by Alastair Scott | May 2, 2025 | Thought Leadership
This week, I had quite a disappointing conversation with an operator. He didn’t make that much money and lived above the pub, taking out around £200 a week. We sat down together and went through his numbers after April’s increase in national insurance (NI) and national minimum wage. All of his profit was going to be wiped out; something that many of us will face. Sadly, it feels like the standard at the moment is cost increases are equal to current profits.
Even worse was the fact that he didn’t believe he could do any better at running labour; he did not see any efficiencies in his business. With this mindset, he likely will fail in the next 12 months – it is depressing and sad, but unfortunately, without spurring ourselves to get better, it will be the truth.
I would say that the current environment is probably going to be the hardest we have faced for a while. Was 2008 as bad? Or the smoking ban? At the time, I was working for a big corporate, so perhaps it didn’t quite feel the same. Right now, we need to be our best and at our bravest; we need to try things that we might not like as much.
You’ll be pleased to hear that with some persuasion and encouragement, we did manage to produce a plan with this particular operator to get him that extra £200 a week, so I thought I would share it with you all.
Top of the list was taking on single shifters. I speak about this quite a lot, as it is something I am a big fan of in my own businesses. When you bring on someone for a single shift, they will still fall below the NI thresholds, so you will immediately save 15% of wages, which is around £2 an hour. But single shifters are not just good for cost; they also typically only work when you need them, either seasonally or on a specific day of the week. In my own sites, Sundays close 30% of the sales for the week, so they are vital. We do not need more full-timers; we haven’t got enough hours in the week for them. Part-timers and single shifters are great for effective deployment and cost.
The second thing we focused on was managing to a cost. One of the major opportunities and improvements that many single sites can make is to know what they are planning to spend before the week starts. On-costs of NI, holiday and pensions add up and can vary significantly by employee, so it is becoming increasingly important to know what you are planning to spend before the week starts. As the adage goes, what gets measured gets managed. Once you know what you are going to spend for the week, you address some of the more marginal shifts and start and finish times.
Plus-one management was the next idea we looked at. Many owner-operators run their business by having themselves as an extra rather than being part of the shift. This is an expensive way to run the business, and probably also an exhausting one if you feel like you have been at work but haven’t been required, and yet have still been on the floor. Surely it is better to be a part of the shift and work in it. It requires the best sales forecast you can make, and then to add yourself in as part of the team.
So, three things to help get profit back to required levels, and maybe more. But as always, it is about changing the habits, which is difficult to do. Planning is one of the inescapable habits in our industry. I am a planner by nature, so I can never understand those who don’t like to plan, but it is a habit that many people avoid doing.
Whether it is changes for the business, financial planning or seasonal planning, it is crucial. Once we begin planning, we can also plan to change certain habits: looking at the week ahead, knowing what your cost is and changing from plus-one management are all key habits to have.
Many can proudly pat themselves on the back and say they do all of these well. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t challenge yourself to get even better. We’re facing one of our biggest challenges yet, so I can’t think of a better time to do so.
Alastair Scott is chief executive of S4labour and owner of Malvern Inns
by Alastair Scott | Apr 14, 2025 | Thought Leadership
A few weeks ago, I visited the Prince Regent in Marylebone, and the experience sparked a fresh focus on kitchen efficiency.
I began chatting to the manager, who was perfectly suited to the pub, being a superbly energetic character who invigorated the place while managing the troops and the crowd. She really was impressive. But the kitchen, well, that was a different story. It wasn’t her territory, and she felt as though she was stepping into someone else’s place when she walked in. She didn’t feel the same sense of command as she did on the other side of the doors.
So, my colleagues and I began to educate her on the running of the kitchen – the ebbs and flows of the team, the layout, the process and the movement of equipment and food in and out. She was in fact our trial house for kitchen efficiency, so we spent a long time learning what we needed to do in order to facilitate her drive to run a highly effective kitchen.
