Envisioning F&B in Hotels, with Scot Turner

Episode Transcript

Scot Turner: We opened the restaurant in the Palm in Dubai, and it was just extravagant, too extravagant for the market. And the market just didn’t understand. It was just too much. People just presumed it was really expensive because of the way it was fit out. So there was already a barrier to the market to come in the restaurant because the fella couldn’t go in there in shorts. They felt they couldn’t go in there in a polo shirt, and it instantly made it a special occasion restaurant, which then we had to fight really hard in terms of messaging because the design was just too over the top going out. Welcome to the Innovative Hotelier podcast by Hotels magazine with weekly thought provoking discussions with the world’s leading hotel and hospitality innovators. Welcome to the innovative hotelier brought to you by Hotels magazine. I’m your host, Robin Trimingham. As regular followers of this broadcast will be aware, I’ve spent quite a lot of time chatting with hoteliers regarding the various ways that their businesses and their clientele have changed. But what about the restaurants and F and B departments within these establishments? How have they been affected by everything that’s been going on and what new realities are they wrestling with? My guest today, Scott Turner, is the founder and managing director of Odin Hospitality, a restaurant and hospitality consultancy. And he recently shared a blueprint for rethinking all things F and B on LinkedIn. And I’ve reached out to him and he’s here today to discuss Reimagining your Fab project the right way. 

Robin Trimingham: Join me now for my conversation with Scot. F.O.H. is a global food service and hospitality company that manufactures smart commercial grade solutions headquartered in Miami. The company designs and manufactures all their restaurant and hotel products. They have showrooms and distribution centers located throughout the globe, and their products are always in stock and ready to ship from any of their distribution centers worldwide. Welcome, Scott. It’s great to meet you. Hi, Robin. Yeah, it’s great to meet you too. Thank you very much for speaking to me and having me on the show. Well, when I saw your post on LinkedIn, I was like, immediately, I need to meet this guy because I thought you had a very refreshing approach to solving a lot of problems that are very common in the F and B world. So let’s just launch straight in here and we’re going to ask the obvious but critical question Why do you recommend that? Basically when you’re designing an F&B concept, that you have to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve right from the outset, or you’re just going to have trouble all the way through? For me, it’s the most important thing because if I use an analogy, it’s very similar to building a house. You would never build a house without foundations because it would come crumbling down. And I think opening any business, not just an F and B business, but any business is very similar. 

Scot Turner: And I always start on this process. Before I came on the podcast, we were having a conversation with a founder about exactly the same thing, about having complete clarity over what the vision is and where you see yourself going, because that affects a lot of decisions that goes through the concept creation stage, the design stage that can then set you up for success. And for me, that clarity then is what can drive the concept creation. By having that clarity. It means that when you go to people who might be doing the branding, might be helping with menus, might be looking at other aspects of the opening design. For example, when you’re as clear as possible, it saves iterations, it saves time, it saves money and everything kind of sticks to the original vision, if that isn’t clear. A lot of the time you find dilution happening and you end up with something that you didn’t want in the first place, or the market becomes confused by the offer because maybe the branding doesn’t fit the menu, the design doesn’t fit the branding, and everything just doesn’t tie up as it should do. And you see this so often in many places you go and I talk about Hotel F and B in particular being something that falls victim of this quite often in that the designers start very early in the process because it’s a huge operation, it’s a huge design, and they design a room and that room serves a purpose. But if you were working like a restaurateur, you would design the room based on the concept, and that would all then feed in with what that clear vision was. It wouldn’t be a space that kind of fits something in because you lose the natural innovation, you use the natural creativity, and often that’s why you see hotel and dining rooms empty because the customer can see through that. That clear vision hasn’t been there from the start, and that results with bums on seats. I think you’re making a critical point right here from the outset. So let me ask a secondary question, because I agree with you in the hotel world, maybe I’m going to say it this way. Sometimes there’s too many chefs involved in the creation of the project because you have multiple departments in a hotel somehow working together or not, or interacting together or not because you have you have the executive chef, you have the F and B department head, you have the revenue manager and goodness knows how many other. People involved in the creation of the project. So how do you get everybody on the same page, especially if right from the very outset? The examples that you used was when the pre-opening team comes on board before then you have a whole chain of people as well that probably won’t even be in the hotel when it opens because it’s designed people. 

