Tom James is Managing Director at Bill’s Restaurants, where he has led the brand to record sales and a 100% increase in EBITDA. With over 30 years in hospitality, Tom has held leadership roles at Jamie’s Italian, Coppa Club, and Harbour Hotels, known for his operational excellence and people-first approach.
Conor Sheridan is the founder and CEO of Nory, an AI-powered restaurant management system alongside being the co-founder of Mad Egg. Conor blends hands-on restaurant experience with a passion for tech-driven efficiency and profitability in hospitality.
Enjoyed the episode? Read our blog for more stories and insights from hospitality leaders.
Curious about how Nory helps brands run smarter, more profitable operations?
Speak to our team to learn more.
Hey, everyone. Connor here, founder and CEO of Nori. And welcome to what's Cooking. In this podcast. We're going to meet guests from the hospitality industry who are pivoting, moving and shaking to stay ahead of the trends and make sure their businesses are not just surviving, but thriving. I recently caught up with Tom James, the MD of Bills. Tom started his career attending Barra and has grown all the way to leading one of the nation's biggest brands and Bills. Tom is a seasoned operator and you get a huge amount of insights and value from our conversation. What metrics he looks at, what's important to the business, how focused they are on the guest experience, how to keep your team aligned. Tom covers all this and more, and I personally got a huge amount of value. I know you will too. Tom, hi.
Welcome to what's Cooking.
Thanks very much.
It's great to have you.
No worries.
Lovely to be here just to start us off, I suppose. How are things going this year for Bills and for you and how have you found the. The environment?
I mean, look, we're coming off the back of two years of fantastic trading, so it's always easier when you've got the wind in your sails. There's no question this year is more challenging. Really proud of the fact that we're staying ahead from a like flight basis and we're still in cover growth or something critical, but you have to work so much harder, you know, and our investment in digital marketing and getting the message out there and giving people a reason to come has never been more important.
100%. Consumer preferences have never changed as quickly or continue to change as much. Are you seeing that in builds as well?
Yeah, totally. I mean, it's the most dynamic. We speak about it a lot. It's the most dynamic the market's ever been, but not just on a single front. It's not like guest behavior is changing. You know, the evolution and introduction of new technologies is almost constant. I think I'm on top of it. And then you speak to someone and find out what they're doing, or you speak to one of the tech providers and you realize you're out of date already within sort of four weeks. And so I think it's. It's certainly demanding of leaders and businesses in the. In the current environment. The flip side of that is also it's never been more exciting in terms of the opportunities out there and what you can do and how much you. You can push.
You'd get bored otherwise, right?
Exactly, exactly.
When were speaking before, you mentioned that change Management is one of the top skills or top three skills you need to have as a hospitality leader. How do you see that? And could you give us an example of a big change you've had to undergo in Bills recently?
I think it's, I mean it's critical in the modern world in terms of anyone who's, if you're standing still, you're going backwards in the current environment. And I apologize for the amount of cliches I'll probably drop in the next half an hour or so. But I think the biggest challenge was actually when I first started that nd role is we did a list of everything we wanted to change and everything where we felt were behind the market. And after two days it was supposed to be a four hour meeting, it ended up lasting two days. We had a list of 187 things that we wanted to implement over 12 months. And you know, bills has been around for 20 years. It's a legacy brand. A lot of the team been there for 10, 15 years.
So trying to drive that change was we knew was going to be the challenge and really tough. And, and I think the winning formula, if you like, was giving a really simple message to the teams that everyone could understand that they bought into. I think often with change the problem is you explain the action or the how without really getting into detail of the why. And so we came up with our goal, if you like, of everyone leaves happy. And that was instantly something that people could understand. So we are doing all this change and it's going to be incredibly demanding of your time and your mental capacity and you're gonna have to do things differently. Cause operators don't like change. Normally good operators are metronomic in their approach to a shift a day, you know, cooking on the line.
And we were gonna shake that up. But I think when people bought into the reason why, and you said this is all for the benefit of either you and your team or the guest and that's why we're doing it and explain that kind of gave us license to push that change. And it was bloody tough. But were changing everything from the visual identity to the booking process to the guest journey. And it was massive, but it was all needed. And the really nice thing, I think when you give people a reason for change and they sort of buy into it and they fight for it, when the results started coming through, you kind of knew were onto something because they saw change as a positive rather than as a negative.
Super interesting. We Always talk about focus internally in my own restaurants as well. Every quarter you have a laundry list of things you need to better at and it's like, how do you narrow that down into. From 187 to the top one or two things that'll really make a difference? Did you. You talked about getting people on side as being huge, get behind the why to. To remove resistance. How did you narrow down into what was really going to be most important to the business?
