Benito’s Hat founder Ben Fordham talks to Mark Wingett about stepping back into running the Mexican food concept, eyeing expansion after exiting underperforming sites and how the business is striving to remain unique in an increasingly competitive category
“I had to stop and think about what I wanted to do. After spending a few years a step back from the business and watching the growth, I am massively excited about getting back in and running the company. I realised I really missed it.”
It’s an admission I imagine many founders have put forward over the years, and one that Ben Fordham, founder of Mexican concept Benito’s Hat, had been toying with as last year came to a close. Back in the spring of 2014, the Calculus Capital-backed group appointed former The Restaurant Group executive Richard Baker to follow the Jackson & Rye-bound Graham Ford in becoming Benito Hat’s chief executive – 18 months later and with the group facing a significant 12 months, Fordham felt it was time he stepped back into the day-to-day breach.
Fordham says: “Rich’s departure was an amicable one. Myself and our investors felt it was the right time for me to step back into overseeing the business as we enter a period of consolidation and gear up to open our largest site yet at London Bridge.”
Fordham admits that for both Ford and Baker, having a founder in the background is a tricky thing to manage, but focuses on the positives. Fordham says: “There are lots of positives there, yes there were a few things I would have done differently, but I am a better operator because of the time I have spent with both of them.”
In discussion with Calculus, Fordham says that there was some talk of bringing someone else in, but that he felt it was right that he stepped back in. He says: “It was something I wanted to do. We’ve had two chief executives, very experienced operators that have come through the business and I can look back over the past few years and say we are a lot tighter as a business than we were before.
“My entire restaurant experience is
Benito’s Hat, but the teams and the managers have seen what it should be like in terms of the operational side of the business and what is expected of them in terms of the percentages they should be working towards on labour and costs. That is all there thanks to Graham and Richard. Our challenge is not to get messy, keep the good stuff but get back into the DNA/personality of the business that made us successful.”
Aside from Baker stepping down, the group also exited a couple of sites – Leadenhall Market and its pop-up kiosk at Liverpool Street Station. On the latter, Fordham says that the company learnt that kiosks are “not fun to run”. “The site wasn’t right for us, but it was part of our learning curve,” he says. “We did two years at Leadenhall, we were busting a gut and throwing everything at it to get it to break even, which is where we got to. But being there wasn’t enhancing the brand and it was taking our focus and energy off our core business. Where we differ to the majority of our competitors is our evening offer, but Leadenhall is a pure lunchtime spot. We couldn’t do our great evening offer at Leadenhall so it got to a point where we were asking ourselves ‘why are we working so hard to make this work?’”
He says the closure of the sites left the business with a strong foundation for future growth. “We now have a really solid six sites, plus the unit at Selfridges which is a short-term lease. It’s nice being in there and we can learn from the site, but I don’t think we would do any more of them.”
Fordham says that the group’s first suburban high street site in Bromley, which opened last year, is going well, helped by a new service style. He says: “We have done quite a lot of work there with our evening offer, become a little bit more assisted service in our approach and added a few new things to the menu. We sit between the high-street and the casual-dining circuit. We are the gateway to GBK, PizzaExpress, Zizzi, Nando’s, etc. Lunchtime trade and weekends are good, but we noticed there was a bit of an understanding gap on what we do, people were coming in and expecting to be seated. So we switched things around so that people could order from the counter and the food will be brought to you, a la Nando’s. The response has been phenomenal.”
Evening menu items across existing restaurants include a build-your-own sharing taco tray for two. Bromley menu additions include a Pulled Pork sandwich, an El Presidente Burrito, Chilli and Churros. Burritos are still fully customisable if the customer wishes but menu items have been made from the best combinations.
Fordham says: “It is not going to work everywhere, but it gives us flexibility when it comes to expansion. We were 50% up on any previous week since we opened there. It also led to a 40% increase in evening food sales from November to December, while cocktail sales rose 38%. Would we put that model anywhere else? In another suburban high street, yes; somewhere like Goodge Street in central London, probably not.
He says that Calculus has been good through all this process, his step back into the main role, the closures and a halt on expansion. He says: “It has been an interesting process because we have had some disagreements, where we had to debate what the right way forward was. We are now all on board with what our next stage is. We have a firm plan for what the next 12 months hold – a little bit of consolidation and the opening of our biggest site at London Bridge.
“We have always had the selling point that we do lunch and evenings but, with the quest for sites, we forgot that. We have a good core estate, but when we try to go outside that, not only is it harder to make it work, it doesn’t always move forward.”
London Bridge is scheduled to open in April, and Fordham says he has couple of offers down on further sites and if “we do one more before the end of the year in London that would be fantastic, and two openings this year would feel right”. The company would then look to ramp up openings to three to four from 2017 onwards. He says: “But bearing in mind that London Bridge will be twice the size of anything else we have done, we have had some missteps in terms of property and I am back in charge and wanting to make sure we are doing everything right, then two sites this year will be a good number.”
He says that trading in January was worse than normal. “The first week was appalling, but it picked up. The second half of last year was good. For the year to July 2016, we are on track to post turnover up to c£4.5m. We have two stellar performers in Great Castle Street and King’s Cross; the other three are good and Bromley is new.”
In terms of competition, he says that Tortilla is out there “doing the numbers, but we are not out there competing with them and others for sites in Aberdeen”. Fordham says: “We have to be very clear in what we want to do – the depth of the food and the evenings, those two things are at the core of what makes us different from all the guys in our sector. So we need to refocus on that. We’ve got to make sure we deliver those messages clearly. It is a quality race, rather than a space race for us at present.”
