it it's it's a round on my shelf and i want to read it but i think we focus on john kay it's fantastic yeah absolutely fantastic it's almost any creative person listening it's one of the first books you should read that actually the way to achieve something is not to pursue it directly yeah yeah so carry it out i mean it's so well be did if you focus on awesome food and drink awesome service and a happy team this was our sort of insight and you control the cost because you have to do that um and then you treat revenue and profit there's the applause that follows from doing a good job and we've reframed everything in the business all the reporting we don't have a dashboard we have a jump through the gentry is a word that an indian astronomer astrologer uses when he names your baby you know this sort of stupid charts that he uses and what we have a jump three which starts at the top with maximize obsess over these measures which fundamentally is around guest welfare and team welfare we've begun to think of team welfare even even before that so i think that the first thing you have to do is stick it right at the top of your list above profit and of course you have to control your costs of course you have to build a decent business model but once you've done that to drive the business model stick stick team welfare right up at the top that's the first thing so once you've crossed that sort of conceptual bridge of saying this this is what's important and this is how we're going to make money not by focusing on the money then i think there's lots of things that you can do uh which are probably a bit more preserved but but they're really really important i mean we spend an awful lot of time really thinking about how we engage our team um whether it's you know i still spend two hours with every new person who joins the business and there's there's quite a lot of them um taking them through the hold of shim story and why we do what we do and it's about bombay um every fight so if you stay at the shim for five years we take you on something called the bombay boot camp where we show you all the best bits of bombay we take you around all the restaurants and all the cafes we we take general managers and head chefs um and in fact the the last bombay bootcamp covey and i put this into place when we were two or three years old we said well we'll take people if they say for five years they'll never stay for five years and last time we went we took 35 people this time we've got 110 people to take i don't know how we're going to do that but but really focusing on that as a real measure um which is staff welfare happiness but i think it just pays back in massive buckets you just and just just do it all the time be there every day you know focus on it and there's a cliche which is if culture is not at the top of your list it's not on your list you really have to be obsessed you mean every day you have to get up and and and you know i do a lot of repeating i think the job of a leader often is to think of the things to say in a conceptually sensible way and then just say them a lot and i find myself saying things a lot and guiding that but you know it really pays back in sort of buckets and dividends we we got to turn number 20 in the times top 100 list and we're entering this year we've done an awful lot of work um in the pandemic with our teams i'd lead a yoga class every two weeks which is quite good fun um but we do lots and lots of things which i think have really helped us so we're going to enter again this year and i hope we can improve our place but it's it's so important to me i i i have to say i find this incredibly impressive i think that one of the things uh which uh i think it's been a characteristic business i've noticed since i joined in 1988 which is that there's been a kind of assumption that you're the staff are kind of fungible that they're replaceable and it doesn't matter whether you have uh five people each staying for a one year or one person staying for five i think the difference between the two is almost uh you know chalk and cheese it's immeasurably great and i think um i think it fundamentally changes the relationship there's a very interesting um insight i heard from somebody who gave a talk who's the chief operating officer of shopify and one of the things he does is he said i got a lot of stick for this because in the customer service teams i put them into teams of ten the reason i put them into teams of ten is because essentially if you look at sport there's something about the human evolved mind which means crickets eleven soccers oh i call it soccer there we go uh football's eleven um then you know rugby's 15 there's something about that size of group and he got a lot of flack because they said well you're going to have high middle management costs you know what about the possibility of scale but his discovery was that you achieve by actually having smaller teams where everybody knows everybody else and the part they play on the team you get a kind of total football there which you don't get when you try and scale up and i have to say i you know i'm not vilifying your time spent at bain but i think that um quite a lot of consulting activity has focused on what you might call fairly shallow ideas of efficiency and cost saving without fully accounting for what you lose to obtain these apparent efficiency games yeah do you think that you have to be fair that actually one of the things bain would probably have i'm being outside let's go that's the name blake's i've got a lot of uh quite a few friends then as you're quite right it's a very nice place but i think there is a wider consulting problem which is i call this the dorman fallacy which is you go to a hotel and you define the doorman's role in a way that makes it for example um highly amenable to automation so you say the doorman's job is to open the door and therefore we can replace it with an automatic door opening mechanism and save the doorman's salary and it looks perfectly logical in the way you've defined it but actually what you find is three years later your rack rate's fallen by 30 percent you know uh there are vagrants to sleep in the doorway and most of your loyal customers have left because the doorman wasn't really about opening the door um in the first place he was about security recognition goodness knows what else yeah i think i i can see a combination of consulting logic let's not always knock it because in something to feel like logistics it's probably a pretty good you know it's probably a pretty good approach but combination between consulting logic and a certain kind of