68. Ex Gordon Ramsay Group CEO reveals his turnaround playbook | Stuart Gillies

Welcome to All About Business with me, James Reid, the podcast that covers everything about business, management, and leadership. Every episode, I sit down with different guests who bootstrap companies, masterminded investment models, or built a business empire. They're leaders in their field, and they're here to give you top insights and actionable advice so that you can apply their ideas to your own career or business venture. What does it really take to scale a founder-led hospitality business? And how do you make tough decisions when your reputation and livelihood are on the line? Today on All About Business, I'm joined by Stuart Gillies, founder behind Number 8 Sevenoaks and Bankhouse Chislehurst, independent restaurants rooted in seasonal cooking, thoughtful hospitality and strong local communities. Stuart is the former CEO of the Gordon Ramsay Group, where he helped lead one of the UK's most recognisable hospitality brands through a major transformation, experience he now draws on in building his own ventures. Stuart offers a rare perspective on what it takes to move from chef to CEO, make high stakes decisions in hospitality and build resilient businesses in one of the toughest industries there is. Well, today on All About Business, I couldn't be more delighted than to welcome Stuart Gillies. Stuart is a chef, restaurateur and former CEO of the Gordon Ramsay Group. He currently runs, with his wife Cecilia, two famous restaurants, Number 8 in Sevenoaks and The Bank House in Chislehurst. You've got an amazing story that I'm looking forward to sort of excavating, Stuart, and I'm looking forward to hearing all about your journey. but I just looked up I looked up number eight and Sevenoaks on my computer just before you came and it's very highly rated Google 4.7 out of five but I noticed on TripAdvisor that there are 103 restaurants in Sevenoaks so how do you stand out how do you compete how do you make a business work in such an environment that's my first question because I think it might begin yeah it'll start a conversation in an interesting way yeah well thank you for inviting me today that's a real thank you very much i appreciate that um so yeah i didn't know there were that many restaurants in seven oaks i was amazed we don't spend a lot of our time looking out i'll be honest we look in and that's i suppose the essence of what we do every day we look at what we do as a business and if it's good enough for us then we hope people like it and that and we're really tough on detail micro detail attention to detail team energy atmosphere all the 360 of what going out and hospitality is that that we've learned my wife and I so I wouldn't have known there were 103 restaurants we notice new competition when it comes and we look at it and we and we take a view but generally we're always judging ourselves I would say looking internally judging the food the drinks the atmosphere the team the way people engage so that when people arrive it's unique and it's got something that is almost living it's got a heartbeat and that that's what we've always done with our businesses right and you've got a 30 year career history in hospitality you've obviously learned a lot along the way coming to this point where you now focus so much on detail where did you begin and what were your first lessons well I wasn't born into hospitality or The youngest of four kids, Glaswegian parents who weren't foodies at all. We were brought up on the famous smash from Mash Get Smash. Oh, yeah. Brilliant advert from the 70s. That and boiled mince was a pretty normal meal at our house. And a posh dinner with steak at the weekend that my dad would get. And I'd get off cuts. So I didn't have a culinary upbringing at all. we'd go up to Glasgow quite regularly see cousins and things and eat aship pie and tatty scone and fruit slice that was super excited to me as a young kid from Crawley and Sussex so it was only really when it was mid-80s and the recession was on and Thatcher was trying to rebuild the country and I managed to get on a YTS scheme which was 25 pounds a week you work five days you get a college one day and you have one day off and uh that gave me uh an entrance into a kitchen local kitchen i think they should be doing this now yeah absolutely it was something equivalent because you're not the first person first guest on our podcast who started on a yts scheme and went on to do brilliant things yeah because it didn't cost the employers anything they had two or three kids who came in on the scheme age i was 17 and i didn't know what i wanted to do stayed on for a year at school my brother was a chef from at the airport gatwick so yeah it's a good laugh in the kitchen go and try it out and i went and tried it and loved it even though i'd never had anything to do with food i just loved the atmosphere so you're 17 at this point 17 went in on the yts scheme worked a year and at the end of the year was lucky enough to get taken on of the three kids they choose one to keep on so where was this this was in crawley in sussex but what was it oh it was a local crest crest hotel right so do you remember there was a group called the crest hotel group right and uh they uh they had a hotel they were a kitchen old style 80s kitchen cooking breakfast for people and so are you doing everything really you know the chefs drank beer and it was it was rock and roll 80s you know while working yeah and i just thought this is completely normal but the head chef was really good he was really talented a guy called david woods and he said to me if you're gonna make something of this career get yourself to london and so um he introduced me to someone who was at the royal garden hotel and i went and worked at the royal garden hotel in kensington and that finished my apprenticeship at westminster college so that was my three years of 706 1 and 2 city and guilds and then finished my year um at the royal garden and met a lot of chefs that i was yeah then in so when you completed your apprenticeship what sort of qualification did you have as you get a city and guilds yeah uh 706 1 and 2 right that's what they called which is was the basic of that era that means you can go to a kitchen and it's a really good qualification actually yeah you you have to study you have to pass you have to do well to to achieve that um It was a basic, I think it was a lot higher level on expectation than the NDQ certificates are now. So that was just standard. And it was full time two years or three years part time apprenticeship, which is what I did the apprenticeship. So that's your entry ticket to good jobs in hospital. Yeah, pretty much. That was it. So that gave me the basic tools as a chef qualifications. And my third end of my third year, I I'd been working all those years as a young chef. and all my friends were doing other jobs and earning three times the money and had doubled the time off. And I was working with a whole massive team at the Royal Gardening because back then kitchens had about 45, 50 chefs in the brigade. They were huge teams of people. And I met a Swedish girl named Andrea and we got together and started seeing each other. And she was heading back to Sweden at that time and I was just finishing my year. So she said, why don't you come back with me? so yeah a boy from Crawley who'd never really been anywhere except London to get the chance to go to Sweden and have an event leave all those friends behind who are showing off about how much they were earning yeah well it was going somewhere more exciting well I was just so excited at the opportunity to grow and do something else and travel so I went to Sweden with Andrea and when I got to Sweden all the Swedes were completely different culture to the