I think just a really clear priorities list in terms of what we did was present the whole year and what were doing when and making sure that it was deliverable and it wasn't going to stretch or put sort of too much pressure. I think that's the real challenge now is, you know, you can fight on 48 different fronts, but so much science to go, really. People can only focus one thing or two things. And so how do you prioritize what's important? How do you make sure that it gets delivered? How do you loop back round to make sure that it's, you know, it's actually delivered the result you want and then embed it into the culture so you don't need to keep going back and revisiting it and it's just another task.
And so were really transparent, sort of said, look, these are the actions. And it wasn't 187 actions that all impacted sites. You know, there was probably of those 40, 50 affected sites, but it was having that clear, what's the goal? How do we make it digestible and then presenting it to the whole team to go over the 12 months. And we now do that every year. We met in Birmingham on February and said, this year, these are the goals, these are the milestones, this is why we're doing it. And that's really. It's been really nice to see people who. Quite traditional operators to go, yeah, I'm on board with that and let's see what happens.
It's a big thing for them to see results, though, too right. Tracking in the right direction.
Yeah, I don't think if we hadn't got the results, I think there'd have been a few more questions asked and change would have been more difficult. And it was. Some of that was a real risk. We changed. The bonus scheme was all about guest metrics, which there were some questions asked. You can imagine a grizzly FD saying, well, hang on a minute, you know, does this mean they're not going to be focused on the finances? But it was really going back to the basics of a. What made Bill successful, But go back thousands of years. Why hospitality exists. You know, we're in the business of making people happy and making sure they have a good time.
And throughout my whole career, I have probably never seen a business where it's a great team making sure guests are happy and they have a serious problem with their P and L. It's sort of, you know, my first job as a GM. I'm not sure I really understood P Ls, but I did understand service and teams and how to make sure it's set up and then the numbers take care of themselves. The caveat is a very clever financial team behind the scenes who are actually doing a lot of the controls and hard work to give license for that. And that was a big part of the strategy.
It's very cool. So some great successes, right? Like, for, like, performance is strong. It's obviously a testament to the relentless focus on the guest experience. And that gets the team rallied behind a really compelling why? I think giving a great experience and want to be a real popular brand is a much more compelling why than just profitability.
Totally. No one joins. Joins hospitality to make profit. They join because they want to have a fun job and they want to make people happy. And it's. It's so rewarding. You know, as a waiter, you can influence 200 people a day and get, you know, if you love praise, which I think a lot of people in hospitality do, I can't think of another job where you can genuinely have 100 people a day saying, thank you, that was amazing. I really enjoyed myself and gives you a buzz. And that was the reason I joined it. I fell in love with it and dropped out of uni and said, no, this is what I want to do. And I'm not sure there's as much focus on that now for the teams.
You know, one of the things that's always upset me with the industry is the experience that I had and what converted me, I'm not sure exists also now. There are reasons for that, obviously the huge cost implications compared to 1995, 96, when I started working in a bar. But. But the fundamentals have got to stay the same. You've got to realize. And the reason why people go to restaurants is for great service and to have an experience. So if you lose focus on that, and there are so many examples over the last 15, 20 years where brands under cost pressure of, you know, diminish the guest experience and diminish the product and you can see where that ends.
Yeah. 100% slippery slope, right?
Yeah, it is. It's a death bar.
So you've had some really successful execution. So kudos for that this year. You look back at any. You've run a couple of evolutions and format changes in the last three years. Anything you look back and go, we could have done that better or any mistakes.
Yeah. I think when were looking at a different service style, you know, there's the sort of mechanical side of looking at how we can introduce tech and how would that impact the guest journey. And you know, when we did the cafe bars originally, we sort of said, listen, we're going to zone the areas, some of the restaurants will be just order at table order through the kiosk. And I was so passionate to make that work because you saw it working really well in other businesses and it was a heck of a. Heck of a saving from a labor perspective, rather. And I sort of camped out in Newbury for four weeks and that was a real lesson for me for just watching the guest. And what was really clear is that's not what the Bill's guests wanted.
And as I said earlier, when you're in the business of making people happy, it was kind of for four weeks. Listen, this isn't what the Bill's guests wanted. What actually was then a sweet spot which still had savings and benefits for everyone was the hybrid of that. So there would still be an option of table service, but if you were in a rush, and that's really interesting with the current market, is that people, if you are going into bills for, you've got a meeting in half an hour, you probably will want to use and pay and use the QR code. Could because you want to be in charge of the time and the speed.