uh what you might call silicon valley define people in a way that makes them makes their functions suitable for automation which generally i think undervalues or too narrowly defines every job i can see those two forces acting in parallel to often obtain quite undesirable results in a way and it's very interesting because you know that we go yeah go ahead rory up after you at some level yeah you know at some level it's the things you do that you don't have to do which people really notice and so defining you know the value of something too narrowly and too functionally in a kind of deterministic way always ends up destroying the magic because the magic comes i have the indian restaurant locally which makes a fantastic uh pallava about boxing up the food in a delivery box that has a carry handle okay which also means it doesn't fall over in the boot of your car which is a bit of a plus but you know this would be the first thing someone in procurement would attempt to cut but it's actually the thing that enables them to charge a kind of 20 premium in a funny kind of way and i often think that there's a you know there's a misalignment between cost and value uh which is a very you know it's a very very dangerous thing i think in the business and you've escaped that gloriously i have to say i mean i hope so i think um and it sort of bites on two levels doesn't it what one is sort of stuff in the business that is around the detail that would get stripped out but the second i think is is where you started which is the people side of things and i think that fundamentally um surely surely i think you can get this at business school maybe you get in consulting but you certainly get a business school but fundamentally business is about people and relationships and um there's an enormous amount of research uh which is i don't know if you've come across the very long longitudinal study at harvard medical school and there's a guy called robert walding who talks about it and i've i've been fortunate to hear him um speak and he's a very impressive guy but the research essentially says that to the extent that your relationships are good in your life your old age or even in fact your life is just going to be healthier and happier and they've got decades and decades of longitudinal data going back to the night i think 1920s or 30s um and it just shows time and time again is that the most important thing for health and happiness is relationships and i i think that that is the fuel that make things work and in a business you've got to give people time to create those relationships understand each other the muscle memory of being a barman and banging the draw shut with your bum and sort of shaking and the sort of being able to be around people you know and trust is magical and i think that as restaurants it can it can be seems a bit frivolous you know eating out's a bit frivolous isn't it but it's really not because um we i think uh i mean the pandemic has really really sort of driven this home but restaurants are places where you see people restaurants are places where you make eye contact with people in the real world and not on zoom and you forge relationships through that sort of space that you feel by talking and not talking and and i think that it's it's not just a thing that humans need to do it's fundamental to who we are because i think we we sort of maybe evolved being very social with each other uh those who weren't very social left the sort of cave or the fire and wandered off and got eaten by sabretooth tigers so it's in our dna it's advantageous together to come and cluster with people we trust and i think not only do restaurants do that but i think that having a team that does that is really the way i can foster wonderful environments where people can come together and and create and enjoy their relationships so i think it's i think we're all going to feel very relieved when we see each other again but particularly around you know if this is the proverbial fire of the cavemen you gather around this is what we've been doing for millennia we gather around a fire and we eat and we we sing and and it's it's deep it's really in our dna so i think relationships and team is is is not in accounting you know this is beyond that and it can create a magic which which can't be quantified or maybe it can because you get the revenue but you can't get the link uh in a specific way i think a lot of it's deeply unconscious and it seemed talib is very interesting on this because people always say i don't like it when a restaurant is too crowded but actually they do um you know there's something there where logically you know you might say well you know perfectly logical world we'd like to go to a quiet restaurant where we're among only very few diners but if you look at the reality of human behavior people actually don't like that at all it's completely the opposite who do you most admire who have your competitors and you know it could be quite a bleak in indirect competitors as well but is there any is there any other business in the anything from the high-end restaurant to the quick service restaurant category that you you generally admire or or or look to oh that's that's a really interesting question um i don't know i'm so busy sort of implementing things at the moment that i haven't think about i really do have an enormous amount of admiration for uh jeremy corbyn corbin and king i don't mean jerry i do mean uh corbin of corbin in kenya and he's um jeremy king should i say not jeremy corbyn at all i'm sort of mixing i think there are many ways jeremy corbyn could reinvent himself but at high-end restaurants i think he found that slightly awkward yeah yeah very sort of classy restaurant but but jeremy king is someone i really admire and he really is about the evocation of of a different time and a place a detail a dedication to the art of it and i think in the end as a as a restaurateur maybe in any consumer business you've got to be dedicated to the thing not to the money because i think then you can monetize the thing just as johnny island is obsessed by the edge of the edge of the macbook and gets to therefore monetize that in a spectacular way but he's not thinking about the property thinking about the edge of the macbook so i i guess i really really respect what jeremy king does but then also even someone like johnny iv is enormously i think he was quite inspiring i've you know seen some of his lectures and keynotes and just the way he is obsessed beyond beyond the financial by by making something brilliant um and and then and then you get to monetize it if you're