British back then they are all about outdoor health and travel and they're huge travelers you know they were traveling the globe in big chunks of three months 12 months and so when you live in that culture and I was completely immersed in that culture you know I didn't know any English people I didn't I stayed away from English people I was just living with my girlfriend and her sister I worked with Swedish people so I learned Swedish fluently within a year and I only immersed myself in that culture and I found I had a real gift for language. I found I had an ear that didn't materialize at school when I was being bashed with a book and reading off the blackboard, but immersed into it fully. And you were working in a restaurant? Yeah, I was working in a restaurant, fantastic restaurant in Stockholm, actually, called Rich Restaurant. Different food, I imagine. It was different food, and the kitchen was full of Austrians and Germans and Swiss, who were the best cooks in the world back then. Back in late 80s, they were phenomenal cooks, and they they were just doing things and understanding food and produce and attention to detail that didn't really exist in london at all back then so yeah i i loved sweden i loved the the culture i like the lifestyle i love the food in the restaurant i loved working with these guys who were super strict very germanic in their manner that everything was incredibly disciplined and meticulous. And just their knowledge was phenomenal. So I had a fantastic year working with them in Sweden. Then I came back to the UK, sort of found me, spent a few months here and then I went off to Italy. To Rome. And you learned Italian, I imagine. Yeah, I learned Italian. It just happened. Back then you could take a one-way trip. So I basically saved up money for a few months. I guess you still can. maybe with brexit you can't get to work so easily yeah that's the thing so back then i had a one-way ticket and about 300 pound went out there and three four days in i didn't have enough to fly back right so i started knocking on doors everywhere all over the city and eventually got sent to a place um called the lord byron which was a beautiful white marble hotel behind a parking room called villa burguesi sounds quite british well it was named after byron of course Yeah, almost serendipitous, yeah, in the direction. And I arrived there and they just said, okay, come back tomorrow. And we didn't discuss money or job or anything. They just said, come back tomorrow. 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And so I slept on his floor for about four weeks. um in rome traveled to work with him just worked and worked and worked and started to learn italian and so so what i'm hearing here stuart you know as a young man you really went out to learn and expose yourself to different sort of experiences cultures kitchens and you were benefiting from being in a different environment with people with different approaches to work that you'd perhaps been with before from whom you learned a huge amount initially in Sweden. And this is a good thing for young people to consider now when, you know, the environment for young people is quite tough to get jobs, but you were really prepared to go out and give it a go and, you know, sleep on someone's floor for a few weeks if it was necessary. I think I wasn't fazed by anything and I expected things to be tough and failure was inevitable. But from that young age, because I'd never really as a young kid and in that family and never really apart from sports I did a lot of sports as a kid I'd never really achieved anything as such so I had no I had nothing to lose I had no fear of failing or not looking good or someone thinking oh you're rubbish at this it didn't matter nothing mattered like that all I was interested in was going ahead and just learning I was so you weren't fazed and you weren't afraid of failing well wasn't afraid of I wasn't afraid of being on my own. I was quite comfortable in my own environment, willing to take risk, language, people laughing at you, because that's what happens when you go abroad. You know, you have to have really thick skin and just move on. You can't be sensitive because an English cook in the 80s in Europe, trust me, we were a laughingstock. A butt of jokes. We were the butt of jokes. And when I arrived in Rome and was in the kitchen, I was never called Stuart once. And all the time I worked in Rome, they called me L'Inglesi. l'inglesi where's l'inglesi dove l'inglesi of course i find l'inglesi yeah all the time it was just constant and didn't bother me because i was just learning i was just eating learning and rome was like it was literally like a magical storybook of if you could find the most amazing place to go and work and indulge where would it be that would be the storybook because people would come on a bicycle in the morning and bring produce in a box they'd have a coffee they'd have a grappa they talk about produce and then the next person would come and the truffles would be in a little cloth and everything was so romantic and incredible because i'd never seen food like that coming from london and the uk and even sweden you didn't get produce like i saw in rome that produce was just mind-blowing and that was that was what gave me the benchmark for the future of taste right because I ate things there that were just incredible. They were what I call those life moments when it's just a showstopper. You eat it and everything stops. It's just, oh my God, that tastes incredible. That tomato or that apple or that piece of bread. So you can still think of moments in Rome when you tasted something. Yeah, the nostalgic memory of that, that flavour point, yeah, I don't think it ever goes away. And that informs you to this day? Completely, yeah. That's my benchmark. If it doesn't taste as good as that with this memory. It's hard to get the produce, isn't it? It is. Well, it's come on a long way. You can get phenomenal produce here and you get a lot of rubbish produce, no doubt. You get that everywhere these days. But I think if you haven't tasted something at its best, at maximum level, then you're never going to shoot that high and get close to achieving that. So I think that was the thing. And I didn't know where that was taking me back then. It was all a hodgepodge of, you know, the Germans and Austrians in Sweden, the travel, the produce in Italy, and the attention to detail on how they start the risotto, how they make the pasta by hand. You know, it was small things that were a whole mix of detail that didn't come together until years, years later, when I worked in New York, actually, which then was a catalyst. Okay. So let's fast forward. So you ended up leaving Rome and going to New York. No, it was years later. years i was really busy in between busy where well i backpack after italy i went i stopped working for uh five months and backpacked south america back in london yeah it was about about 25 i'd done lots of years of traveling james in and out back to sweden italy south america and then got to what i was done i'd had enough of living out of a bag i'd seen a lot of things i'd seen a lot of danger and i was at a point where i decided i needed to get my career on track so i went to work at a place called Grave Time Manor down in Sussex. Spent 18 months there, split shifts, back into the routine of being a chef, working all day. So I met Marcus Waring he was there as a young cook And from Grave Time Manor I then went to Le Caprice Right Which back in early 90s wasn really known at all actually It was only known to the elite of society and the billionaires of the world all knew Le Caprice because they all went there. Chris and Jeremy had this incredible place they'd built on the bottom of Arlington Street. And it was full all day with every