Yet if you're going in with your family at the weekend, you want the full service experience because you've got more time and it's really interesting the current market now, how you need to adapt to the guests. And I think the lesson for me there was don't go quicker than your guest. You know, a guest will want that experience in some other brands, but in builds they didn't. They wanted the interaction which makes sense. And I'm glad I learned that lesson early.
Went through the exact same experience in Matic casual dining format. Rolled out QR codes, same reason, speed of service, obviously, impact to efficiency. And rolled it back and then went to the hybrid approach. I think, like, guess is right.
Right.
And you can see that in how they speak with their feet and they speak with the wallet.
Yeah.
So you can see the impact of.
That 100% and I think having that data and I mean also you know from when you do this change and it's a big part that we encourage for all the senior leaders is watch it like be in there. Like we implement it in Newbury and there was a lot of diary management from my point of view but I wanted to be there for three or four weeks because it has huge implications if it had gone a certain way. We roll it out for the whole group. Actually we have rolled out the hybrid and it was still, it was an amazing sweet swap. 60% of guests are paying at table, 30% of guests are using the order facility but they're using it to order extra drinks or sides.
And so it was amazing to actually see it and look at the data coming through and say for our brand this is the best use and turn a negative into a positive.
It's kind of two pieces to that. A lot of that front facing technology has been driven by changing consumer preferences. So you've say the biggest share of the wallet is Gen Z right now for a lot of dining. They're in their phones every day. Obviously it's a staple of life. How do you see that changing the rest of the business outside of situations like that?
I mean it's only going to grow and I think that's what was really good about doing that whole piece of work is you know, if you look at, it's lazy to say and I haven't got the numbers in front of me but the people who were using the order at table were Gen Z and the people who weren't using it were the older generations. However, that percentage is just going to go up. So we're sort of, we're ready now and as the market moves and Gen Z become more and more of our dining percentage and the next generation coming through. Obviously with Gen Alpha coming through then we're ready because you've got the infrastructure there as the market shifts.
I find it interesting that you piloted it in one site. We actually did two. Two. And instead of rolling it back you found something that worked for you. Is that, is that consistent with how you approach change in the company? It's seeded somewhere. See how it reacts and then look to deploy it.
Yeah, totally. I think one of the things, you know, we've got 47 sites and two and a half thousand members of staff. You can't make quick anecdotal gut decisions anymore. And the starting point might be from that same level of passion or I think this is right. But putting it through a rigorous testing process, seeing how your guest reacts, your team reacts and then just being obsessed with the data and the insights because you learn a lessons. And I think the market's changed ridiculously from 10 years ago. What worked 10 years ago might not work now.
And so this whole testing, from testing drinks, testing dishes to introduction to new technology, we always do this depending on what the size of the project is, two to five site trial and then scale it up so it'll be a two site trial and then if that's been positive, you scale up to five sites and then it can go to group rollout because it has huge implications and you can't on a group level, you know, it's much more difficult to roll back on a mistake once you've done that. And just the investment it takes. So that testing is. We're lucky. We've got an amazing head of new projects and innovation, Sasha, who feels that pain of doing all the testing. But it's great because the other thing that happens is, you know, talking about change management is where it works.
Those sites that you've tried in, they end up becoming the ambassadors. So, you know, hearing if I was a general manager and you hear some middle aged MD saying this is the future and this is what we're going to do, you might roll your eyes. Whereas hearing one of your peers say, ashley, we had it and it was amazing. The team loved it. There's so much more invested and so it kind of has a double benefit.
Yeah, it's really nice because back to alignment on buying into the why if you have internal champions who can almost sell it for you inside the organization, 100%, how do you broadcast the results? Are you doing like we, we do it.
Tom James
So we do a big thing on Monday called the Monday memo, which is a lot of. And that's interesting how that's changed over the years. You know, two years ago it was a newsletter. Three years now it's all nearly short form videos and you can get it through your phone on WhatsApp. So all the staff get it and you can just click on the various boxes and we always update the teams through the Monday memo and that works really well.
That's funny, right? Because from the bulletin board to the E newsletter to the email to the short form video.
Yeah, and totally. But the engagement levels, I mean the minute we sort of switch to short form videos and you see that we obviously get all the data for saying how many times it's been open. You know, 10% of people will open the health and safety report but you put a short form video on it and you suddenly views are up to 70, 80, 90% of the teams are looking at it. So it's definitely the direction of travel.
Conor Sheridan
Seem very tech forward as an organization. Has that always been part of the culture?