passionate about it and you don't care about the money you are entitled to monetize that but when dell says we need to create a great edge because it will get us market share or they're going to fail because they're not going to do it probably and just as we couldn't do an immersive production for brand values i've got to do it because i love it i i had to say i i i once watched a johnny i've talked and i you know bear in mind i love to nerd out on this stuff but after about 20 minutes i was thinking i think we've probably heard enough about chamfers and bezels at this point but the extent to which he could actually wax lyrical about some tiny detail of an edge or a curve is exactly you know that's where the magic lies essentially and i i find it so i i found it just really really interesting and i think um i think also what it's done is that you know there are a lot of people now talking about the future of london and where people are going to live and are people going to come into london five days a week but i think through your distinctiveness you've definitely created a business which is going to hold out remarkably well because you know they're they're too thick i'll be candid for my own experience okay they're two things like when i travel into london there are only two things i want to do which you can't get in tunbridge wells or wherever else are the two things i really miss i have to admit are um the um the kebabs on the edgeware road particularly from beirut express or from meru and it's actually yeah that actually is another business which could scale i have to say but very one interesting one interesting trend in i suppose in british restaurant food is the rise of the high-end turkish restaurant as well isn't it that's something comparatively new um along with very bizarre thing which fascinates me which is that um uh there seems to be a huge rise in turkish men's barbers and i always i had around with an advertising planner about this because he was always saying no no you can learn everything you need from research i said let's be honest i said i don't think 10 years ago there were lots of people in market research she would say i really like my barber but i just wish he'd flick burning methylated spirits into my ears you know that's the thing i've been missing all along that's a that's a fantastic thing you know you know to discover a completely reinvention of the category yeah and it's a high-end turkish i mean there's a great one in bromley actually um which i i can highly recommend but that's that's um that's an another interesting i think that's a competitor space which someone could uh could probably expand um but um this is this is all incredibly welcome but i think one of the things you will do is you will hold up remarkably well um because again out of distinctiveness you know even if you know the nature of london slightly changes the nature of commuting slightly changes uh you know i think by creating this incredibly distinctive property i don't think you'll see the queues disappearing anytime soon i have to say and that that by the way is actually we've been quite humble about it in a way i'm not i think i'm assuming that we're gonna have a great deal of uh difficulty because of people working from home uh which will reduce daytime i think a lot of people have left london uh they live in different places eu people have left as well because of brexit or because of the pandemic and i think we're assuming we're going to have a problem and i think the only way you should be is is you sort of have to believe that your business is going to collapse tomorrow you've got to go out there every day defending it and working hard to re-earn the trust of people and sort of get people back in so we're we're reopening in in may when i hope we can reopen um with an intent to be um much better than we were so what i want people to do is to um this is a slightly dodgy analogy but bear with me but um you know you know if you last saw die another day you know that james bond film where it appears for awesome it's a bit of a ropey film but then but then you come back and you see uh casino royale and you know daniel craig emerges from the ocean with with these great big pecks and you're like oh my god daniel what have you been eating i sort of want people to come back into the gym and go oh my god that's even better than i remember it look at those pecs i'm just stretching it too far but i still want people to come back thinking wow this is even better than i remember it and we're working internally on how we up our game and and be even better we're trying to be even better for the team but then even better for the guests in terms of the food the service wanted to be a daniel craven experience don't be too rude about dying another day by the way because i have a peculiar connection with that which is the girl who dances naked in the opening sequence is actually my third cousin um now i don't know why i bother pointing that out you obviously know you wouldn't notice the obvious physical resemblance but um that's my little claim to fame there in uh as far as the bomb franchise you always remember that yeah exactly that's a bit of trivia you probably didn't need to know is it um but um no i understand exactly what you mean in other words it's kind of the return uh is something which now marketing spend of course for the restaurant category um has plummeted i think i've got the figures here actually uh let me see in 2020 the uk's biggest restaurants uh their online and digital advertising spend was roughly 150 million and that's 100 million less than it was in 2019 would you believe it or not now i have to say i i mean i think that's slightly risky i think there is an argument to actually advertising even i mean the famous case being i think wrigley's spearmint gun which advertised during world war ii even though it wasn't available in order to create penta demand when it should return um and um yeah i i think we will probably see some you know uh explosion in marketing and promotion uh any thoughts on that yourself how do you promote yourself or do you not need to is it entirely through word of mouth and um uh and repeat business in a tourist site it's an interesting question isn't it because uh you know you have to essentially make someone recognize a concept from scratch more or less you know as a you know someone walking by the cues obviously help don't they so cues are a marvelous marvelous way of providing social proof and con garden particularly i think you served chai to people in the queue if i remember rightly yeah with you together do you remember