A-lister in the world would go to Le Caprice. when they came to London. So, Luca Priest was two and a half years, which was phenomenal for me. Just working with Mark Hicks, Tim Hughes, and a whole team that were there. A really famous team. It was a bunch of phenomenal cooks who were just cooking all the time. Super fresh produce, as well as the staples of Luca Priest's menu, which were the Caesar salad, the fish cake, the bang bang chicken. There was all these staples that all the regulars loved, from Peter Stringfellow to Princess Diana to um leslie wadding so that these were there so you sort of knew what they had ordered when they came so they knew yeah they looked after them it was their place it was incredibly consistent and that was their place and then you had all the others who came because it was look a priest so the menu changed regularly it was incredible uh artisan and british produce that we were using all the time uh rotating so i spent two and a half years there was a sous chef which was uh fantastic um entry i think into that style of food which was all ingredient led um very much regular changing adapt things all the time rather than the serious level of michelin where you don't do that michelin is get perfection and just repeat repeat repeat repeat so the caprice was much more risky much more off the cuff but phenomenal food um and from there i was at the level of sous chef and thought well head chef is obviously next i'm in a serious zone i'm really focused but london's not giving me anything exciting everybody in london is feeding off each other they're all going to each other's places they're all repeating and copying what everyone else does so i looked uh i looked out at what was around and heard of this place called danielle in new york which was top five in the world daniel balud was creating a sensation with his style of cooking and wrote a letter to him um in fact i did the draft letter and jeremy king offered to help and he looked at the letter i wrote and said it's not really punchy enough stewart you know this is a guy in america you gotta really you gotta regale him with you know you gotta pamper his ego a lot more so so jeremy helped me write the letter uh which was stunning that's nice as you're working for him yeah it was like nothing i could have written and clearly had an impact because it went went over there and i heard nothing and then decided i was going to go though instead and meet him and confront him nicely politely turn up have lunch say oh i actually wrote you so we did that me and another three of the sous chefs who worked at look a priest we all went over planned this trip went to union square cafe which was legendary back then and we had lunch at danielle and at the end me when daniel came out and spoke to us and i said oh actually i i wrote to you danielle about a job here but i didn't hear anything about it what's your name so he went away and came back two minutes later he said yeah i've got your paperwork here i just i was waiting for timing because it takes quite a long time for the j1 visa so he said i've got your paperwork here so yeah we're looking to uh contact you and you would start in september that year and it was march at that point so so i waited a year for that job danielle from when i wrote um but it was a good story about just going out and getting a job i mean literally going there and saying well i wasn't taking no for an answer no no quite but you were very focused on what you wanted to do and where you wanted to work and who for well yeah i i had a dream i had an ambition and i was determined i would find a way to make that work so yeah we went out and and it worked and i spent uh 18 months with danielle which was yeah yeah that was phenomenal i mean danielle was the most incredible kitchen because it was full of you know it was full of chefs from france and and america but the guys from france had all worked in every single top three star in france and they wanted to come and live in america so they were coming from michelle bra from mart vera they were coming from toagro bocuse oh lamboise i mean everywhere that you would hear about and just be like wow so they'd all work there so what a stage for me as a cook to judge myself on you know you're called linglazy there no they call me teabag so yeah i seem to have another english everywhere maybe maybe they didn't like stewart but uh yes i was teabag there because that's what the americans called the british okay they haven't forgotten that tea party yeah exactly and i was the only english i was the only english you'd ever worked there i was the first english guy really who had actually well i imagine fully so um yeah worked there 18 months with daniel and that was incredible that place was the catalyst that brought together everything i'd ever seen uh eating ceviche and in peru and cooking in italy and cooking in sweden it just brought everything together as this mix of you can have one style of cuisine which was french which is daniel's cuisine but you can have influences from all over the world right and that's what he did and he did it incredibly um really creatively and and he was a brilliant technician danielle he could do volume and finesse incredible incredible levels so danielle changed my cooking career no doubt about that he brought everything together um and then i went back to london after that and then when you came back to london your journey involved you moving from being chef to ceo yes took a few years took a few years but you went from being obviously top chef to the ceo of a gordon ramsey group is that right yeah so just describe that journey a little if you might and how that came about what you learned well i was working as a chef director of three or four of the businesses the business had gone through a massive transition uh gordon's father-in-law had been removed from the business and the business was in a lot of trouble because it was 2010 on the back of the time on the back of the the the lehman um issues and and the financial crash you know the whole fine dining sector had gone so that was gone so the big huge spending the fat cats of the city and spending like 44 000 pound at patrouse there was that story that came out back in the day so the wine and everything yeah which was happening all the time you know and that was regular and those businesses in that uh area or or Echelon, let's say, they were profiting brilliantly from that. They loved that because people were coming and spending incredible amounts of money. So that had all gone. And I was working as a chef director of so many of the businesses in the company. So I was doing everything new anyway. And Gordon and I had a conversation. He said, look, I found someone to take over. I said, okay, great. Who's that going to be? And he said, somebody who really knows what he's doing. I said, okay, great. And he said, that's going to be you. And I said, oh, no, no, I'm not ready for that. I said, I can't do that. I'm a chef and I love being a chef. You talk about change, what we need to do. I think you can do it. And you can't say no to that opportunity. No, you can't. It wasn't that I didn't like being a chef, but that opportunity was huge to have that then. And we agreed that he would step back. I'd have pretty much a clear run to change and make the changes that I felt needed to be done and just keep him in the loop. While he was in the US a lot doing the shows, earning money to support the business which is a really simple arrangement but it was there was a lot of layers of complexity in that and the business was yeah really brilliant in some areas and really damaged in other areas like lots of businesses as you progress through the years when things get tough you suddenly notice what doesn't work anymore yeah and as i understand