No, I don't. I think were well behind the curve three, four years ago. I think there was a desire within the business, but who. I think Bill's had a tough exit from COVID as everyone did from there and then it sort of, it just didn't progress its technology. A lot of things let forward within sort of four or five years from COVID onwards. And so were definitely behind the curve. I think it's something I'm passionate about, probably out of laziness. I think I always have in the back of my head there must be a better way of doing this from whatever. I mean I've got a whole shed full of ridiculous tools and gadgets that made my life easier.
And that's actually the joy of technology now is that the starting point for us is always that question of is there a better way of doing this? Who's doing it well, seeing what they do, speaking to the tech provider and then seeing does it fit with our brand? Because that's the other key thing is as I learned from doing the sort of change in service style, everything's got to go through a brand filter. One of the reasons why people come to your brand is they love that interaction with friendly, kind, fun staff. You take that out, it's probably not the right piece of tech for you. However, if this is making the team's life easier so they can spend more time with the guests and spend more time on the floor, then that is right for us and we'll do that.
So I, I think it's always. You've got to have that in the back of your head. I think. I think across the leadership team is who does it well and is there a better way of doing this? And then it's the discipline which is the problem now is there's so much. I mean you can be like a kid in the toy shop with all the sort of great products and tech companies got really good at selling. Sales teams are fantastic as well. So it's just working out. I think prioritizing what you need for your business, what's going to have the most impact and what's going to Build your brand and then building that and meeting the right people.
Yeah, it's definitely what's the most important thing for the business versus what would be a nice thing that could be a distraction. Right. Because you could turn around tomorrow and have 15 new technology products in your business that look really cool. And kind of leads me to. My next question would be, has there been anything that you thought this is going to be a game changer and you deployed it and it just didn't work for the business?
No, I don't think there's been anything that hasn't worked. I think there's been some pieces of technology where you've introduced it and actually you've learned the lesson. It was kind of a single lesson rule in terms of where you could deploy people in shorter shifts and benefit from having the right people on at the peak times. But you then sort of start learning. Actually this technology has existed to fix a problem. Why don't we fix the problem and to go from there? I think that's happened a few times. I think the other thing is, what we're quite good at actually is not jumping on hospitality. Used to have a problem.
I don't think it's as bad now where it would have a problem and then it would go and seek the tech solution and it would probably only use 10% of that tech solution because you'd be like, brilliant, we fixed the problem with communications or deployment or whatever, but not use the whole package suite. And, and as time's gone on, you then look at some of the tech stacks, especially in casual dining, and you know, they've got 26, 30 products that all do one thing. That's a very relevant thing. What you're seeing now in the marketplace is a lot of good tech companies actually do much more.
And I think the underutilization of products is actually one of the big problems with tech in hospitality, in terms of, you know, the products are now constantly evolving, the good ones, and it's making sure that you have a kit, you're reviewing your tech stack, you're looking at what your business needs and then you're speaking to your tech providers to see what they can do.
Is that underutilization from the tech provider side? Do you feel like it's not been implemented correctly or is it from the business side that it's not clear what a company can do?
I think it's down to, often down to the relationship between the tech provider and the business in terms of. I don't think necessarily weren't very good at speaking to tech providers and saying these are all our challenges, you know, almost being open book and we're using it for this and that's really good. Who uses your product the best and why do you say that? And that's really interesting question because you'll suddenly get three things where someone will say, oh well actually we work with this brand and they do this and they've had a massive sales uplift and you're sort of, they're going, oh well thanks for telling us to go. But that happens a lot actually. I think the other thing is, is having someone who understands technology.
I've got to watch what I say in terms of being rude about sort of IT managers. But where we've hit a sweet spot is having someone leading certainly the new tech and innovation who understands operations to actually understand the business needs and the site needs. So you're seeing far more clearly the benefit of the deployment of the technology and that's cool. But again, it's all down to relationships. It's all down to having the right relationship with it, with a tech partner and working to fulfill your businesses or your brand's ambitions, dreams, goals, whatever you want to call it.
It goes back to alignment, right?
100%.
You touched on something there. Deployment of labor and post Covid's obviously been a challenging period for anyone in casual dining, full service dining. From a labor productivity or deployment point of view, how do you balance? Needing to obviously face that with. You have a huge focus on guest experience and obviously employee experience it sounds like. So yeah, I'd be interested to know how you balance that.
It's a really tough one because you know, and it was a. There's a big decision but our budget time for obviously 2025 is back in October of last year and you know, it's the same time it was announced obviously about national minimum wage and the NFC threshold. So, so you were there going, okay, this is going to be a big impact for us. We actually took a lot of that cost and took a bit of a hit on the labour percentage because you know, we've had two and a half years now of success, sales growth and great guest metrics that weren't prepared to sacrifice. The fundamental reasons for the success was a great guest experience.