once that was yeah exactly that was fantastic so well i think um we never believed in in marketing in fact i think before i launched uh to show with my co-founders i had read that book purple cow uh who's named the author i've gotten but seth godin i declared very sort of naively and a bit sort of i just said marketing's dead this is rubbish we're not doing any marketing we're going to bake the remarkability into what we do and we decided instead of doing um marketing we did we did a decent amount of pr so what we what we thought is let's propel word of mouth using organic social uh but back then there was only organic social basically and and and let's also do stuff that bakes in the remarkability let's make it different and interesting and nowadays we don't i don't think we spend any money on above the line of digital we have recently because of our um products business which i think is maybe slightly different but but we'd much rather blow a whole bunch of cash on an immersive theater production uh or on a record um which is paid for itself many times over or on our book for example put the effort into that and i think for us i mean those numbers are huge you know 100 million or 150 million i can't really sort of relate to them because we don't spend any money on above the line or digital we sort of work on making it remarkable build in the story work on that and then try and turbo charge the word of mouth uh to bring people in and apparently we have a great following amongst the tech community and the creative community of boston and san francisco and i don't know how that happened um but i i think it's uh it's through you know repeat business and word of mouth and people talking about it so people who fly into london will actually go out of their way it's just word of mouth through the tech community in in in san jose that's that's fascinating yeah i mean i have friends there who uh you know there's friends of mine in the west coast who who sort of come to london discovered it mentioned it to their teams and said oh i know someone who founded de sherman and they're like oh i've got celeb status and you know i think one of the guys was was vp of pinterest or something you know running pinterest he was like i'm a sled now because i know you it's ridiculous but there's i think this i found pockets of i've just been surprised like how does that work um so there's sort of things happen that way but i think it's better not to do marketing or advertising it's at the marketing conference well the glory of sort of marketing as contagion is you instead of pre-defining who your target audience is you discover to your immense surprise that your target audience is actually much more varied and diverse than any kind of demographic can capture which i always think is really interesting i always think it's a terrible mistake to go in with a complete kind of preconception over who your customers will be because it's never that simple um i've got to ask one question which intrigues me one thing that could take the deschum com concept on the road is a kind of food truck now it would have to be a kind of eccentric vehicle possibly accompanied by a fleet of austin ambassadors or something but i've always thought there's some potential there we have a wood-fired pizza van that stops at the end of the drive here on mondays and i'm convinced that my daughters buy more food from it than they would if it were a restaurant open seven days a week simply because of the scarcity thing it's only here once once a week so now is your chance and i've always thought the potential for the food truck which obviously is widely explored in la and places like that i think that could be extended in the uk a bit i'm always intrigued by the possibility do you have any thoughts along that line yeah it's a great idea i think it's very difficult to do is a mobile tandoori very energy hungry i mean elon musk could probably provide you with some sort of battery solution but i'm just wondering if it's a good question i i think it's a great idea i mean we have thought about it in the past future and it's always never made the list of strategic priorities we've always sort of had too much to do but actually as i think about it um in this sort of pandemic and post-pandemic environment where we're trying to launch the products business i mean having a bacon non-roll truck might be just a piece of genius you know rocks up in your neighborhood and the sort of ice cream bell rings and it's the duchenne bacon that enrolled truck which sells you the bacon or kit as well as bacon on rolls it could be a really interesting thing to do so i'm glad you mentioned it i'll think about that tomorrow morning i'll give you i'll give one tip which is that if you if you focus on selling only one thing people will pay a greater premium for it because they assume that that one thing must be fantastic there's a guy in australia in sydney who's just opened a restaurant called wings and tins okay it's the most australian thing imaginable they only sell chicken wings and tins of beer that's it and i think you know one of the starbucks did that because they could charge more for coffee because coffee was their lead product it wasn't sold as a as a kind of you know a sideline and i think there's an interesting behavioral insight there if you have actually a very very limited menu of high margin products you can i'm terribly sorry i've just had a voice in my ear which says i could go on all evening as you can imagine uh except for slightly the conversation making me feel hungry but i was just gonna just absolutely great to talk to you so thanks for your time today i can recommend the restaurant absolutely without reservation to everybody listening if you haven't been go and even if you think you won't like the food you will or you're basically deranged okay that's the first point and um it just reminds me today that's all for this episode of on brand uh the podcast is brought to you by alph insight for more information on powering your business growth visit their website which is at alphinsight.com that's alfinsite.com the series is produced and edited by ultimate sound and vision very expertly i might add and to make sure you receive the next episode obviously here's my usual plug please do subscribe and if you've enjoyed what you've heard then give us a like so thanks for listening and immense thanks see you soon in person i hope [Music]

Channel: MAD//Fest London

Views: 1,025

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: n4qEzKauprc

Length: 61min 57sec (3717 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021