you had to make some quite difficult decisions you had to close some restaurants you opened others was that i think i closed yeah so over the period i was in charge i closed 12 businesses around the world and we opened 18 right so that was the transition so really there was a lot of things that were your decision points on why you decided to close something or and what you were going to open it definitely wasn't emotional it was it was just logical for me that sort of job when i get into that role or even how I'd always functioned as a operator and as a chef for me it was often it was it was just mathematics some things added up and some things didn't right so you got to make decisions that are not emotional you really need to get the facts gather the data and make a really informed decision so I'd always done that my whole career and probably my my whole life in lots of ways just naturally so when I got into that role as CEO you just have to strip back and see you need to be able to see what the root of the problem is get get to the get underneath the skin get to the core of the problem and then make a decision and move on and then and then execute that so so these were businesses you didn't really see a few future in because the mathematics didn't add up and you couldn't see a way of turning that around didn't it didn't add up financially and it was also draining the the resources because when you have businesses in trouble every entrepreneur it consumes cash and it also eats up all your time you put way more time into a business that's doing badly than you do into a business that's doing well. That is just, that's just the facts of it. A business that's trouble, you put way more time and emotion and energy into that to fix it. A business that's going well, you just keep an eye on it and you let it tick along. So there were lots of those businesses that needed attention. And a lot of them were international deals that had been set up by other people that were just draining resource, weren't contributing financially. They were eating up Gordon's time. so you'd have to get jordan on a plane fly him out take his time up which was taking him away from things actually that were generating yeah that were more profitable simple as that so so so those 12 were fairly easy decisions actually and what were you looking for in terms of opening new ventures well as as i looked at it and spoke to gordon about so we saw that everything was branded gordon and ramsay which makes sense for lots of people but i think what i saw when i looked into the group and and the the the micro detail levels i saw that everyone was hiding under the brand and they were looking thinking well if things aren't working we'll just wait for the brand to fix it but it wasn't and so the people working within it had got used to the good days big spend high income so that was fixing all the problems in lots of ways until you get to a point when that stopped and so my my view was we debran we create individuality and we bring in new people to support the current team who have unique skill sets so they're not all born of the same yeah core um central um what would we call it i suppose area where they've all worked together in that level of fine dining at a super high level you need people who are diverse who have only worked in bars or worked in brasseries or worked in different environments where they have different skill sets that's interesting because that is a different business strategy to say recreating the ivy in lots of places or yeah yeah yeah cafe rouge that was a big deal at the time or i'm thinking of gales now which is a sort of well it's different if you've got one phenomena if you've got one thing that works and you can do the cookie cutter yeah and mass produce it really well then there's nothing wrong with that that that's very clever yeah but your business was not like that you're saying it was different it was already diverse right it already it was already a collection of restaurants as i called it and it was it as i say it had great elements within but there was so there was so much noise that we had to really individualize and start to put responsibility and pressure into individuals within their bricks and mortar establishment rather than them looking to head office and central support area so so you wanted people to take responsibility in their yeah and actually in location be involved in the decision decision making yeah um and actually make this make decisions that were going to drive the business forward and they would then own and manage that decision rather than we hand down a directive or yeah um a a command so to speak uh and then they would just execute it because there was you just lose so much along the way so you were basically devolving sort of responsibility from the centre to... Yeah, well put. That's exactly what we did to the point where I made a really unpopular decision and I changed the name of Head Office to Support Office, which was really unpopular. Who was that unpopular with? Obviously Head Office. Not those people in the other office. No, because I said, look, without the restaurants, there is no business. Yeah, I always say at Reid, we don't have a head office. Yeah, it's... We don't need one. It's a collective force and you don't need a head office. We're all one team. Because everyone's out doing their thing, but together, you're a brilliant machine and it works brilliantly because everyone's an integral part of that machine so that's how i explained it and the teams understood it completely so right we're as you say devolving power to you this is support support team will help you achieve that and you need to drive this and you need to hit your targets and you need to achieve so we did that and that then created the individuality of different brands bread street kitchen uh uni street cafe in london house and then all the developments in the united states with burger hub so there was lots of that individual focus on each of these businesses that then were more self well well they were self-perpetuating to a large extent and then the support office gave them the resources to see what was good and bad right and grow that business um and that was pretty much what i spent my eight years doing was growing new businesses new contracts new relationships with caesars with sans casino group so ceo it's a completely different job to being a chef you know i wasn't cooking i wasn't spending time in that way with teams as i would have done before much more focused on the the artist side of the business i was purely involved with banks finance costs that is a very different you know role i mean did you did you find that you could rely upon things you'd learned as chef it does mean chief doesn't it chef in french yeah it does yeah boss yeah boss that means boss boss of a kitchen a boss of a company other sort of things you took from one to the other well definitely yes i i just transitioned from one job to the other people had some other the people I knew outside the industry who were already CEOs they said you know it's going to be the loneliest job in the world being a CEO because you have to make tough decisions and people won't understand those decisions but you've got to make decisions. Do you find that to be true? 100% it's true. I think the things about being a CEO there were a couple of things I really learned first of all it's it's the loneliest job in the world and secondly you're really up against it with regards to your strategy, depending on who you're trying to keep happy, whether you're trying to grow the business for the future and build something, or whether you're trying to keep your shareholders happy. Right. Those two strategies are, in my experience, very different. Because the shareholders had more short-term