Deployment

by Alastair Scott | Nov 14, 2025 | Thought Leadership

Deployment is a word that has been bandied around the hospitality industry for a long time. At S4, we invented it. But what does it really mean, what are we trying to achieve, and how do we become great at it? 

In essence, all we are ever trying to do in hospitality is match supply and demand. Too many staff standing around is wasted cost and wasted money. Too few staff, and you deliver a poor guest experience – leading to comped meals, lost sales, and, at worst, unhappy guests who tell others and never return. There are only so many jobs the team can do to fill the time if you aren’t busy. 

That’s why we, and others, pull sales data, forecast sales, and then create a sales profile to write a rota against. In many businesses, you see two daily peaks – lunch and evening – when people want to eat or drink. Our job is to have enough staff when it’s busy, and not too many when it’s quiet. Of course, there are barriers: shift lengths, minimum hours, staff availability, and skill levels. And it’s not just about matching supply and demand within a day – it’s also about matching the total number of staff we have at different times of year. It’s easy to produce the perfect rota for Christmas week, but where are the staff? 

But deployment is way more than just having the right number of people, it is then about using them in the right way. Over the weekend, I visited a farm shop that had clearly done a brilliant job attracting customers. But as we finally got our coffee after the excruciatingly cold pumpkin making, it was fascinating to watch. There were queues out of the door but loads of empty tables. When you watched the staff, they had plenty of people, but too many of the people were neither trained nor managed. The coffee and cake line was riddled with bottlenecks. Half the floor staff were wandering around doing their best to look busy, but actually, were doing nothing. The managers were working very hard but ignoring the people wandering around. Perhaps they didn’t have time to train them, perhaps they didn’t want to, or perhaps they thought it quicker to do the job themselves. 

Deployment is about having the right number of trained team, with the right roles and the right objectives for that role. A well-motivated, energised team member is infinitely more valuable than a poorly energised team member. Without this, as I witnessed on Saturday, chaos ensues. 

So, the hierarchy of deployment is simple: 

• The right number of people at the right time 

• The right skills for the shift 

• The right brief of responsibilities 

• The right management on the shift 

If any one of these is missing, the shift won’t perform as it should. And we all know the circularity of the difference a good manager, a well-trained person, and a well-structured shift makes. As the cost of staff goes up, the effort and energy we all need to put into training, shift management, shift briefing and the right number based on all the above factors can make a significant difference to the shift. I used to say that running at 25% slack was a good job. The truth is that if you invest in all the above skills, you get the number down to nearer 15%, and that makes a massive difference to the P&L.  

And the reality is, we have no choice. With financial pressures mounting, deployment is no longer optional. It’s a commercial necessity. 

Clarkson’s Farm

by Alastair Scott | Oct 31, 2025 | Thought Leadership

I have recently, and somewhat belatedly, finished watching Clarkson’s Farm 4, where Jeremy buys his pub. It was an interesting experience for me. Where I have previously found all of his farming shenanigans funny, I was a bit more frustrated at the poor decision-making opening a pub. Perhaps I now understand how the farmers feel. I hope the advice was for TV appeal rather than thinking it might work!

One item really struck me though, which was a little piece Jeremy did on what happens to a village if it loses its pub, and what is left of the village when that happens. His argument was that the village is little more than a dormitory, with no heart and soul, once the pub disappears. It didn’t escape me that while he was making that argument, he was also opening what looked very much like a roadside pub, one that would inevitably draw trade away from the local villages. Sure, the village might still retain some sense of community. It could have a shop (though I’m not entirely convinced that counts, if I’m honest).

But a club, a community centre – somewhere people can actually come together, that really does matter. In our two villages where we operate, one village has a cricket club and a shop. The pub competes with the cricket club as a community hub, and it is great that the two co-exist together.

In the other village, we are the only things left. No shop and no community centre. And the neighbouring two villages have nothing at all. We are their community, and as a result, the three villages now see themselves as a group of villages rather than separate ones.

The village Christmas and Summer parties all happen in the pub, and typically we have a good 100+ attending the events, which have slowly grown over the years. If we believe in community, then we need village pubs to survive. It would be relatively easy to give them support. Exemption from business rates if you are the only pub in the village would make easy sense. A grant if you are the only pub in the village would go further.

