00:00:00
Oliver Rodbard
Any fundamental change in the business is based on culture. Nobody needs a dessert. We may all want one, but we don't need it. Therefore, a customer is choosing to spend their hard earned cash with us, and we're one of, let's say, 50 % less visits to a restaurant that month, it needs to be special.
00:00:17
Conor Sheridan
One of the unique things about the brand and that I really like as like a operations nerd or an operating model nerd is vertical integration.
00:00:23
Oliver Rodbard
Nobody's born with a multi-site skill set. You learn it along the way.
00:00:32
Conor Sheridan
Welcome back to What's Cooking. I'm Conor Sheridan, founder and CEO of Nory, and this week we're diving into franchising, but not the sanitized version you see in marketing brochures. We're talking about the operational reality of scaling a franchise business when the relationship between franchise OR and franchisee has been strained. Franchising is meant to be a partnership model. The franchise or provides the brand, systems, and support. The franchisee provides capital, local knowledge, and operational execution.
When it works, it's powerful and you can scale rapidly without massive capital deployment, and franchisees benefit from proven systems and brand recognition. Average British families have dropped from seven restaurant visits per month to four. When you're operating on razor thin margins and your franchisees are worried about whether they can pay the bills, relationship breakdown isn't just uncomfortable, it's existential. Today's guest joined Cream's Cafe almost three years ago to specifically repair.
broken franchise relationship and rebuild thrust across nearly 100 sites and 60 franchisees. He's done it before in other markets and he's doing it again, this time while simultaneously implementing a complete tech transformation, launching a new direct delivery platform, and preparing for international expansion. This is about more than just fixing relationships. It's about understanding that in a franchise model, operational excellence and human connection are not separate priorities.
They're the same thing. Let's get into it.
00:02:10
Conor Sheridan
Oliver, welcome to What's Cooking. Great to have you here. So you're the chief operating officer of Creams, almost a hundred sites across the UK. incredible business growth in the last number of years, but you've had a pretty incredible career working for brands like Freshie, Soul Foods, Young Brands. how did you get to the role that you have now in Creams?
00:02:13
Oliver Rodbard
Good good to be here.
00:02:30
Oliver Rodbard
Like a lot of people in hospitality by accident, guess. So I kind of fell into retail after college whilst figuring out what to do. Fell in love with serving customers. Really enjoyed that sort of retail environment. Spent about a decade in high street retail in the UK. a pretty linear operation sort of upbringing, you know, part-time or full-time or assistant manager, store manager, up to area management.
Um, and then I, um, moved to Yum brand in 2007. Um, wasn't sure whether I wanted to be in hospitality food was a bit of a, you know, I like cooking at home, but you know, doing it for work, wasn't, wasn't too sure about it. Uh, but certainly Yum is a company with, know, their global scale, the opportunities from personal development, et cetera. That was the real pull as opposed to the product or, or the environment. And, know, 18 years later, I'm, I'm still in hospitality and couldn't see myself anywhere else. And I don't, you know, very fortunate.
time with YUM. They were great to work for nine jobs in 12 years, so plenty of variety. know, of above restaurant leadership roles in the UK, then central operations assistant process, then some roles in Europe around concept development and franchise support and management, and then over to Canada where I was running operations HR technology for the Peter Canada business. Then sort of the idea of selling pizza grew a little stale, excuse the pun.
Funted a change, enjoyed a Canadian brand called Freshies, a bit of healthy fast food, essentially. Did a couple of years with them, just implementing systems and process across Canada and the US. And then I went to the other side of the fence and I joined a franchise organization called Told Foods Group operating Starbucks, KFC, Burger King, Taco Bell in Canada, and some of the stores in the UK as well. And got to experience the life of, you know, the franchise side of things from the other side of the table, which I think probably given me a fairly uncommon.
perspective on what good franchising looks like. I've been the recipient as well as the giver if you like and then my wife who's been absolutely incredible through my career and allowed me to take these roles and move around the world said she was ready to move home and the deal was always when you're ready we go. So I started looking and came across Creams as a few ex-yum folks in the business as well. So some sort of familiar names and then the idea of the dessert sector.
00:04:49
Oliver Rodbard
how that's growing in the UK but also globally as well. You know the increase in people not drinking, looking for different types of places to hang out later at night. And you know who doesn't like a dessert right? It's good fun. So I moved back to the UK to take the creams roll just under three years ago now.
00:05:06
Conor Sheridan
Wow. So you've seen every hyperscaler that there is in the QSOR market and franchising. So that's very cool. so you've been busy in the last three years, to say the least. obviously working with the brand and growing it and preparing it for like the next stage of the business. One of the key projects you've undertaken was transforming this service model, which is something you're busy at this year. Yeah. could you talk to us a bit about what that looks like?