expectations. They have financial expectations. They want dividends. They want some money. Well I think in lots of businesses CEOs are really and you don know until you a CEO that you really under that pressure because you go to the board meetings and it all about money shares what's in it for us kind of thing. And that's what board meetings, I suppose, I've oversimplified it, but that's what they're really about. But if you want to build something for the long term, for the long term, it's not going to look pretty. You have to make your case, don't you? It's not going to look pretty. You're going to have to put money in. You're going to have to do things. You're going to have to break some shells. You're going to have to build. You have to structure. you have to build and i see a lot of these companies around the world that are producing results and people say they're doing badly but i will see that they are putting money into growth they're investing they're investing into growth so your results aren't going to look pretty if you're building if you're building it in growth it's extremely unlikely the results will look pretty because it takes money it takes investment and and no matter what the business you just don't know how well it's going to go your forecasts and your projections they're literally just guesstimates you you take the best guess you can and you push it out there um but to the point i think um my strategy was rebuild restructure bring in new talent individualize and create then avenues that can be grown into future individual brands things that could be segregated whatever it might be that was always my focus so the de-branding point wasn't to remove the name or anything that was negative to Gordon it was creating individuality within that which was then associated with this amazing brand just by association which when we did Savoy Grill that was the last restaurant that I was in charge of as a chef director so I remember having the conversation before Chris left and they wanted to call it Gordon Ramsay Savoy Grill and I said no no no it's got to be Savoy grill that's it and you let the quality speak so i mean it's a famous restaurant it's a famous restaurant so you can't be bigger than that name it's been around for 150 years you know even a massive name now isn't bigger than the savoy grill it is an institution so let's just let it do the work and let everybody else bring the name in and let people know that it's run by gordon ramsay exactly let the press talk about it let the article say that that's much more i think it's much more endearing and it's much it's much more of a statement of confidence in your ability you don't need to stamp the name right it's the it's the quality that shines through so i think that was where we got to with a lot of what we did uh and grow the us of course was different completely different because gordon was a huge name out there uh and you needed to stamp the name on everything because that's how the american market works because it's off the back of the tv not off the back of a career of 20 30 years yeah it's off the back of tv and that that's how the u.s works differently to here maybe not so much these days but certainly then it was it was quite different strategy well that's very interesting so so you were there for eight years you say and then you decided to pursue your own strategy and start your own business is that right is that the right way yeah so you you you set out on your own again is that right yeah i finished up with uh gordon rams group was ceo uh in 2018 generally 2018 finished and um then looked that towards that next chapter of 20 years my wife and i talked about it i'd been away a lot as ceo and as a chef i hadn't i'd been home but i hadn't been fully 100 at home i was either on the phone i was either just on emails or i was completely consumed by something that was uh work related and when i was see I was away once a month traveling sometimes for a week or 10 days so when I'd come back my plan was organize this speak to this child speak to this child it was it was the same as I organized my work life everything was on a list which is really bad but it's just the way you function because you're so busy juggling things so we look to that and agree that yes this next chapter will be different we will start our own business and because we do that we're the creators we know how to run these things let's just do it so that was in 2018 we had the chat we looked at options and then in 2019 we launched our first business bank house in chisselhurst september 2019 so everything looked great the world looked amazing and hospitality had a massive opportunity to grow and sun was out sun was out so we had six good months and then and then yeah then covid hit but so what happened yeah that must have been a bit of a nightmare wasn't it you made this big investment yeah your wife cecilia and then suddenly covid hit it was a nightmare yeah full stop because we just had a review by grace dent right in the january grace dent came unannounced gave us this review phenomenal review which is exactly what you want as a local business you know the biggest food critic in the country at that time she comes and gives you this amazing review and talks about how incredible it is why can't every local business be like this and you start to build immediately on the back of that and then covid hits so no doubt we lost all the value of that review and that positivity that had come uh that we'd spent ages building towards but here's what it is what do you do you start it again in a sense you pick yourself up and you just keep going and then we we are still a startup business six and a half years later there's no doubt about that because every six months we have to review everything we have to review the pricing the menu what works because every six months the landscape has changed for the last five years really um not by choice it's just the way the world has gone through the economy through the external factors um even post covid all the new things came which was the war costs utilities so we are still a startup um but we just keep going and i would say even through the hardship and the pain and the frustrations the journey of working uh with my wife cecilia and our kids has been something that i never planned but it's probably been the best thing that happened working with our kids actually who were back then aged what were they uh 18 down to eight pretty much or seven so you just don't know how that's going to go and the kids came into the business to earn some cash we dragged them in they were typical owner operator kids you know they get dragged in you know often by choice and often not by choice but um so this is a real family business yeah full on there were there were times when there were five of us working in the business my brother was babysitting for our youngest he was at our house and we were just they're all working between kitchen kp runners bar front of house that the whole thing and and i'd say yeah that that created a whole new dynamic and a whole new chapter with our relationship with our kids so the kids had never understood what i did they just knew they would go to lots of restaurants all the time and everything would be really great and everyone would know us so that's what they thought life was like they got a front of house experience kind of yeah but it wasn't you know when you look back and you think there's not a good way to teach your kids because they just become so so uh so privileged in lots of ways and so it was different because they saw their mum and dad working extremely hard really long hours right uh and dealing with so much stuff inside outside the business and i think it was the best chapter that we've had with the kids where we taught them the