We taught her about the six-foot rule, stepping off the line, and all the other key kitchen habits. In time, she became more comfortable with the running of the kitchen, moving from judging the kitchen entirely on the GP, the quality of the food and speed, to having a proper understanding of how the kitchen worked. Prior to this, if the food was slow, she let the kitchen have more labour, which of course led to the team asking for more than they needed as the hours would suit their needs, and not the needs of the business.
The moment the penny dropped for her; she uttered “This is just the same as the bar but with food”. Good enough for me. She was now in command of the kitchen. This was the first great step in our kitchen efficiency consultancy, which we considered when laying out how we could roll this out into over 1000 pubs with varying levels of food, kitchens and skills.
How many of our front of house management team feel comfortable in the kitchen? How many know the processes and can spot when things are going wrong? How many work there on occasion and can step in when we are short? Whoever can and does all of these things has the attributes of a multiskilled manager. My recommendation of course it that every member of the management team should be able to do all of the above in a normal site, except if the food skill required is extremely high. In much larger sites, this might be different, but the smaller you are, the more important it is that your team are multiskilled.
Kitchen efficiency is still, for many, the great untapped opportunity in our industry. One of the more obvious benefits here is ensuring that your team always have something to do. No more standing at pot wash with their phone, going out for another cigarette break, or over-prepping. There are less obvious signs of an inefficient too; a badly laid out kitchen, a kitchen that is not ready for service, a kitchen where the head chef either does all of the work, or none of it. Poorly laid out line fridges and storage are too. And, if you can’t spot them, you are at a big disadvantage. Like the manager at the Prince Regent, you may be reliant on outputs, not inputs. In the end, front of house may suffer, which is the last thing we will want this year, as we are going to have to compete even harder for value.
We all need the energy, passion and organisation skills of the manager at the Prince Regent!
Alastair Scott is CEO of S4labour and owner of Malvern Inns.
by Alastair Scott | Mar 28, 2025 | Thought Leadership
Last year, I wrote an article on a few of the habits I wanted to embed in our two village Gastro pubs. I believe my focus at the time was on trying to implement three specific practices: hellos and goodbyes, never using the word ‘ok,’ and what I refer to as ‘restaurant eyes.’
Our results using habits
Now enough time has passed, I am pleased to report that the implementation of the first two has gone pretty well. Now, I never (I know, brave word), hear the word ‘ok’ in our pubs. Albeit, admittedly I have heard a few substitutes! Really, what we are trying to get to with this habit is asking open-ended questions. “Would you like another glass of wine?” or “how is your fish and chips?” are much better than asking “are you ok for drinks”, or “is your food ok?”.
The second habit, hellos and goodbyes, has also gotten much better. Earlier this week I heard the best ‘hello,’ in fact. Rachel (who will be reading this) was behind the coffee machine and she peered out, gave a great ‘hello’ to the guests as they were walking in. I could see how warm and welcome they felt immediately. Good job!
Sadly, however, mission restaurant eyes was a complete failure. In truth, this was my fault. My idea of ‘restaurant eyes’ is actually a load of things rolled into one – actively making eye contact, not avoiding eye contact, looking around more, and so on. Perhaps this one was not communicated well enough to the team to enable them to focus on it. But I suppose, two out of three is not too bad, so I will take it.
So, has all of this work resulted in anything? In all honesty, not everything can be measured and analysed. While our guest satisfaction scores seem to remain about the same each month, and sales growth, while ok, has not been exceptional, these habits are the right things to do. We also gave each habit a long period to embed, around 3 months. This made a big difference when it came to sticking, and now we will not have to repeat the same process for some time. If you recall, we based our theory on the 66-day rule to form a habit – we loved it so much we even did a podcast on it! It means that if someone is working 5 days a week, it is a 13-week implementation.
What’s next?
This term, we have added three new habits to focus on, in an attempt to hold onto the previous two and make further progress on our service skills. The new habits are as follows: smiles, FIFO, and the four-foot rule.
The first, smiles, is pretty self-explanatory. I am pleased to say that a few weeks ago, I gave out one of our ‘management recognition’ tokens to Doruta. Doruta has been with us for a long time, and she gave the best smile on Valentines Day that I have ever seen from her.