Then there's efficiencies and when we looked at where we can deploy better and actually a lot of it for us is in accuracy of forecasting which was the major challenge. It was, you know, we ran a tight ship but the Minor variables. You know, if you get your forecast out by 4 or 500 quid and that is at a particular pinch point in the day, that has a huge impact on, you know, if you're overstaffed then your numbers look dreadful. At the end of the day, if you're understaffed, that's just stress for the team and a dreadful guest experience. So a lot of focus on forecast accuracy and then it's I think really clever deployment and that's our next big project over the next 18 months is things have come on so far in terms of deployment.
Having the link between team sentiment and guest experience and sales, in terms of being able to know the impact of a happy team on a shift and you can do that now when they clock in and clock out, they sort of say have they had a good shift or have they not had a good shift? The link between a happy team and a profitable site is clear for all to see. But also skill based deployment. You know, I might be a talker, so I might be great on a Sunday and Monday nights where I've got time with the guests and do that. But actually on a Saturday night I'm not turning the tables, I'm gas bagging, whereas you might be a machine.
And actually we should be putting Connor on the front section on a Saturday because you're going to generate, I mean it's huge numbers. With the right person you could generate an extra 600 quid over me, who's a bit forgetful, doesn't offer second drinks and talks for two hours about people's cats. And that's huge in terms of seeing those because you're getting the data and you're getting the insights now to know actually the sweet spot of who should be where, doing what at what time.
That's really cool. It's always been a challenge historically with a closed loop on deployment. Right. Just feedback from. Was it too slacked, was it stressful? Was the guests feel. Oftentimes reviews can be lagged scores and to be really powerful to get your team the guest perception, the operational metrics, put them all together and there's too.
Much, I mean there's so many threads is where I get overexcited with this now in terms of, you know, it's almost self generating performance reviews for the teams as well. And then you get into really exciting stuff like. Or we could do a league table to go actually who can, you know, whether it's a sales incentive, who you could do a waiter of the month but based on data and Based on fact, not based on anecdote or whether I'm the manager and you're my friend. So I'm always like, Connor's the best waiter we've got. Is amazing smasher. But with nothing more than that sentiment. So you win three awards and then the rest of the team's upset. So being able to have all those insights and data now, and that's where I think technology is going to have a huge impact on productivity.
So we sort of hold. Held our nerve and, you know, we've tweaked our models slightly, but it's. We never wanted to do a sort of big, deep, hard cut at this stage of the business where we've had so much success based on the guest experience.
Makes sense, right? I think, as you said, arena for delivering awesome experiences. And you have to stick to your guns.
Yeah. You know, and it's the point I made earlier. We've seen what happens when you do the other way and it's there. There are far more case studies of people who've cut costs, diminished the product, diminished the guest experience and trash the brand than there is the adverse you seem.
You have a really deep operational background. Obviously you've come up from, like, as you mentioned, tending bar to running bills. How do you like. Do you see yourself as an operational leader? Do you see yourself as product led, customer led? Do you think it's a mix of everything? How would you define, like your. Your approach to leadership?
Always an operator. I think one of the challenges, you know, if you take a single restaurant, it's relatively simple. There's a really hot place where there's a chef who creates great food. There's a front of house that's well designed where you've got someone who makes sure the guests are happy and the teams are doing what they should do. And it's not supposed to sound patronizing, but it's so easy to forget that the fundamentals are quite simple and they're based around operations. It is operations. The caveat is, I think I've always understood brand in terms of my job as an operator is to deliver the brand to the guest in the best way possible.
And I represent the brand as an operator and I've worked for some great brands and some great independents, and the understanding of the power brand, the brand is the umbrella under which we all deliver and operate and do that. And the job of an operator is to transition that. If you take someone like Bill's, it's quite easy because the brand work, if you like, it's been done for you through Bill. You know, Bill's still in the business today. He totally represents the brand and is a kind, generous, lovely man with an eclectic sort of taste and will do everything he can to make sure people are happy. So alongside, actually, and that's been what's really interesting in sort of the last two and a half years is our brand director, C.J. We needed to become more relevant and reinvigorate the brand.
So Bill and CJ worked so closely together with sort of CJ picking bills, you know, what's the ethos, what made bills work, what made Bill special and really put that together. And then that went to Richard Caring, who's very excited, knowing that the business needed to evolve and go from there. And so that kind of work, which we did right at the beginning on the brand was the umbrella. And then my sort of operator mode kicks in, which is then the practical, logical steps to transition that brand vision to the guests. And that's, that won't ever go away. It really upsets my wife apparently, that you just, you, you are operator mode on everything, which is what are the logical steps to get from our house to the airport on time? Apparently. It's really frustrating to live with.