00:05:29
Oliver Rodbard
Well, I think this is off the back of some work we've been doing, bringing a new tech stack into the business. And as part of that, from a customer experience perspective, is the order and pay at table model. You see brands like Nando's executing that extremely well. And I think that what we've realized is we bring in the new tech stack into the restaurants. So that's a new repos system, customer ordering capabilities through an app or a website, and some back office stuff as well.
is that you actually have to completely revisit your customer model. We're not a functional brand. People don't come to Creams to sit there and have a 15 minute functional visits like what you might do at a QSR at lunchtime. So there needs to be a little bit of magic. There needs to be a little bit of fun. And actually the way we see the service model evolving is that if we can take away some of the functional work that our team in the restaurant is doing, like order taking.
and then give that time back to the delivery of the food, the theater at the table, the having fun with our customers, the human interaction, which is super important in our industry. It kind of comes together and gets us to the right place. So we're in the middle of trialing out, you know, different types of service models at the moment. And we've had a lot of fun in our Reading location recently with sort of the order and pair table model and then handing out games at the table to sort of get that human connection and people having fun while they're with us.
And then hopefully we're going sort of go into a wider test coming up soon and then launch that sort of autumn this year.
00:06:54
Conor Sheridan
I really like that, right? usually the complaint in in a service model is maybe it takes too long to take an order or to bail out. So if you can speed that part up whilst also retaining like the interactive element of of yeah, some joy and and and human touch, that's really nice. You mentioned you've tested a bit in the Reading location. Is that typically how you you test new things? You pick a you pick a site or or a cafe and and and roll it out and test the feedback from the team, from from guests to see what works, what doesn't work.
00:07:23
Oliver Rodbard
Yeah, so the leadership team across the board have been absolutely maniacal about making sure that anything goes into a restaurant and gets tested, whether that's consumer tested with panels first and then operationally tested in the restaurant. So it doesn't matter whether it's a product, doesn't matter whether it's a change in training, doesn't matter whether it's a piece of technology, it kind of goes through that process. Ultimately, it can look great in a boardroom and it can fail miserably on the front line. So that's why we sort of spend a little bit of time.
So really thinking that through. It's also super important from an engagement perspective as well, I've been in large franchise organizations where the brand knows best and we just implement, but actually the best execution comes when your team members and your franchise partners really believe in what's going on and why behind it.
00:08:06
Conor Sheridan
Yeah. And you can sell the results internally a bit if you have good good feedback, good from the guests and from the team, you can showcase that versus yeah, that's cool. So not just on the service model, you've been busy all across the board operationally. One of the places you first started was around the brand purpose and values and how that resonated with the teams, the franchisees and and the guests. Could you talk to us a bit about that initiative and what you were focusing on?
00:08:30
Oliver Rodbard
Yeah, sure. So this is kind of all built into our service model launch later in the year. And as we started talking about service, we realized that actually if we were going to elevate our service model and incorporate the technology part of it as well, a new fundamental change in the business is based on culture. It's got to support it. And actually that's based on values. So our CMO Simran did a phenomenal piece of work doing a ton of research around what was CRIMS been, who uses CRIMS today.
who stopped using creams, who has considered creams but not used it. And then how do we then bring that into a way that says creams 2.0, you know, in our next part of our growth journey evolved to meet today's needs rather than the needs that we were perhaps trying to solve for in 2008 when we were founded. So actually it's quite difficult to disconnect the technology, the service model, the values and culture piece because
You know, they glue together. So, you know, our brand purpose is very simple is to bring people together. And as an operator, I like that because it's super simple. It does what it says on the tin. But when you start threading that through everything you do, how do we bring our franchisees together? How do we bring our office team together? How do we bring our franchise partners and the office team together? How do we bring our customers together? It's a really nice thread that you can use in a ton of different ways. Send them lots of fun, some of quite serious, but to actually sort of
piece of glue that brings everything together and makes it work.
00:09:58
Conor Sheridan
Yeah, really nice. And that's quite binary, right? So if you're changing a way of working or an SOP or a menu item, a structure, a piece of technology, you can say pretty quickly whether it's bringing people together Yeah, I like that. It's very simple. Often people can do like align on say a set of values or or or purposes that are many many derivatives away from from reality. And it's hard for the teams to connect it much. You don't want it is to be on a wall and then people don't buy into it, right? Yeah. Very cool.
00:10:10
Oliver Rodbard
Yes.
00:10:27
Oliver Rodbard
Absolutely.
00:10:28
Conor Sheridan
So you started there and looked at the service model transformation. how much of that you mentioned is obviously for Creams two point which is the next stage of growth. how much of that is in response to maybe the some of the the current headwinds in in the UK market about rethinking the the brand, rethinking the operational position?
00:10:47
Oliver Rodbard
I think that what we see and what we hear from our customers probably more importantly is that with a squeeze on consumer spending, every single restaurant occasion of which there are now less because people can't afford to go out as often as they used to becomes more important. So where a good level of service was good enough in the past, it's no longer good enough. In particular, when you think about the product that we sell at Creme's, it's incomplicated. Nobody needs dessert.
