I absolutely love to see fantastic restaurants expand successfully across the capital and the country. More opportunities for me to eat great, reliable food!
But It is always a sad day to visit the second or third outpost of a beloved restaurant and discover that it’s not really worked out.
Sad, and a little too frequent.
There can be innumerable reasons why quality suffers as a restaurant brand expands; but they usually all revolve around the same thing: people.
That warmest of welcomes followed by an ethereally perfect pizza seemed like it would be so easy to recreate, but of course it isn’t. Otherwise every pizza restaurant would be great.
No, you just had a kick-ass restaurant manager, and a phenomenal head chef. Great at their jobs; great managers, consistent, competent and inspired.
Maybe you didn’t have such a “can’t fail” brand and concept after all. Just really good people.
And you can’t clone your people (unless you’re a mad scientist). So now you’re left deciding whether to move them to one of the new places for a while and compromise your first location…or…well, there’s no good option.
The good news is that as long as you started with a rock solid concept (we prefer to call it an Armature), you can operationalise your successes, and these operations can be cloned.
Ideally you can even operationalise how you found those great people in the first place…but it’s not easy. The opening team of a first restaurant tends to have been pulled together from personal relationships and partnerships that aren’t easily repeated.
So it’s incredibly important to take a cold, hard, detached look at your restaurant and decide: how much of its success is due to great operations, and how much is simply down to having great people.
You sure as hell don’t want to find out it was mostly great people 2 weeks after opening your second site!
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