Can you enjoy a meal in a restaurant without looking at the operational flow and their awareness?
Genuinely? Not ever. And it's. I'm a nightmare on those. Because if people do things well, then you start writing stuff down and go, that's amazing. I need to go from there. And I do love eating out. Like, I'm so passionate about food and eating out as well. But you're always looking over shoulders and seeing what's going on and seeing what works and you, you have that. You know, I say all these, the gym. I love talking to a GM where he's not really paying attention to me because it shows they're a true operator, that they're constantly looking. You know, the GM says, yeah, I'd love to have a catch up. Can we go out of the site? Amazing. Because, because you should have that engine where you're always looking. How could you better? Are they happy? Oh, that. That table needs clearing. So.
And that won't ever go away, despite how frustrating it is for my wife.
It's very cool. You talked a bit on brand positioning. Obviously the brand is like so well known nationally and mentioned Bill's influence. And then you're able to take that from an operational execution point of view. Have you had to do any work on positioning over the last couple of years. I think one of the data points we got was a couple of years ago for the first time alcohol dropped out of your top 15 drinks. It's obviously a different consumer behavior which requires a different positioning.
I mean it's all linked. One of the things when we sort of went back to the starter bills was, you know, bills at its inception was a cafe popular for breakfast, popular brunch. Everyone I was speaking to was sort of saying that's how they use bills. So and were at the time were really focused on dinner and drinks but probably more sophisticated than we should have been and we sort of bundled all that out together to go. We've got to attract Gen Z so we need to be more fun, our food needs to be far more innovative and Instagrammable to use that phrase. We need to double down on breakfast, brunch, lunch. The market's changing, you know, less people are drinking and certainly less of Gen Z are drinking. So how do we change and adapt our drinks range?
And far more lower, no, far more interesting soft drinks, far more health drinks and CBD drinks, cold pressed juices. And it's all been part of that journey and I think the key thing there was really setting a goal far enough ahead to look at all the market Trends back in 2023 and seeing what was happening and saying by 2025, 2026, this is the business we want to because that then you can keep a track on that and you can keep following the trends and going is the market, you know, the market has gone harder to know alcohol than we thought it would in 2023.
So when you have the six month many development meetings it's quite easy then because you know the new trend data saying this it was already on our radar and I think there's a lot of that where like we have with the technology is you've got to now operate far enough ahead so you're setting the foundations and ready for change that you know is coming but then also be dynamic because it can suddenly veer off. And you see that a lot with food trends and probably more so with food trends where you sort of, you know we have ridiculous pancake days and the five pound pancakes but then something comes on the market like Dubai chocolate where you go right this is now massive. We need to put on a chocolate praline pancake and all that stuff.
So it's that mix of that long term view of where we think the market's Going with being adaptable and dynamic and it's. You gotta be wired that way. I think it's, that's the one thing that's changing massively in the industry is if you're not up for change and being dynamic and you know, the days of sort of having a formula and replicating that again and again, that was pretty much the fundamentals for brands. And consistency is still really important and you've got to work out ways of doing consistency with so much change, but you've got to be more adaptable nowadays than 10 years ago.
It's crazy that you can kind of turn the ship at that scale to be that adaptable. Yeah, really impressive. It's testament to the change culture, I think, that you've put into the business.
I think it's good, but I think it's the. Underneath that it's the systems and the process that we have built to know, you know, you've got to give yourself license to change. You know, we change specials every six weeks, so there's your license to kind of go if something and there's not a long lead time on the creation of those or whatever. So that's where you go, right, we can drop stuff in straight away there, a new drink, a new food product, and that's almost a test bed to then go onto the core. So it's making sure your infrastructure is correct and making sure that the team will understand which areas can you have dynamic change and change quickly and which ones take a lot more time.
Because that's one of the challenges if you go quicker than your teams as well, you know the sites and don't have an understanding of the front line. And we've done that a couple of times where you know, you introduce two or three new things that are great for the business, but the reality is, if you introduce them all at the same time, that's not fair on the operators, the GMs, the teams and the site. And what will probably happen is you don't implement any of the three things that are probably all positive for your business well, and then you're ending up going, oh, actually that didn't work for us. No, it wasn't the fact that the product didn't work or that the idea didn't work. It was actually just the comms, the execution and the headspace. And so we've learned that.
And I think that the teams on the front line might disagree, but we're much better at that now in terms of that making sure that there's a clear. We're focusing on this. This is what the important thing is. And I use delivery as a good example for us. We launched delivery four weeks ago and it's performing amazingly for us. But we gave ourselves a eight month lead into that launch and we could have turned it on and actually it's happened in the past. You could have turned it on within four weeks, stick some breakfast and a burger and a coffee in a bag and send it to guests. But it's never going to be right. We wanted to have the perf. You know, trying to find the packaging for a full English breakfast is really hard.