We may all want one, but we don't need it. Therefore, when a customer's choosing to spend their hard earned cash with us, and we're one of, let's say, 50 % less visits to a restaurant that month, it needs to be special. And I think this is a challenge, not just for creams, but the whole sector. When people go out now, they want it to mean something. And I think that certainly in the casual dining or the full service dining environment,
The experience is as important as the food. So how you make people feel is what they'll remember about you. The food has to be good. We've got some great product, but if you don't match that with the great experience, and that's really driven our thinking around how do we change that experience to better in a changing world? we want people to feel great after they've been in, but from the other side of the table, we want our team members to have fun serving people. How do we make it easier for them? And if you think about sort of...
the guest experience will never be better than the team member experience. So if your team members aren't happy, they're not going to make your customers happy. So how do you make it easy for them to execute? How do you give them the tools, whether that's processes and systems or technology to make their lives a little bit easier so they can then make the customers feel great?
00:12:30
Conor Sheridan
That's really nice. it's refreshing to hear, right? That kind of dynamic approach to to hospitality. Oftentimes 'cause there's been a big change in consumer behaviour, patterns, people can double down in terms of what maybe worked well ten years ago and and just dig in the heels. You're doing that with a obviously great product and experience, but you're two Xing the experiential side of it, which is very cool. Looking at consumer behaviors and patterns, speaking of that, have you seen the profile of your consumer change or or the way that they
They engage with the brand change in the last few years? Yeah.
00:13:02
Oliver Rodbard
It's interesting question. I think fundamentally we, you know, we index really highly in young adults, young families, of children right up to sort of mid forties. And we have customers that sit outside of that range, but we index highly there. I think how younger people engage with brands has fundamentally changed in the last decade with the social media therefore being present on social and not just at a brand level.
What we've seen a real rise of is a sort of hyper local activity, which actually is driven by many of our franchise partners who some of them do an absolutely phenomenal job engaging with their customers, engaging with their community, being part of their community as well. And I think that that tells a different story. It's no longer a brand. There's a face and a name, a local operator that owns the business that's part of the community. So we've seen that sort of become really important now in terms of engaging with our customer base. I don't think we've necessarily seen a massive shift.
in the demographics that we serve but within there that with that squeeze on consumer spending we've certainly seen some pressure on on visits and therefore needing to work harder to help those customers come back more often whether that's through value or just a better experience they choose us versus somebody else within our competition set.
00:14:15
Conor Sheridan
Okay, nice. Very cool. So the business is franchise driven. So close to a hundred cafes, sixty franchisees. So there's a mix of independent multi site operators. maybe talk to us a bit about the franchising strategy and how you got to that mix.
00:14:30
Oliver Rodbard
Yeah, in terms of ownership model. So we've got everything from owner operators up to emerging multi-site operators. So our largest franchisee has six or seven stores. We have other franchisees that are sort of growing in that direction as well. And typically it's a brand for a long time. We've been primarily owner operated. And we still see a place for that within our operating model. In fact, we're quite proud of the fact that we could be the first franchise.
for somebody that's not got a ton of capital to invest, but has enough to come in, build a solid business, get a good enough return to either be able to get the leverage on that business, open a second restaurant to third restaurant. And I absolutely love seeing franchisees coming in with one store and then realizing that dream and actually growing a business. And many of our franchisees do it for, you know, they're business people, right? So they want to get a return on what they've invested and make a good margin, but they also do it for their families as well. And as I see some of these businesses growing,
and the franchisees mature themselves and their kids get a bit older and suddenly they're working in the business then. I think of one of our North London franchisees, his son's now operating a really good volume restaurant for us. And he loves the fact that he's since involved in the business and it's nice for us to be part of that growth journey, not only for him, but his family as well.
00:15:48
Conor Sheridan
Yeah, really nice. So you've seen franchising success on both sides of the table. Yeah. Obviously as a franchise or at scale with a number of brands, but as a franchisee with Soul Foods. So you have a deep understanding of what makes franchises successful. So at Kareem's be great to understand a bit more around the recruitment and onboarding process to set franchisees up for success. What does that look like?
00:16:08
Oliver Rodbard
Yeah, sure. So when I first joined the crews, I spent a significant chunk of my time in my first three months, not only doing my store training, but actually getting out and meeting franchisees and understanding why were the best franchisees in the system, the best franchisees, why were their sales growing stronger than the system average? And I think what I learned from that were some key attributes, which I've seen in other brands as well. And then we built those into our recruitment tools.
So these are personality profiles that we're looking for. They are skill sets that we're looking for as well. And then also a cultural fit. know, fundamentally franchising is a partnership, but it's not one or two year partnership. When people come and invest in the brand, you know, they sign a contract, there's five plus five years. And typically a lease that's running for 10 years as well. So you've got to get this right at the get go.