But just as important is planning and usage. As we move gently away from alcohol more and more, we are embracing the coffee occasion. Pubs need to become coffee shops so that those who want to meet have a place and a space that works for them.

One of my most depressing drives is across the A66, which joins the A1 to the M6 (you southerners probably won’t have heard of it). I am consistently upset by how busy the farm and coffee shops are, and how quiet the pubs are. The pubs along the strip need to figure out how to make themselves attractive to this market and deliver an offer that works.

How we do this is not easy. When we took on one of our pubs, we built a large extension at the back which not only added loads of covers but joined up a disused barn. We made the mistake of not branding it as a separate coffee venue.

As it happens, since Covid we have repurposed it as a wedding venue and are now building a decent wedding business. We’ve renamed it the Orangery and are now trying to work through how to brand it effectively as both a wedding venue and a coffee shop. Lots of fun.

I once went into a pub in the South that had a small coffee shop next door, run and owned together. I was fascinated watching customers come into the coffee shop who would never have gone into a pub, look around for the best seat, and then wander through to the pub because they preferred the seating. A great lesson in kerb appeal for me.

But of course, if you have a coffee shop and a bar then the danger is that you need two staff to open, and if you are not careful you have immediately lost any profitability you added. So how to work the model, and leave one half or your business unmanned, is a real skill, but an important one to learn.

So, while Jeremy Clarkson might only be seen in the pub drinking a pint, I think the market for coffee is an important one which we need to find a solution for in a fair proportion of our non-city-centre industry. As well, of course, as the government doing what they can for the community as well.

Alastair Scott is CEO of S4labour and owner of Malvern Inns.

Debt Repayment

by Alastair Scott | Oct 21, 2025 | Thought Leadership

Our restaurant business had a big moment this year – we finally paid off our covid debt. We borrowed £300,000 for our business during covid, which, for a business doing a little under £3m in turnover, is 10%. Not huge, but if you look at it against annual profits, it was a lot larger. In any event, it has taken us nigh on five years to pay it off.

As you might expect, this has been the real challenge for us – and I think for many others in the industry. The length of the debt overhang has been significant, and of course, it isn’t just the debt. When we took on our covid loans, the base interest was 0.1%, life didn’t seem too bad. But as soon as base rates raced up to 5%, life looked very different. So, not only have we paid our £300,000 back, but also another £50,000 in interest.

Unsurprisingly, we haven’t been as profitable in the post-covid years – and honestly, I don’t think we’ve been quite as good either. As a management team, we were recently reflecting on some of the team dynamics and realised that a few individuals wouldn’t have met our pre-covid standards. It’s only now that we feel ready and able to raise our expectations back to where they were before. That said, it’s not easy; we’ve all become a bit too used to a slower pace and a culture where hard work hasn’t always been the norm.

On top of that, we haven’t had the cash to invest in our refurbishment programme, which means some areas we would have upgraded earlier have had to wait. I’m only just now getting around to refurbishing a meeting room that hasn’t been touched in 12 years! It can be frustrating, but this is the reality.

I sometimes wonder whether we should have gone down the company voluntary arrangement route and ditched a load of debt to enable us to start afresh. In truth, I have no idea how common this has been over the last five years, but my suspicion is a lot of people have done it, maybe quietly, and it has helped them get restarted much faster than us. It is one on my list of many regrets.

Nevertheless, the good thing is that, after too long a time, I now feel we are back and able to run the business without any covid overhang – whether in terms of staff or finances. I even took a 16-year-old to work recently because her father was ill and couldn’t drive, and was so impressed by her level of commitment and determination – this really gives me hope.

Service levels are on the rise, we are doing the final bits of refurbishment that have been a little long in the making, and we are feeling positive about what we can achieve. Of course, there are still a few things we need to work on – staff that need to be lifted up to the standards we want, for example. That said, the positives are still there, and it feels like we are moving in the right direction.

There is, of course, the fact that, as an industry, we are still really struggling with a price point that has grown significantly over the years, with the result that volume is, at best, flat. This has meant that our customers will stay home a little more, just come out for a drink or spend a little less when they are here. As operators, we have to find ways to make the value equation work harder for us and deliver experiences that our guests want to come back for. The outcome is that we need, as always, to be holding ourselves to account – constantly questioning how we can improve and where we can do better.