And the amount of times we drove that breakfast around car parks and all that stuff to see what it looks like. But the positive then is that when you do it correctly and have the team on board, the results come because it's good products. And so that's another part of the change management in terms of really be clear. And that's another role that we've introduced into the business with Leah who really deals with all comms and projects. She is the focus to sort of say and she'll pull me up because I quite like doing things quickly to go, listen, look at this is a pinch point, this is a bottleneck. We should roll this back three weeks and. And that's been really good.
That level of granularity and execution. I think the teams can have a lot of confidence and change. Like I can picture you driving around London or cycling around London right now.
Testing the heat with a fry up in my.
Testing the heat in the bag and the spoilage and how many miles it can go. So I think like to sweat the details at that level is probably your operator's mind.
Yeah, we did eat Bill's burgers for about three weeks at home which went down well for the first week. But I think by week three. But you need to be like that now because it's the risk of a guest having a bad experience is still should be the thing that keeps anyone in hospitality up at night.
Yeah, I mean they're not in the building. Once the bag leaves the building, your impact on the experience is. Starts to dilute. Right. That's a scary place to be. Very cool. Look, I appreciate those insights and the openness. I suppose for you, anything you want to cover that's next for bills that people keep an eye out for the rest of this year.
No, I think the big. A lot of our projects are sort of internal. I mean delivery We've just launched and that's so exciting. You know that is doubled our expectations already in terms of what that will do. So now we're looking at how far we can take that. You know there's a big increase in the market for corporate dining. We've just started doing some quite cool like pancake parties where if you're having a brunch party for your kids you can literally order a whole setup and we do brunch and we send you a lot of different pancakes and toppings. So it's then looking at how far we can take that. We've got some new openings in the pipeline as well.
And then we are also looking at this whole internally the workforce management, you know what were speaking about with making life easier for the managers in terms of and the ops team in terms of insights and where can they have a huge impact and having I suppose those data insights in the morning to say if you did these three things today, this would have the biggest impact on your region and it's there, it's coming and I'm really excited about those level of insights and really taking a lot of pressure off the guys. And that's where we're going to see the benefit of technology is it often gets said I don't like technology, I want to go back to a waiter just talking to people. Technology is the enabler.
You know, I'm still keep saying it, you know, the obsession is still with the guest and old school hospitality. But technology should give you more time, more space, more freedom to do that. And that's the exciting things coming up in the next couple of years.
Feels like it's only catching up to where the industry needs it to be. Yeah, it hadn't met expectation for the last couple of years and it's accelerated so quickly in the last couple of years now to really meet where the industry needs it to be exciting.
I don't think the tech was ready. I mean my understanding of technologies is that agentic AI really only got going that could be used sort of at back end of. We've been talking about it for two years but we've often been talking about AI and we actually mean machine learning. But now it's really coming through and now that's coming onto the market Jan Feb and you're seeing actual real time use of it. It's going to start getting very exciting and you've got, but you've got to set yourself up ready for that and that's, you know our other big project is obviously organizing our data and making sure it's accessible because all these products, shiny new toys coming onto the market, they're going to need access to your data.
Yeah. The data is not in order. You can guarantee the outputs would be a bit messy.
Exactly. Very cool.
We're going to move on to a short segment called the Quick Turn. Just a few rapid fire questions. So number one, what is the most important operational metric that you look at every day?
Cover growth. For me, it's the best indicator of popularity.
What's one piece of tech that you would never rip out of bills?
And why EPOS? Because I don't know how you run something on LinkedIn. The other day, I think someone put it up, say, you know which piece of tech, how you could run without an EPOS system nowadays is impossible. If went back to paper tickets and all that side, it's not very glamorous.
But yeah, epos, this might feed into the first one. But what's the biggest red flag you see when reviewing performance?
When I look at an overview of the week, I do cover growth first, but guest opinion score is massive. And it's so obvious when we have a problem at sites, the first question you ask, what's the guest advocacy? What's the guest opinion score?
What's the most underrated skill for new hospitality leaders?
I think, I mean we've kind of covered change management. I think the other thing is probably when I say leadership, I mean in terms of it's a tough year, it's a different workforce. You have to be visible as a leader nowadays, I think in hospitality. And a lot of great hospitality operators and leaders are.
What's a recent customer insight that surprised you?