Because divorce is painful. And actually it's not good for anybody. It's not good for the brand and it's awful for the franchisee. So applying a little bit more rigor in our interview process, making sure that we've got stages that they go through where we assess for capability or the potential to be capable. And then cultural fit and fundamentally, are we going to like working together? And as importantly, are we the right organization for you? Here's how we support our franchisees. Here's what we do. Here's the playbook.
does that work for you? Because if it doesn't, then we're going to be the wrong fit for you. So it's very much a two-way process.
00:17:38
Conor Sheridan
I like that. Yeah, it's not like a hard sell, right? It's here's what we do and does this fit how you want to operate your business as well. Nice. you took talked a bit on capability and and and assessing for it. Any examples that you might be able to share?
00:17:50
Oliver Rodbard
we often look for operating capability and how they can demonstrate it in other walks of life. I think fairly uniquely in brands that grow with owner-operators, many owner-operators come in because they're entrepreneurial, that they've made some money in a different career, and they want to run a business alongside a role somewhere else. So that, you know, on paper might look like it doesn't transfer. So what we're actually looking for is
sort of transferable skills they've built elsewhere. And then we assess how much time are you going to need from our team to help turn you into a restaurant expert. And then we put that with, know, are you the right cultural fit for the organization? So when I think about capability, it's not just, can you run a restaurant? Because some of our applicants can't. But have they run retail before? Have they been in a consumer facing environment? How do they deal with conflict? What's their, you know,
What's their operational rigour like and the role they do? How organised are they? know, restaurant systems and franchise systems are essentially built on series of processes, which if you follow them pretty much religiously, they deliver the entire, you know, the intended outcome. And that intended outcome is a great customer experience and a growing business. So our interview process when we, when we're on board, and then when we're on board, people is very much tailored around to what's your background, experience do you have?
What are your areas of current capability? it's transferable skills, how do we help you transfer them? If you've never made a waffle or a crepe, or you're not sure about what food safety looks like, how do we make sure that we deep dive on that on the way in? So you have all those tools and that knowledge that you need. And also then there's a different profile of people you're recruiting. Some people come in as what we call an investor franchising. So they will come in, they will effectively perform an above restaurant leadership role and be almost the area manager.
and they'll drop in on the restaurant once, twice, three times a week, whatever that looks like. But they have a GM that's running the unit. Some will come in as the owner operator. So depending on your role and how you're structuring your business, you'll need a different type of onboarding. So you're an investor franchise, you will need to understand what good looks like and how to coach and where to ask the questions, where to find stuff. The owner operator is going to need to know how to run the shift at pace at 7 p.m. on a Friday night when it's, you you've got more customers coming in than you've got seats.
00:20:08
Conor Sheridan
Really cool. Really dynamic, right? And really it's really interesting. Like oftentimes you speak to operators and they'll look on a a background and go, Have they franchising experience? No. Okay. It's not a fit. But the fact that you're saying, Okay, have they shown or demonstrated capability of on an entrepreneurial aspect on a on a scaling or leadership? And you can mold that. So it's like how do you find the intangibles, maybe that you can then bring through the creams way and get successful? I mean that's very cool.
00:20:33
Oliver Rodbard
So if you come through our process and you're successful and you want to proceed, we then look at actually what does the onboarding look like. So if you've been running restaurants for 10 years and you've got some phenomenal experience, yes, you're going to need to go through and qualify on our food safety system. So we've done our due diligence, you've done your due diligence in case there's a problem in the future. But fundamentally, I'm not teaching you about holding temperatures or cleaning gaskets on a fridge or something like that.
So we spend enough time on that to make sure that we tick the boxes. But actually now we're talking about a service model and getting you up to speed on the brand quickly. If you've got none of that experience, we're going to extend your onboarding time. You're going to spend longer in a restaurant and we're going to take you through everything from A to Z. So by the time you come out of the onboarding period, it may have cost you a bit more money and it may have taken you a little bit longer, but you're now fully equipped to run a restaurant, which ultimately sets them up for success.
00:21:23
Conor Sheridan
Yeah, very nice. so you mentioned it's a long term partnership. and like any business partnership, sometimes people can can face challenges. So when you're looking at say the franchise network, what signals tell you that maybe a franchisee is facing challenges and how do you manage or support that as a as a franchise owner?
00:21:41
Oliver Rodbard
We joke little bit about this internally sometimes. We often say that, you the old adage of no news is good news. I don't think that's true in franchising. When it all goes quiet, it's either really, really good or really, really bad. So I think that comes back to, you listening? And if you're not hearing anything, why not? And you're asking the questions to understand, actually people are just really busy and getting on with it. You know, we get to August, we know that...
the volume of contact coming to us on the office side is going to drop because the restaurants are really busy. And we actually give our franchisees and the GMs the restaurants space. We don't roll stuff out at peak and just get on, serve customers, make money, know, deliver the best possible experience you can do. But when it goes really quiet, are you asking the right questions? And I think that's been a big learning for me because in some of the more established systems that I've worked in,
like KFC and Pete Tutton, what have you. They've been around 60, 70 years. They've got a very established proven model. It's quite a different dynamic when you're in a smaller franchise and you're growing, but you're not at the scale that a KFC is, or the maturity either. You're still effectively trying to get to scale and it's a different type of relationship and you've got to listen in a different way.
