Everyone’s welcome at Our Place

It’s a miserable Tuesday afternoon at the beginning of January. On the sleepy suburbia of Teddington high-street, I walk through the doors of The Kings Head and come face to face with the last thing that I expected to see. Customers, and lots of them.

“This is the lowest Tuesday that we’ll do all year, but the whole town must be in here because there’s no one on the streets,” jokes Richard Ferrier, Brasserie Bar Co.’s chief commercial officer.

Despite its independent feel, The Kings Head is one of 20 White Brasserie pubs, and one of 37 Brasserie Bar Co. sites – which includes 17 Brasserie Blanc restaurants – across the UK.

As the lack of empty tables less than two weeks from Blue Monday indicates, “we’re a good example of what can be done and how things can work,” says chairman Mark Derry.

White Brasserie pubs produce the highest sales per outlet in the sector. Derry, an industry veteran formerly of Premium Causal Dining and Whitbread, and Ferrier, who’s dedication to Brasserie Bar Co. has seen him achieve a steady eight-year progression through the ranks, clearly have a business model that works.

The more the two men tell me about Brasserie, the more I notice a mantra of caution, consistency and community that seems to reverberate through everything that they do. And this starts with the staff.

“We put enormous effort into training our staff and we’ve become much more sophisticated in how we go about doing that,” explains Ferrier. “We’re much more regimented in terms of training manuals, sign off processes, having central people in the business purely to make sure no one slips through the cracks and everybody is getting the same standard of training.”

The sophistication Ferrier talks of comes to the fore most clearly in its move towards tech innovation. As of 18 months ago, all Brasserie employees from director to kitchen porter have access to ‘Our Place,’ an internal app dedicated to training and communication across the company.

A massive catalogue of intellectual property, Ferrier says the app ensures everybody has access to the same information.

Alongside extensive, constantly updated allergen information, company policy and menu changes, one of the apps most valuable features is its cooking masterclasses.

With sites from Cheshire to Dorset, the app is used to ensure that with every menu change, each new dish is made to a consistently high spec across the estate.

“It sounds cliché, but we talk about one version of the truth,” says Ferrier. “The danger historically is that Clive Fretwell, our executive chef, would train down to some fantastic people he has below him who would then train it down to somebody else and what you find is it turns into Chinese whispers. It gets diluted a little bit each time, so the person on the front line who you really need to understand it is mucking around with something that isn’t quite right.”

“We wanted to find a way of communicating directly. Clive is very purposeful in the language that he’s using and the things that he says because it has a direct impact on the way that people cook the food.”

But communication through the app goes beyond top-down purposeful training. ‘Our Place’ has an unmoderated rolling newsfeed, a platform on which employees can post anything from pub award nominations to photos of new year’s parties.

“I think we’ve deleted two posts in two years” says Ferrier. “It really reflects our culture, people are really respectful of one another, so it only seems to behave as a positive forum.” “At the end of the day everybody likes it,” adds Derry. “Every single day there’s new stuff on the newsfeed. There are endless ‘prettiest dog in a pub’ competitions.”

Faced with Brexit uncertainty regarding immigration and labour, Ferrier says training and retaining staff has been a major focus of the business over the last six months.

“We’re very focussed on how to bring our staff turnover levels down. There’s a load of analysis that we do to understand why people leave us, where they’re leaving us from, what particular job role they’re in and what we can do to improve that job role for that person in the future. If we look after the one’s we’ve got, we’ll need far less coming in.”

As in their dedication to training and staff satisfaction, the group has also “raised our game in the procurement side of things.”

Other than a select few products that it gets from Spain “that you couldn’t get in the UK even if you wanted to” almost all the produce used by the company comes from UK based suppliers.

Derry explains that this, along with the company’s emphasis on in-house chef training, means it can support a top-tier flexible menu.

“That flexibility ultimately means that if we get excessive price increases from inflation then we’d just take the item off the menu,” he says. “Last year there was a massive increase of about 40% in the price of scallops, so we took them off and put something else on in the space of a day. If you’ve got an inflexible menu and a very low skill base in the business, then getting people to be able to change things quickly is near impossible.”

Ferrier adds that where some other businesses may have faced currency issues because of high inflation, Brasserie’s procurement strategy mitigates these pressures.

“We’ve mitigated these issues simply because we already go to the best suppliers in the UK. For us, the provenance of the food, and the integrity of that provenance, is really important.”

“If you cut us down the middle, that would be true all the way through the business.”

Historically, Brasserie Bar Co. has been known for its Raymond Blanc inspired premium casual dining concept Brasserie Blanc. But according to Ferrier it’s not afraid to move with the times.

“Over time, with a Brasserie Blanc site if we don’t see it ever getting to where we want it to be or at the levels that we see in the pubs, we haven’t been afraid to cash in our chips and deploy the capital elsewhere,” he says.

“The White Brasserie spaces can be used any time of the day by any type of person, whereas Brasserie Blanc is far more formal, and we felt that was quite a serious proposition when actually the consumer was looking for more relaxed dining.”

With an ethos built from the values of Blanc and his craft, the pub concept straddles causal dining and premiumisation. This malleability spans taste and day-part, making the concept accessible to every type of consumer.

“You could come in here where we’re sitting and have three courses, but it’s not an environment where you’re going to feel uncomfortable,” says Ferrier.

“You can be in an environment like this in shorts and flip flops and eat a fillet steak. Ten to fifteen years ago you’d never find an experience like that as a consumer.”

Over the next year, as part of its repositioned pub-focussed business model, Brasserie is hoping to encourage funding to support expansion. But despite, or perhaps because of, its success, Derry explains that good business sense must come before vast growth.

“We’re extraordinarily cautious because if we open a pub that does less than all the others, it drags the averages down and that’s not really helpful. We could do up to ten sites if we were properly funded and we found the right sites, but we’re not frightened of doing none. It’s a measured expansion.”

In order to continue expanding the pub arm successfully, Derry says that obtaining funding from “sensible people” with an interest in the sector will be a primary focus in 2020.

“Just because other businesses have had problems doesn’t mean that it’s endemic,” he says. “Taking underperforming pubs and bringing them back to life is what we do, and the opportunities for us our huge.”

“We’ve got enough money to do a couple of sites and after that point we’ll have a look again. But I’d like a war chest!”