Home - How we decide who to work with

How we know who is 'good' and how we say no..

There is still a culture with hospitality of old school leadership, both back and front of house. Passive aggressive chefs, subtle sexism, ruling with fear, profit over people, wearing burnout as a badge of honour, we all know it still exists.

We are in a unique position to know what is really happening under the cloak of many of these seemingly cool and beautiful restaurants. We talk to people each day about their reason for leaving where they are. The only thing we have within our power to make any impact is to say no if a business with a bad reputation (culturally) requests our services and be sure to tell them why.

When building a picture over time, it is important for us to differentiate between a disgruntled ex-employee trying to bad mouth a business or when it is a genuinely bad place to work. We have had to create a rule for ourselves to follow as we have grown:

One person’s feedback/account is interesting but far from fact, a second person coming with the same issues is a trend (we do our due diligence to ensure these people aren’t just pals supporting each other) and three accounts or more becomes something to take note of. Especially when the same issues are highlighted and repeated over months or years, we know that problem is often systemic and more than often, comes from the top. By that we mean whether the owner is condoning bad behaviour within their leadership team, or they themselves are the problem.

We only work with owner operated businesses, that’s our thing, so that we can say we know the owner, we know what they are like, what they like and we know that you will still be working for the same person in years to come, (unlike corporates where your boss changes on the reg). Working with owners is wonderful, but is also heavy and intense day to day as it is more than a job to them.

When an owner with a bad rep reaches out to us to work together, we are upfront about the reputation they have and dependent on our level of certainty on the matter, we are specific. If the issues are seemingly repairable, we often agree to work together as soon as some of the internal work is underway. Or owner will return to us a few months or years later, ask to work together again once the issue has been resolved, or they are quite far down the path of sorting it. Everyone can learn from previous and everyone is worthy of further chances to do great things.

We have been responsible for many vast improvements to less than great businesses. We have often been the only reason the owner has any idea they even have a bad reputation. So many people come and go within their business without the feedback ever making it to them, blaming hospo in general for their high turnover of staff. We have been the reason many businesses have moved their hourly contracts from 50 to 48 or even 48 to 45. We have been part of the reason many leaders have been given coaching, why many business have decided to implement anonymous culture surveys and why exit interviews are now so often being held by an external resource.

We set out to only work with the really good ones. I am proud to say that we do, but also, with the the good ones who want to be really good.