Maybe not that recent, but when we did our first big pancake day and Bill's has always done pancakes, but went for it and the first pancake day, I think we sold 44,000 pancakes in a day, which is 217Tom Cruise's stacked on top of themselves, but just randomly. And then you kind of went, oh, the people really want this product. Like, like huge number of pancake days, but big anyway. And we from that point back in 2023, we've absolutely doubled down on it. We sort of do the five pound pancakes and we've introduced four new flavors. And pancake day last year was 66,000. But it's one of those, it's much easier to overdrive something that's popular.
And I think where you see something working well, double down on it and double down on it quickly because that's it's like when you have challenges with sites, it's like, it's much easier to grow a Saturday by two grand than get, you know, 500 quid a night, Monday to Thursday. So if something's working well, make that better. And so that was the, that was the trigger for that.
And try and finish my sentence for me now. Right, so scaling smart means scaling good.
And what I mean by that is you've got to be good and have the foundations to grow. It's, again, apologies, there should be a. Like a cliche, Klaxon, whatever. But if you grow a crack, it becomes a chasm. And I think that's one of the things again, you know, I've seen it in my career and learned it in my career. It's, you've got to have the foundations. The challenge now is because the bar keeps raising or the landscape keeps changing with new tech, you've got to make sure you've got everything in place to grow because you're just creating problems.
And last one, if you could wave a magic wand, what's one challenge or industry challenge you'd love to change overnight?
Tom James
Investment in people. We have amazing people working for us, like, genuinely. And that was the first thing before I work for bills. It's what I always come to because, like, really nice people. I think as a hospitality and I understand the reason why, you know, training people and investing time takes a lot of money and a lot of effort and a lot of resource. But I think one thing that genuinely makes me sad is you sort of see people, they're not. It's not easy. You know, being actually being a general manager now is harder than it's ever been, you know, much harder than back when I was doing it.
And the skill set that you need to successfully run a 4 and a half, 5 million pound, 2 million a year business, you know, managing a team, that's more demanding, managing a guest, that's more demanding, managing 20 bits of technology, having to do everything sort of perfectly every single shift. How inspiring people. That requires a lot of leadership and a lot of skill, a lot of the art of delegation. And I think we're, again, that's our big project from a people perspective, is really growing and coaching other teams, you know, because you need. The reason why most people say in. The reason why most people get promoted and say in the industry is a lot of people in their careers, they can name the person who inspired them and made them a great manager and wanted to better and invested in them.
And I think we need to make sure that there's a whole army of those in our business of, you know, inspirational, great leaders who are well trained. And I think because of cost pressures, I think hospitality is letting itself down and it's difficult. I understand and I get it. But that's our sort of big investment over the next 18 months is to really invest in the team and create leaders and make it easier for the guys because it's a different landscape.
Really nice. You didn't know, you probably didn't notice, but one of our team members, I worked for bills for 10 years. Oh, really, Phil? Yeah, oh really. And is a huge testament to what you just said. Still talks about the vision, the leadership, the people, focus on the team. So I can second what you've just said is obviously a big.
Priority for the business as it's, you know, I, I, I've been with Bills for coming out to four years now and the team of people and that culture I just absolutely, I coveted and that now I fall in love with it. So it's good. I'm glad he said that as well.
Nice one. All right, thanks very much. Great to have you. Wow, what a conversation. Tom is a pro. Incredible insights from an operator who's seen it all and done it all. Personally, I think the huge things operators can take from this conversation, alignment for your teams. What's the big why? Why are you making changes? Why is this the most important thing for the business? Why does everyone need to pull together to make it happen? Create the space for clarity and create the space for focus. Tom has been able to show us how to do that. Adaptability. With over 40 restaurants, Tom still looks to move on a dime piece to make changes to trends that are happening in the industry.
To make sure Bills can capture the value, he used examples like Pancake Day, how to stick and twist and put Dubai chocolate into it. These are small changes that just show the flexibility of a big brand. Operators need to stay flexible, stay adaptive, and stay close to the ground in terms of what's happening in the industry. Team experience and team education. Tom finalized our conversation with his worries around the lack of investment in team development and team education. Bills is renowned for its training programs and its development programs. And it's clear from speaking tom that they're going to invest a huge amount of their team to make sure that they win during this next phase of hospitality. So for operators, what can we take away? The guest experience is everything. Focus there first before anything else.
If you can nail that, everything else can make sense afterwards. Without a great guest experience, doesn't matter what your P and L looks like today, it's going to erode in the future. Start there. Create the space for focus and clarity for your team and then invest in your team because they're the ones who are going to deliver in your mission. That's it for this week on what's Cooking. We covered all the ingredients to a successful change management program. Thanks for joining and see you next time.
Shift.
.jpg)
.png)