value of hard work of if you want something go and do it go and get it and you've just got to have this work ethic so our kids are 100 working kids they are super hard workers if they want something they know that they will achieve it and they will go and get it and they've just become those sort of adults so james is 25 harry's 23 and luca's uh 20 almost 21 uh and they all now james is digital media so he's in hospitality in that way he works restaurants in central london and then harry's in australia in sydney has been traveling a lot like i did right and he's working in sydney in sales and he loves sydney at the moment not sure if he'll come back and then luca's a chef serious serious chef so luca has gone on that path and he's fallen in love with food and become consumed by food and cooking and he's currently at elanderos at the O'Connell as a young 20 year old. Good for him. Good for him. And your youngest? What's your youngest doing? Still helping you? So Arthur's 13. So he's been desperate to come into the restaurants and work for ages. For years, he's been telling me, I can earn this much. I can do this many hours. And he got fed up waiting. So Arthur, age 12, started a car wash business. All right. So he started a car wash business with lots of kids too. And he's got to a point where he's now 13 and he's got about 15, 16 clients regularly. He started now what they call a detailing business where he does really high levels of car washing and he earns really quite amazing money because his attention to detail and his levels of, I suppose, finesse and perfection is so high, which he's got from Cecilia more than me because she's very meticulous as, you know, with perfection and in that OCD manner. so he's got all that detail so he's suddenly creating his own business and now employing other kids who come and work with him he drags a trolley down the street he's got his cart so he's got and it just sounds like a very good education for everyone it's been quite phenomenal but we didn't plan it but i would say if we could have chosen it to be like that we would have said god how could you create but that's very interesting the family aspect of this and how positive that has been starting this business together yeah it was completely unexpected we did not expect that and we didn't set out to do that we didn't force our kids to do that they just organically chose to do that and organically they've seen us deal with a lot of stress drama yeah people managing people how to um deal with financial situations external factors learn a lot from that yeah they're unfair but you just need to make a plan and get on so yeah i've had the best time with my uh me personally i've had the best time with my sons the last eight years yeah and i had for all those years where i would have thought oh they're seeing me as a ceo but it was completely disconnected yes uh now they just see they see the raw world of what you do how you deal with stress how you deal with everything and it's it's been the biggest education for them of how to actually get on in life did any of them go to university only harry only harry went harry went and studied uh finance and economics right for three years and yeah don't know if it was worth it really well that's what i'm wondering because you learn so much doing what you've described yeah the others didn't want to they definitely didn't they were quite clear james is always really artistic as a photographer and set up his own website own company so again very entrepreneur You know, he went out and got business with people that he was doing photography for for dinner, for sketch, for the Goring, for the Conor, for a Wong. Just incredible clients with no no university qualifications just based on what he did, his talent and his website that he built. And those people seeing the attention to detail with his photography. And they're like, yes, that's our level of sophistication. And that's, that's hearing you say attention to detail a lot. And it sort of reminded me of the early part of our conversation when you were talking about those chefs in Sweden, from Austria and Germany, places that you said then had great attention to detail. Do you think this is a skill that isn't sufficiently sort of emphasised, you know, being good at the detail? Do you think we've sort of become a bit sort of grandiose and sloppy in the management of things? well i i think this it's a really difficult question to answer but i would have to say short answer is yes i think it's critical i don't think i had it as a kid at all i think i was young as the four pretty casual pretty sloppy and not particularly focused in any one area apart from sport i did a lot of judo and i achieved really high results in that and won lots of competitions so i guess it was in there but i needed the training of all those people to be extremely strict with me and discipline that if you follow this way and you plan and you have this structure you can achieve great things and i think that just organically stuck with me and grew that if you're meticulous and detailed you can achieve so what sort of i mean what sort of disciplines or structures help to be focused in this way i i think the basics are what you get out of every motivational book and speaker in the world. Make your plan. Get up early. Keep yourself mentally and physically fit and ready. You know, constantly challenge yourself. Never be afraid of failure and risk. It's all internal. None of it is unachievable for anybody. every all the basics you're like the david goggins you know education of you know be hard push hard train hard i think everyone has their own version of that but i think it starts internally so our son luca for example is 20 was yeah for want of a better expression all over the show as a young 17 year old didn't know what to do he was going into property and you know wasn't consistent wasn't reliable he was a classic teenage boy who was just a bit all over the show and was distracted really easily couldn't focus on anything and then he worked with me in the kitchen for about six months when i was back in the kitchen about three years ago just rebuilding the structure and he fell in love with it he fell in love with the discipline that every single day he had to repeat and replicate the setup and he had to check everything exactly the same way every day and if he did that come the busy time he was okay right and he just saw the the beauty in being prepared and being organized for any eventuality that then he could just get on with stuff um and i think that's really that is impressive for other people to see i think that attracts people to you because you're so consistently meticulous and it gives great confidence to people you know what you're doing confidence i think it's to draw you need energy to do that you need to be driven You need to be super focused. You don't get distracted. You can have fun, but you really have this sense of purpose. I think that's what it maybe comes down to. And that's probably the best expression I've read over all the years is this sense of purpose. If you have a sense of purpose and a drive and a determination to get somewhere and you might achieve it and you might fail. It doesn't matter. You've got this sense of purpose that you are going to achieve this and get somewhere. I think that is incredibly infectious. Other people see it and they're like, yes, I can control all my distractions, all the noise. I can deal with all that. If I just stay on point and I stay focused and I keep my own discipline, personal discipline, if I keep it really rigid and meticulous, then I can. And even the things that get in the way, they're just problems to solve because there's always something that will stop you. But it doesn't matter if you have a plan for that and you counter