We want to keep raising standards of amenity, service and food quality to make the value equation worth it for our customers. Perhaps now, the business can pay me some of the loans I have put in!

Alastair Scott is chief executive of S4labour and owner of Malvern Inns.

Goldilocks – Writing the Perfect Rota

by Alastair Scott | Oct 3, 2025 | Thought Leadership

A few years ago, we introduced our Goldilocks programme, “writing the perfect rota, that’s not too hot and not too cold”. This always gets a giggle (or a little groan), but in essence, it’s a name that sticks, and our customers love it.

The theory goes that systems can change some habits, but by no means all of them. The rest of the change needs to be done by people, to people. For some systems, such as a property management system, the implementation will automatically change more of the business behaviours (but it still won’t stop you rejecting the booking if you don’t want to take it). But with people management, old fashioned persuasion is the key.

If your kitchen team like doing prep in the morning, or if your front of house team always do admin on a Monday, then the chances are that putting in a system won’t change these habits. The real change comes around when experts persuade other people to think differently and convince them that there is a better way. Not easy, but doable.

Since our first project, we have completed hundreds of Goldilocks visits and have been constantly learning how to refine the art of getting people to better themselves. Too often, the solution is easy but the wrong habit is embedded, and persuading people to change what they have always done is hard. It takes 66 days to change a habit, so maintaining the new behaviour needs constant reinforcement too if it is not going to wither on the vine.

So, what are the main elements of a Goldilocks visit? Of course, it all starts with shift management, challenging and adjusting how a shift is run to optimise the team’s efficiency. We all know too many staff leads to worse service, as I witnessed recently – I walked into a major casual dining group, was confronted with the “please wait to be seated” sign and waited five minutes (probably three in reality) while two staff members finished their conversation before attending to us.

What we define as slack tasks and when we do them is another vital element of the process. Moving rostered fixed tasks to slack tasks to be done in down time is, of course, a massive cost saving, but you won’t achieve any of it if you don’t have the mindset. This is a really hard change programme.

Considering a site’s nuances and giving the managers the opportunity to really get their point across always gets their buy in. They can talk about their challenges, but with a bit of guidance and a fresh set of operator’s eyes, they always start to think about the way they do things and whether there’s a better behaviour that will drive sales, save them some cash and ultimately improve the guest experience.

The changes we have seen are better than even the optimist Alastair might have wished for. In bigger sites, savings of £40,000 a year are the norm. But the real surprise to me is in smaller sites. The old saying with labour management is that you can’t save much in smaller operations. Our Goldilocks programme begs to differ, with savings of circa £20,000 at the “lower turnover” end of the scale. This strangely means that the proportion of labour saved goes up as the size of the site goes down. This is not what most people, me included, expected – so why is that?

The chances are the organisation managing these smaller sites maybe doesn’t have the internal skill set to optimise or hasn’t given it the focus because it doesn’t believe it can get any better – but it can. I always love the counter-intuitive solution where you must re-think your starting position, and this is certainly one of them.

The interesting bit for me is why people employ us versus doing it themselves – I am always one for doing things myself and tend to be a bit reluctant to enlist outside help. I blame cost, but in reality, it is because I hate admitting I am not good enough at everything and I simply do not have the time!

The reality is spending a day just “doing rotas” is hard to schedule and hard to stick to when you have all your other business pressures, despite the fact this could (or should) sit at the top of the priority pile. The real differentiator is the stories that people can tell to convince people they aren’t alone; there are many who have been through the same journey, and they are still great operators who can be even better. I think the psychology of the programme is the most important element.

Helping our large customers make far more money is satisfying, but one of the most gratifying elements of our programme has been, quite literally, saving single site operators. When someone is going to go bust if they don’t do anything about labour cost, they certainly have the motivation to succeed. It is such a great feeling when we can finally help them make their business work. These are pubs, and communities often rescued. And that’s it – creating a rota that is not too hot, and not too cold, does make a difference.

Alastair Scott is chief executive of S4labour and owner of Malvern Inns