00:22:59
Conor Sheridan
Yeah, I really like that. I've never heard that before, right? And actually it kind of rings true. to give a similar piece of advice and like if you're on the investment side. Okay. So you do angel investing or invest in fr in restaurants or franchisees, they typically say when things go quiet, things are not always going great. Yeah. It's usually like the updates start to get less frequent and then they they start to drop off and then you don't hear it. And that's usually a sign that
People are worried to give yeah to to reach out when things are not going well because they have feel like they have to solve it themselves and and these kind of things. So that's interesting, right? If the signal starts to reduce, is maybe it maybe the right time to knock on the door and see how they're getting on. Yeah. Yeah, which is cool. Very cool. You talked on support systems. One of the unique things about the brand and that I really like as like a
operations nerd or an operating model nerd is vertical integration. So you've obviously gone up the supply chain and you produce a lot of your own creps, waffles, a lot of the the kind of ingredients for the food. That's not the most common thing. Often people will try to find maybe big big block suppliers or food service suppliers and and and use them. Why was this important to the business to do that?
00:24:09
Oliver Rodbard
I think it's one of the best decisions our founders made a number of years ago was to actually build a gelato manufacturing plant in East London. And the benefits that we see from that now are a broad range. One, we produce phenomenal gelato and it's made in the UK, which is really cool, right? It's nice to source stuff locally. It's nice to make it locally. You're part of the community, you're part of the economy. Yeah, we import some of the ingredients like the Madagascan vanilla doesn't come from Sheffield, right?
But it's made here. So I think there's a provenance piece, which is really good for the brand. There is a quality piece as well. So we now control the quality of the gelato and it's, know, something we're well, really well regarded for both internally and externally. And it's always great when, know, you hear it from your franchisees that, know, our gelato is absolutely brilliant. great, it makes us feel proud, but it makes them feel proud too, which is super important. And I think the third piece is economic. What we've been able to do because of this virtual integration is protect the franchisee P &L.
So over the last four years, food service in the UK has seen around about 59.5 % inflation. Massive. We've managed to deliver about 19 % inflation. now we're not saying that that makes creams a much easier brand to operate at the moment. Everybody in our sector is under the same pressure, whether it's regulatory, macroeconomic, whatever. It's not an easy place to be right now.
But I think we've been able to weather the storm quite a lot better than many other people because of we've been able to find ways to improve efficiency and in particular not take price. And actually what after we'd built that sort of expertise manufacturing gelato, it gave us the confidence and the capability to build another manufacturing plant near Dunstable, which is our dry mix. And that's where we make our waffle mix and our crepe mix, which is made from wheat.
that's been grown in the UK, Milden Northamptonshire, so another provenance thing, Sustainables, you get the whole sort of CSR component of it as well, which is super cool. But then we were able to manufacture some of these products knowing that we were about to see a massive price increase from the vendors that we were using and actually mitigate that almost in entirety on a number of products. So whilst maintaining quality and supply continuity and all that kind of stuff. So I think it gives us a little bit of a unique advantage.
00:26:32
Oliver Rodbard
out there and sets us up well for thinking about how do we manufacture other products in the future as well.
00:26:39
Conor Sheridan
Yeah, it's incredible, right? To be able to save from nineteen versus fifty odd percent. Completely different business model. You touched on the PL. and then we talked a little bit around the the kind of makeup of the different franchisees. So 60 odd from 100 cafes. So a mix of, as you mentioned, like investor to owner operator. Yeah. Do you see a difference in in the profiles between maybe the that kind of PL management capability or
00:26:42
Oliver Rodbard
That's it, right? Yes.
00:27:07
Oliver Rodbard
I mean, invariably, right? When you think about, I think about my career, right? I was a store manager at one point and I became an expert in managing one P &L and one team and everything. I could put my hands on and it was my environment to lead and manage. When I became an area manager, that skill set requirement was very different. Now I'm influencing remotely. Now I'm coaching rather than telling.
And so you evolve your leadership style and the way you're managing as your role grows in scope. I think it's exactly the same for our franchise partners. Nobody's born with a multi-site skill set. You'd learn it along the way. And if you grew up in a sort of corporate environment that I did, you're very lucky to have a ton of people coaching you. You might be pulled out of your restaurant for a day to go on a leadership development course. You might have a mentor in the business. You get all these things, which is fantastic in a corporate environment. In a franchise environment, that doesn't exist.
So actually I think that the role of me, the rest of my leadership team, and the field-based guys in our business, the franchise business managers, the trainers, et cetera, we're all there to provide a coaching role to our franchisees when it's needed. And that's not meant in a sort of patronizing way. Sometimes they know best and we learn from them. But there'll be other times when I'm sat with the franchisee that's gone from one store to six stores relatively quickly, the way he structures his business and the above store staffing.
routines, etc. is completely different from an owner operator. So actually, did he suddenly develop that skill set overnight by luck? No. How can we help that part of and we've got training platforms that are set up to help people on that growth journey as well. So we can start talking about successful teams when you get from up to store three, we know that the routines you need when you hit six to eight units changes again.