it. If you wanted to train regularly and you haven got time to train it because you not getting up early enough And I not saying that people should get up early to do it I saying you need to structure your life with what you got to work with so you been dealt a hand work with that and then build on that and I think then anybody anybody can achieve like you know their wildest ambitions by having that sense of structure and a sense of purpose and if you want to build a company yeah that is infectious that passion and drive is super infectious people migrate to that so much and when i talk about restaurants and food and different things or even people management with our teams yeah i really believe and mean what i say with that and i think that helps keep our teams together because our teams have been with us a long time in a really complicated period of time so there's a lot of the team has been for six seven years um and and we build and we grow more but our ethos is always the same that we're super focused we uh we we shoot high and we we want to achieve the best and we're determined to get there and nothing will stop us not financial issues not problems with people whatever the problems are they are just they're always going to be there they're just there um so yeah i'm i'm i'm signed up i like the sound of this so you put me into a space there and that's it i think that sounds good well no it's interesting because when i asked you about number eight your other restaurant in seven oaks and all those other restaurants in the town i mean you said we look within and about getting it right from what's within our control and everything you've just said so it supports that i mean one one thing i'm interested in beyond what you've been explaining so brilliantly is your working relationship with your wife cecilia because i mean quite a lot of people embark on business ventures as couples what advice might you give them you know what makes that how do you make that work i mean i used to work for gordon and anita roddick who founded the body shop yeah brilliant both of them and learned so much from them both but they were obviously a famous business couple too what do business couples need to think about well i don't think it's easy that's the first thing i'll say i think you have to tread carefully i think uh it was cecilia and i had history already working together we met working together so we launched a restaurant called teatro with lee chapman back in late 90s which was a massive success on charlesbury avenue and had a members club and a restaurant so cecilia was a young 20 something french super professional from paris who'd been working with market pierre white and i just come back from new york uh so i was it was my first head chef job and i was full on and completely focused on um yeah self-achievement i guess or on this mission uh cooking so we we worked together professionally we clicked because she was super professional so then we fell in love had kids and then celia spent all those years giving me the space to spend 80 90 hours a week in kitchens uh and and she was at home with the kids so when we got back to working together you don't know how it's going to work but we clicked together within i think two weeks like we'd never stop working together again because cecilia is so professional she's so focused on detail and cecilia's good at things that i'm not good at which is really important i think in the couple you both need to have your individual skill sets that then contribute and make you a stronger unit so i think that was always the way it was i i'm a chef i'm all about food i'm all about structure and engineering systems to work and i'm about finance and cost control yeah because that's the career i've had and that's what i've learned cecilia is all about being the people the person that people like so if they choose out the two people who they like best it's always cecilia it will always be cecilia a hundred times out of a hundred because i'm focused on just being professional and running a business so see just charming bubbly charismatic she's got all the finesse of the front of house with then immaculate training from paris um and she's got such a so much of a softer approach with the team that just wraps them in a warm we can do this so so i think those two factors sounds like a good team it's a good team because then you know if there's something to be said i'm the guy who brings the hammer down sits them down and says it's not good enough it's not good enough for this reason and that reason this is what you're going to do and the team are okay i get it i've got direction i'll go and do that and so they learn and so that's what they all want all those people whether they're 20 years experience or two years experience they want still to learn and be structured so a lot of our team have got a lot of experience some of our team are in their 50s but they still get direction and guidance from me in certain ways which is what they want and i think that's very hard to find in our industry where you can go somewhere with a lot of experience and still get developed. I think that's very difficult for people to find. And if you don't get development, you plateau. So I think it's amazing to work together as a couple, but I think you really need to make sure you both focus on different areas of the business and you're not clashing too much. That said, when we used to have management meetings, we would often sit there and for the team it's like being in some domestic um home argument because the scene would be like a teenager and i'd be saying can you be quite pleased or i'd be telling her off at the meeting because she'd be too bubbly and having fun with the team and i'm trying to get some points across and the team are just sitting there not knowing what to say so it's more like a family because they're terrible yeah terrified but i think that's been a lovely dynamic that the team really love they love the fact that there is this dynamic which is pure family and it's not just corporate it's not just a meeting of professionals there is this whole side to it which which is ultimately what hospitality is i think when you lose that in hospitality you really lose that nuance of exceptional guest care attention to detail again for the minute of time you know it's those little soft skills with the guest are critical um but you can't do that if you don't have i think your structure really well organized and your engine meticulously tuned so then you can have fun mistakes can happen you know it's not a big deal stewart you work with your wife cecilia very successfully it seems um what if a couple is thinking of embarking on a similar business journey as you both did and thinking of working together what questions should a couple ask themselves before going ahead so tread carefully that's for sure don't just think it's going to be easy because it definitely won't be easy to be honest make make sure you're strong as a couple make sure your marriage is strong and you're not doing this to fix something else because it won't it won't fix something else this will be its own challenge all on its own and you need to make sure you are strong and you have a good marriage we have our problems in our marriage like every couple me and see but we work hard to make it work and if you don't have that ability to talk and get through that then it will be super tough again it doesn't matter it doesn't matter what you both do within that structure it will be tough at some point and you can't be blaming or angry with the other person for that and that's a natural emotion that comes out so yeah be a strong couple if you if you've got to work on that first work on that first so what about sort of back at home i mean are you talking business all the