FIFO of course has many meanings. But rather than first in first out, here it means full in full out. This is trying to get our staff, as they return from anywhere, to look for empties to collect along the way, making us more efficient and touching the guest more often. We are far too good at letting the food runners run food only, rather than picking up empty plates as they return. While we do not give the food runner iPad tills, they can quickly find someone else with an iPad if someone wants another drink or anything else.
We have combined this habit with the four-foot rule, which is that you must at least look at the guest if you are within four feet of them and preferably smile and say something. This is a much better first element of ‘restaurant eyes’ as it is more specific for the team as to what they have to do. We will of course have arguments about what is four feet, and whether they all need to do it as they pass a busy table, but at least it will help deliver ‘heads up’ service, rather than trying not to look at the guest in case they ask for something.
Final thoughts on habits in hospitality
So, all in all, this is a process that is here to stay. Each term we will pick the habits we feel we want to drive and try to remain focused on those only for the whole term and then move on to a new one. Even though I am on the old side of the industry, I am still learning to do things better. How I wish I had adopted this decades ago, rather than trying to solve everything too fast and ending up solving nothing. Maybe I am not an Old Dog after all!
Alastair Scott is CEO of S4labour and Owner of Malvern Inns.
by Alastair Scott | Mar 14, 2025 | Thought Leadership
As we all know, hospitality is a people business and people have emotions, views and habits which they may be resistant to changing. This means decision-making can be an emotive subject, and labour costs and targets are probably one of the most sensitive areas to address. Opinions vary widely on what constitutes the ‘right’ labour cost, making it one of the most hotly debated topics in the business. While some managers believe that senior management’s cost-cutting measures hinder sales, especially during peak periods, others argue that excessive spending leads to inefficiencies and wasted resources. Striking the right balance is no small feat.
Often when these managers leave the business to run their own, they immediately invest in labour with the sound knowledge that their business will thrive. They see an opportunity to prove themselves right and show their previous bosses to have been mean, corporate profit chasers. But typically, after about twelve months of investment in labour, which often translates to losses, they hit the cold economic reality that they cannot afford as many staff and have to cut back. In doing so, they may inadvertently undercut their own operations, leading to reduced service quality and, in some cases, the collapse of their businesses. These experiences impart a hard-earned lesson: overstaffing is far riskier than understaffing.
The key takeaway from these scenarios is that effective labour management requires precision. A corporate target for labour costs is futile if managers lack the training to achieve it. Understaffing and overstaffing are symptoms of the same problem: a failure to manage labour strategically. For instance, running a shift with five team members can produce dramatically different outcomes depending on the quality of leadership and planning. Without effective shift leadership, even the best resources can be underutilised, leaving teams feeling overwhelmed and wrongly attributing poor performance to understaffing.
This is where the importance of top-down labour management and training really becomes noticeable. Setting standardised labour practices and clear expectations alongside introducing feedback loops and hands-on training will be extremely effective in embedding better labour practices into the business.
A poorly managed afternoon shift, for example, might neglect critical slack tasks, setting the evening team up for failure as they struggle to catch up. This domino effect not only impacts operations but also affects team morale and customer satisfaction.
This underscores the industry’s pressing need for labour management training. Training not only equips teams with practical skills but also helps change entrenched habits that hinder progress. Poor habits, such as inefficient time management or inadequate task prioritisation, are pervasive. Training teams, managers and ops managers to be better is the only way to help them. But how? Breaking these habits requires a carefully balanced approach that combines enforcement with support—what might be termed the ‘carrot and stick’ method. Tightening rotas without providing the necessary training leaves employees frustrated and ill-prepared, while training without enforcing changes risks making the effort redundant. It is only by combining these two elements that businesses can break free from the cycle of poor service and high staff turnover.