I know from other businesses I've worked in, when you start getting to 20 stores plus, they change again. When you get to 100 units, they change again. So, you know, we're not at a point yet where we've got franchises with 100 stores one day. Absolutely. But, but not today. But actually, how can we, how do we think about that journey up to that point and start working on it now, rather than getting to the point where somebody's got seven, eight, 10 stores and then falls over because they don't have the right system, processes and routines in place.
00:29:22
Conor Sheridan
Very cool. So you got the playbooks built to get there and people can see see the pathway. If I go to one one unit, I can get to eight. And you're kind of seeding the next generation of multi multi unit franchisees. Very cool. We talked a little bit around growth and you're saying creams two point you've some interesting plans for scaling this year, both from a a domestic and and and further afield. Can you talk a bit about what what you're looking to do there?
00:29:48
Oliver Rodbard
Yeah, sure. you know, the UK growth plan continues, you know, as we sort of got to the end of implementing our tech stack, which has taken a lot of resource. We've also shorn up our business development team. So we've got to make petitions and franchise sales now. We're about out in the market. We had a kind of a period of consolidation of just getting our systems right for being a 200 store business rather than a 100 store business. And I think we're in really healthy place now to sort of press that growth button.
So we're actively recruiting at the moment in the UK and the doors open to owner operators as well as multi-site businesses. We're also looking at international expansion. So we're deep into some conversations for two or three different markets at the moment. The ink hasn't dried on the paper yet, so it can't share today. But we're really excited about taking creams out of the UK and launching them to the markets and actually being able to take some of the fabulous product that we create here.
into other countries and build growing businesses there as well. there's a lot going on at the moment and exciting stuff though.
00:30:50
Conor Sheridan
Yeah, very exciting. And definitely the work that you've been doing over the last two or three years around setting up the foundations, the systems, the operating worker technology, the supply chain feels like it's gonna be able to accelerate that if you were to try to do that now at the same time.
00:31:04
Oliver Rodbard
Very much so. And I think one of the things I'm really excited about this year is that most people who've been into a cringe will know it's a sort of a casual dining slash cafe business. actually have a concept now that's more kiosk based that's designed to serve customers in 90 seconds. So when you think about holiday parks, ferries, leisure chains, travel hubs, all that sort of stuff, we're now in, you we're now having conversations with many other businesses around how can we bring sort of
a fast version of creams into their environments and give that, you know, the creams experience but at pace or portable. So I think there's going to be some really interesting movement in that space as well.
00:31:41
Conor Sheridan
Really nice. So you've got those different formats and different franchising partners. How do you think around site selection? So do you source centrally? Do franchisees source? What what makes a good site to you to give you confidence that it's gonna trade well?
00:31:55
Oliver Rodbard
We help our franchisees find sites. Some of them are very good at finding sites themselves and within their own networks will bring properties through to us. And we've had a number of our sites open through that way and that channel remains open. Where we have new franchisees coming into the brand or franchisees perhaps that are owner operators or have a couple of stores where they're very much they need to be in their business and it's difficult to go and get a day or two a week where you're going out and site finding. We have a partnership with an external acquisitions broker.
So we give them a profile of the site that we want, the city that we're looking in. We've got some software platforms that we use that help us understand consumer demographics, spending power, all that kind of stuff. And we know from our current estate, what a good cringe looks like and which are the locations that work in a certain way. And that allows Gemma who heads up our development teams again, say, right, we need to be in town A.
or Town B, I've just recruited a franchisee that can match up in these. We can either say, do you want to find it yourself or actually we'll go and engage with the broker and we'll find the site for you. Finding sites is, you know, it's the one thing you've got to get right. And unfortunately, what makes a site today might not be a great site in 10 years time as city centers shift. having some flexibility in the lease agreement, having the right break clauses.
having the right rent level and occupancy costs sorted out is super important to the business. And actually we find sometimes that using an acquisitions broker, all they do is find sites and negotiate with landlords. That's their reason for being. And with some of our franchises coming in, they may be phenomenal operators and business operators, but if we can give them a bit of help over here with the site acquisition and the lease negotiation, that sets them up for success in the future.
00:33:41
Conor Sheridan
Yeah, we've seen that over the last what six years. If you can have control over the op ex side, like the occupancy costs in in periods of challenge, it gives you a much better chance of success, right? So it's important to have the rigor there. So we'd be remiss if we didn't talk a bit more about technology, right? Yeah, sure. Given given the nature of the podcast. You've touched on obviously a big piece of work that you've been doing around service model, ordering pay, a pause change. You've also launched Creams Direct and still almost half a million.
in trade in ten weeks, which is pretty significant, pretty high adoption. Yeah. A double that, right? What drove that? What what was the decision behind doing that? Maybe talk to talk to us a bit about what it is and and and why you did it.