time or do you have to make time when you're not going to talk about business or does it not matter does one have to stop and the other begin in terms of home and business life or or is it just a sort of fusion so that's really tricky i have to say because the especially when your business uh isn't doing so well you're going through a tough time then that that consumes your home life as well so that that can put your relationship under a massive amount of pressure i'll be honest that is just inevitable you can't avoid that um you try and balance it out and you try and cut it off but ultimately you can't because the stakes are so high aren't they you can't yeah even when things are going well or you're discussing stuff you can talk about personal things for a while but eventually that is always going to segment back into something um work related yeah we're quite strict and disciplined with that at times when we we block it out and we just talk about us and we section that that it's about us and it's about our time in the future but you really have to be disciplined do you take holidays or we do take holidays yeah and often they're amazing and sometimes they're completely consumed by problems with the businesses that come up just before you go you can get a message or yeah something happens something happens and because i'm you know the head office the term we don't use because i am head office because i deal with so many elements of the business if we have to recruit i have to focus on that or if there's something that comes up that's to do with an issue or payment or whatever i have to deal with it i can't not deal with that well we can help you with the former if you need it so so um just to sort of pull this together i mean you you've touched upon some of the challenges there running a business is there a failure i mean you said earlier that you weren't put off by the prospect of failure is is there a failure that you had earlier in your career that in hindsight shape your leadership style particularly or a failure that you look back on and think i really learned from that and this is what i'm going to do differently i mean that's tough i mean there's lots of failures really i've had that's that's a fact there's lots of things i've done wrong or badly um and hopefully lots of stuff i did well which uh carried me through but i don't know if there's one particular thing um no it's really hard that actually i'd have to say but your your spirit that's coming over so strongly is is to keep going i mean kind of maybe that's one of the lessons from the failures of the past you could to keep going well i think yeah i think i think you you just have to keep going i think life will just grind you down whether you're doing well or whether you're not doing well in business i think there comes a point when there are there are issues and obstacles and there's there's adversity and you have to see that advert i think that's probably it i'd always seen adversity as something that i needed to overcome no matter what it was so if there was a challenge i'm bet i'm better out of my in fact that's the lesson i'm better out of my comfort zone i am better under pressure and out of my comfort zone i did i did a couple of courses when i was ceo gordon at a couple of courses at harvard the exec ed courses they do this executive education courses where you do a big chunk of a BA course in you know 10 days and it's really intense and you live together as this group so you live on campus you live together you study together and and you work in almost like 24 7 it's super intense and I was definitely you know uh probably the least smart person in both the courses I did which I have no problem saying because all the people have done a lot of these courses before and I didn't I was a chef and newly promoted CEO I didn't know what I was walking into but I took the most out of those courses that's for sure because I just learned more about the fact of how to look at business how to look at the future how to look at what did what being a disruptor means all that and also about internal focus on you how that then impacts other people and affects other people there was so much I learned from that just by being in that community and with those teachers they were fantastic courses and I think that's what Harvard puts them on for to teach all those values not just stuff you can learn from a book it's about the whole package of being a a good business person that capitalism can be good if you do it well there's nothing wrong with capitalism if you spread the love and you spread the you know the profit and so that was a really big education for me so so i think the big learning was i'm better out my comfort zone when i'm not out my comfort zone i'm probably not pushing myself enough i'm not reverting back to that focus my mind get up earlier get my list done make my plan and go attack and achieve well that's a very good point and probably a good place to finish i mean i think the message of getting outside of our comfort zones is a really good one and you've exemplified that in your life whether it's going to dangerous parts of south america or heading off to italy with a one-way ticket at the end of each of these conversations i always ask the same two questions which i'm going to ask you and the the first one um because here at reed we love mondays is what is it that gets you up on a monday morning stewart the problems from the week before probably but yeah no i'm i'm a morning person i've always been a morning person and i have no problem getting up It's the comfort zone thing again. It's that what am I not achieving enough of? What am I not doing enough to achieve better? That's probably the thing that gets me up always. I don't look to be comfortable or relaxed or I'm going to have a chill Monday. That probably never, ever enters my mind. I'm always like, what haven't I thought of this week? So you're actively seeking discomfort. And to do better. What can I do better? Yeah. And the last question, which is from my interview book, Why You? 101 interview questions you'll never fear again. That's a shameless plug, Stuart. It's where do you see yourself in five years' time? We'll be doing the same thing. We'll be still working in hospitality. We'll have more restaurants. We will grow and we will do more. We love working with teams. And as I've said, we're not phased by how difficult that looks like. That doesn't put me off. It just means I have to work smarter and I have to plan better with the team. So that never scares me. And I think you have to have an appetite for risk and almost danger to be able to get through that. So I see myself doing the same and developing hospitality people who really need that development. They deserve to work with people who are enthused with passion and love for what they do. and from grassroots level up from the young kids up to really senior people. We love working with all people within that structure and we love working with people. We love the guests. We love the complexity of people. We love the challenges. So, and we love food and drink. We love food and drink. So we love food and drink. And if anyone listening wants to enjoy some of Stuart's food and drink, number eight in Seven Oaks and the Bank House in Chisel House both have very good ratings. Thanks so much for coming in to talk to me. It's been a pleasure, James. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks, Stuart. Thank you, Stuart, for joining me on All About Business. I'm your host, James Reid, Chairman and CEO of Reid, a family-run recruitment and philanthropy company. If you'd like to find out more about Reid, No. 8 Sevenoaks, or Bankhouse Chislehurst, you'll find all the links in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and see you next time.