The path to improvement cannot be rushed. Effective change requires targeted training that addresses specific aspects of labour management. For example, quieter shifts present unique opportunities to reset and prepare for busier periods, but these opportunities are often wasted without proper training. Similarly, kitchen management demands specialised training to ensure efficiency and coordination in one of the busiest and most critical areas of any hospitality business. Each aspect of labour management comes with its own set of challenges, and each requires a tailored training programme to address them effectively.
Ultimately, the success of any labour management strategy hinges on a commitment to investment—not just in staffing but in training. A well-structured training budget is not an expense; it is an investment in the future success of the business. Approaching labour with the same mindset as before but with fewer people is a recipe for failure. Instead, the focus must shift to delivering the right training, supported by precise execution and a willingness to adapt. This is the path to long-term success in an industry where the demands are constantly evolving.
Alastair Scott is CEO of S4labour and owner of Malvern Inns.
by Alastair Scott | Jan 27, 2025 | Thought Leadership
We’ve certainly had a tough journey in kitchens over the past five years. During lockdown, many of our chefs left the industry, with a significant number of them becoming delivery drivers. I even ended up in a taxi once, driven by an ex-head chef from a well-known local restaurant. It’s a sad reality, but that’s what happened. This, combined with the loss of a significant number of skilled European chefs following Brexit, created a real shortage of talent in the industry.
Addressing challenges in our kitchens
So, post-covid, we were just glad to fill the roles, and in truth, we probably trod a little softly with our chefs because we needed to keep them. As a result, we may not have enforced the habits we wanted, and costs started to drift.
The chef situation does seem to have eased somewhat, but our ability to recruit non-EU overseas chefs has been constrained due to the higher reward levels now required for recruitment. Overseas hiring now mainly works for the most senior chefs. Despite this, recruitment and retention appear to be getting easier, and, just as importantly, I believe this trend will continue over the next 12 months. More people are looking for jobs, fewer jobs are available, and I think (or at least hope) that we’ll find it easier to recruit over the coming year.
That said, we’ve probably allowed some kitchen habits to slip. Start and finish times might have become too lenient. I was in a restaurant last night that had just 12 covers for the evening but still had a pot wash and five chefs! Prep might not be as efficient as it could be, and straight shifts may have become the norm.
In short, there are a number of productivity opportunities we can take advantage of if we choose to address them. But, as we all know, changing kitchen habits is tough. Teams like to work the way they’ve always worked, and altering those habits requires time, effort, and most of all, patience. But this is probably the year to tackle it.
The benefits of improving kitchen efficiency
Our analysis shows that the opportunity in the kitchen amounts to at least 10% of hours worked. Slack hours are typically much higher in a kitchen, even though the timing of prep ought to mean they can be more efficient than front-of-house. Kitchen hours vary as a percentage but typically account for about 30% of total hours worked (and kitchen cost will be higher). So, if we save 10% of kitchen hours, that is a 3% saving in total hours, and potentially up to 4% of the cost base.
For our own businesses, this amounts to around £500 a week, or £25,000 a year. That’s a big enough number to warrant action, in my opinion. We’ve already started tackling many of these areas, and while changing habits is undoubtedly challenging, the process of change is happening – slowly, but surely.
How to create a better run, and happier kitchen
In my view, kitchen habits need to be changed one at a time. Start with one easy habit and work through the change process at a pace that suits the team. But it’s important to make people realise that this is a continuous process, with breaks only for busy periods or significant changes in the team. If we focus on changing one habit each month for nine out of the 12 months, that means we can change nine key habits in a year and reach our target. The result will be a better-run kitchen and, more importantly, a happier one.
Why do I say happier? For several reasons. Being busy but not stressed is an enjoyable state for everyone. Being quiet and unproductive, on the other hand, is unfulfilling. While it may seem easier, it’s not rewarding at all. A slick kitchen team is one that takes pride in its work, creates a positive energy and fosters pride throughout the team. This is the environment we want to cultivate.
Kitchen efficiency can lead to great things. It can lead to a lower cost team, a happier team and, of course, make a major dent in offsetting the headwinds facing us this year. With more people looking to work and a growing number of young people eager to put the effort in, now is a great time to give it a go.