00:34:15
Oliver Rodbard
Almost double that now.
00:34:25
Oliver Rodbard
Yeah, sure. So it started off from a consumer perspective. You know, when we were looking at the service model in the restaurant, it was beginning to date. It would begin to get interpreted differently by different franchisees. Some believed it was a full service, you know, dining model. Some believed it was a QSR model. And I think the experience became inconsistent across the estate. And when we started talking about service, we started to say, what are the brands that we admire today?
doing for the customer. And, know, there's been a ton of movement over the last 10 or 15 years and sort of, the methodology, you know, the traditional wait and sit at your table and wait for somebody to come to you or go up to a counter has, you know, has changed beyond belief. But we've always been, our North Star has always been, how do we make sure that that human touch exists still? So when we were thinking about the service model, went...
back to basics said, okay, well, actually what we fundamentally need is a customer ordering app or platform. What does that look like? How does it work? Then we need to make sure that that integrates with our repos. And what we realized was that the partner we were working with before, perhaps we'd outgrown them. So we brought in a new repos, we brought in an external white label app, and then they also do loyalty for us as well. So.
I think you can look around and see a ton of good examples of other brands that have done this really, really well and, and materially improve the business. Now we've got the e-polls and the app in, we're starting to see significant commercial benefit for our franchisees. When we switched loyalty on in a couple of months, there's significant benefit for our consumers. And then when we pair that with the service model in the future. So I think what this is about having the right foundations in place and then we can involve that experience as we move forward.
00:36:12
Conor Sheridan
Really nice, yeah. Why was it important to own the guest spacing technology elements? Like you mentioned a white label app. Okay.
00:36:18
Oliver Rodbard
we wanted consistency. And, you know, we own two restaurants. So we are 98 % franchised, essentially. And in that type of setup, you effectively give up margin by franchising the restaurant. So we are quite lean above restaurant team. If we owned our entire business, we would need a bigger team to service it. So what we are very good at doing, I think, is looking at where do we have the expertise?
internally or why do we want to hold the expertise internally or why do we actually outsource that? So were we going to build an app ourselves? Well, I'm an AI's transformer at the moment. We probably could do, but actually what we wanted to do is make sure that we had a proven app with a proven vendor that was small enough to grow with us, but big enough to have done it with other brands already. So we were looking for that sweet spot. So we, we, we found that and now we sort of own.
that customer experience rather than leaving it open to interpretation at restaurant level. And that's where you get the consistency.
00:37:18
Conor Sheridan
Brand. Yeah, very sharp. Very cool. So we're going to move on to the quick turn. So this is a rapid fire okay section of the podcast. rapid fire means different things to different folks. So we've had 20-minute answers and we've had 60-second answers and 10-second answers. So we'll leave it up to interpretation. What's one thing every franchiser gets wrong about franchise relationships?
00:37:39
Oliver Rodbard
They think that the contract governs the relationship and it doesn't trust us.
00:37:44
Conor Sheridan
Nice, I like that. If you could change one thing about how franchise agreements are structured, what would it be?
00:37:49
Oliver Rodbard
One of the challenges I've had from the franchise or side is flexibility. So. Contracts are there to protect both parties, but in particular, protect the brand as well. in doing that, there's a, element of rigidity within, within the contractual framework. And when you think about the amount of change that we've seen in the hospitality industry in the last six years, I, it's just, it's phenomenal. And it's not stopping the pace of change is getting faster.
Sometimes your contracts don't give you the freedom you need to evolve the brand as your consumer experience need to evolve, your tech platform need to evolve. Your contract holds you back in terms of pace sometimes. And I this is a challenge that a lot of franchisers face. We know this is what we need to do for the customer, but because of the way our contract is structured, it either becomes a battle with the relationship or commercially with the franchisees when actually what you're trying to do
ideally is have enough flexibility for the franchise community and the franchise or to come together and say we have a burning platform or a consumer problem we need to solve together how do we do it and I don't think perhaps some contracts give enough flexibility with that.
00:38:59
Conor Sheridan
Yeah, I like that. That's very nice. What's one operational metric franchisees should track, but they often don't? Okay.
00:39:05
Oliver Rodbard
transactions.
Transactions raw volume and like for like and by day part specifically. I think it's very easy to become obsessed with sales and there's nothing wrong with being obsessed with sales, but the lifeblood of any organization is the number of customers it has.
00:39:21
Conor Sheridan
It could set the price, right? And everything else that can
00:39:23
Oliver Rodbard
You can figure out your average ticket and where you take price or don't take price. But if you don't have a strong transactional pipeline and you're not growing transactions, that's where the obsession should be.
00:39:34
Conor Sheridan
Mm-hmm. So aggregator delivery platforms, a necessary evil or or fundamentally broken for the industry? Both. Both. Okay, fair.
00:39:44
Oliver Rodbard
I think it's, they give you reach and presence and they give consumers convenience. And these are all good things. The customer pays a premium for convenience, which many customers are obviously happy to do because there's millions of pounds of sales going through aggregated platforms every year in the UK. The restaurant operators have a customer on a razor thin margin. And if they lose too many of their dining or their own channel.
transactions to the aggregators. It has a materially negative impact on the profitability of the location. And you effectively end up getting to a place where you rent customers, which is why we've gone down the route of actually setting up Creams Direct, which we'll start advertising in a few weeks time. We need to go through implementation first and get everything working. But ultimately, what we need to do is accept that aggregators are here to stay, and there are some customers that come through to your brand.
irrespective of who you are on an aggregator platform, do you effectively rent? They've come to you today because they fancy chicken, they fancy a dessert, they fancy a burger, they fancy a pizza, whatever it is. And they may have been driven to you by a promotion. Many, many are. There's a real value sort of piece with consumers. They'll surf around. Generally two aggregators. It's sort of, most people have two apps on their phones for aggregators. Where we can get our customers that are on the aggregators, because that was the only way to get delivery back into our ecosystem.
We can now reward the consumer with lower pricing because restaurants inflate menu pricing to cover the aggregator commissions. The only way to make the transaction break even or make a small amount of margin. And we can actually give that margin back to the franchise operators, which makes their business healthier and more sustainable. So it's of a bit of a win for the consumer, win for the franchisee, which is why you'll see us talking a lot about Cranes Direct in the coming months.
but we accept that we're not going to move 100 % of delivery traffic from aggregators into the creams ecosystem.
00:41:41
Conor Sheridan
Yeah, it's a nice bet. be interested to see how it goes. Yeah, that'd be great. And last one, what's one common belief around franchising that you disagree with?
00:41:51
Oliver Rodbard
that tighter control equals a better franchise. And what I mean by that is that top-down control, you can do that and it's possible and some chains do quite a good job at it. But actually I think fundamentally what makes a great franchise is capability. If you can build better capability at the restaurant level and with your franchise partners, they're going to execute the brand brilliantly.
00:42:13
Conor Sheridan
No better way to end, right? That's awesome. Well, Oliver, thanks so much for joining us. Excited to see the the route 200 stores and all the different technology implementations you're doing. So thanks so much for joining us. Pleasure. Thanks. A few things really stood out from that conversation with Oliver. First, the economics of franchise relationships matter more than people admit. And when you dig into why franchise relationships break down, it's often because the economic model is misaligned. The franchise or
00:42:23
Oliver Rodbard
Yeah.
00:42:41
Conor Sheridan
Is extracting value through royalties and supply chain markup while the franchisee is bearing all of the operational risk and watching their margins get squeezed. What's interesting about the Creams model is the manufacturing component. By controlling gelato mix and production, they can actually support franchise margins rather than erode them. That's a fundamentally different relationship. A partnership over extraction. And in the environment where UK families have gone from seven restaurant visits a month to four.
And franchisees are genuinely worried about paying their bills, that alignment matters. Second, tech transformation. Oliver's rolling out a completely new tech stack, a new pause, new customer app, direct delivery platform, specifically to help franchisees take back margin from aggregators. Delivery commissions are 20 to 30 percent, and these are unsustainable and already thin margins. By building creams direct.
They're giving franchisees a way to compete on price while protecting profitability. Almost £1 million through the new app suggests there's real customer appetite for it. But here's the thing that doesn't get talked about enough. Implementing new technology across a franchise network is vastly more complex than doing it in a company owned operation. You're asking independent business owners to change their operations, thrust your platform, potentially disrupt their revenue in the short term for.
Promise of long-term benefits. That only works if the relationship is solid. This is why Oliver has spent the last 18 months rebuilding trust before pushing tech transformation. Third, the service model relaunch. Oliver made a point that resonated in that you just can't train people to do service. You have to give them a why built on culture and brand purpose. Bringing people together isn't marketing fluff at creams.
Is the operational framework for how team members show up with customers. The tech creates the space for human connection by removing low-value tasks. Team members spend less time taking orders and more time making experiences special. And finally, franchisee sophistication. Oliver's strategy is to move forward towards fewer, larger, and more sophisticated franchisees over time. That's the right long-term play for scale, but the transition is delicate.
00:45:02
Conor Sheridan
You can't just tell a single site owner operator they're not sophisticated enough. You have to provide the tools, the systems, and the support to develop their capability and respect when they choose to stay small. If you're operating a franchise business or thinking about franchising your concept, the takeaway here is clear. Relationship is everything. Get the economics right, align interests, invest in franchisee capability, use technology to create competitive advantages.
Not just operational efficiency. And when things get tough, and they will, show up as a partner, not a landlord collecting rent. Thanks for listening. If you found this useful, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you've got thoughts, questions, or strong opinions about franchise models, send them my way. See ya next time.
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