Scot Turner: It’s corporate office, it’s X, Y, Z. The best operation I run in a hotel. It was when we opened the Intercontinental in London and the fab space was defined and it was defined by the architects. But the actual design happened very, very late on in terms of the build process. And it was almost a year before and it was very much focused on we have these spaces, let’s create an identity for each and then let’s design based on that identity. And from there, when the people that you mentioned, that the fab manager, the exec chef came on board, the identity of each space was very clear. So a lot of that investigation period where there’s opinions and committees and things like that, it was already very defined. So we found that when we did that, we recruited for the concept. We didn’t recruit a head chef. We recruited a head chef for the concept. So that individual came in knowing exactly what the menu should be. He’d already started thinking about the process, and it’s back to that clarity. He knew there was a concept in place and his job was to then execute that concept. So I think it’s super important when people are looking at fab spaces to look at the community around, to look at the individual space, to look at what services that space needs to function, and then design the concept around those things. Instead of going, we have a hotel restaurant and it has to serve breakfast and wouldn’t it be nice to do a really nice dinner trade as well? And all of a sudden you have this restaurant that at dinner there’s a big empty buffet sitting there that you would never have in a normal restaurant environment. So I think it’s just about kind of taking time and reversing that process and thinking about what makes the hotel room side great and applying that to F-and-b because you would never open go into a design process for a hotel without understanding whether it was a luxury hotel, a boutique hotel, a budget hotel, and then in the rooms, those guests expect different things. And you wouldn’t do that with bedrooms before you started building it. But so many people do that with Fab before they start building. I think you’re absolutely right. I know you always say put people first. Yeah. What does that mean when you’re defining a clear vision for your project? I think for me, it’s fundamentally, regardless of what we do in hospitality, it’s about making memorable experiences for the people who come to that building essentially. So whether that’s a guest, whether that’s a waiter, whether that’s a receptionist, a housekeeper. We’re a people industry. And I think it has to be around building great spaces that help people to thrive. So people for me is twofold. One is for the guest. Listen to what your audience is telling you and look at how you can execute what they’re saying, because that’s immediately how you get instant buy in from local community, from the people who you might have as a following. And, you know, some of the big hotel chains do that really well. They know their business hotels. They listen to what their customers want from a business hotel, and they put those principles in place to be able to be the best business hotel they can be. It’s the same for FNB. It doesn’t have to be anything different. So if your guests that come or the local community want a place to work and meet and host meetings, you have to put plugs by every table. Otherwise it’s not a place where you can go and work. You have to be intuitive with your team to understand that if people are having meetings, there’s a time to ask for drinks and there’s a time to stand back. And it’s about all those little touchpoints that mean you’re delivering on what that person would like. So you mentioned paying attention to what customers want, what people want, and I agree that’s important. But I think there’s also a tendency in the restaurant world to take this a step too far because let’s face it, restaurants, a lot of places live and die by restaurant reviews. But I know that you really recommend knowing your numbers and using data and over even and above restaurant reviews. 

Robin Trimingham: Where’s the happy medium here and why do you say this? 

Scot Turner: Yeah. So I fundamentally for me, data doesn’t lie. Data is factual. So what I tend to say to operators and people who I work with is look at data to back up what people are saying and take things in perspective. So I’m working with a restaurant operation at the minute and in the morning on Saturday last week, they got an amazing review from a critic here in the UK. It was flawless. There wasn’t one thing that was wrong with this review, but later in the day, they got a two star review on Google and it’s all the owner could talk about. And it’s the first two star review in six weeks of opening and they’re serving 300 people a day and had the conversation with him saying, let’s take perspective. Think of all the people who’ve been through the through the restaurant in this six weeks, and you’ve had one person saying that the seating was a little uncomfortable. It’s about perspective. And I think where I look at reviews is I look at them in terms of a data set and I look at them in terms of trends. So if over that six week period, seating kept coming up again and again and again, that’s when I would start looking at whether there was something we needed to do with the seating, because trends are telling you and dataset is telling you that there’s an obvious problem reoccurring and the same thing happens when you’re looking at experience. If everyone’s telling you breakfast is slow, I don’t get my coffee quick enough on a morning. One person who says that that might just be a bad day for the waiter. He might have been in a bad mood himself and thought it should be quicker. But if that’s happening over a constant period, you should be sitting down with your teams and saying, We have an issue with speed of service. How do we make it so that we can get coffee to people quicker in the morning? And that for me is why don’t overreact to individual reviews and I use data and trends to properly analyse the business. And it really came to me once when one of the things I’m really, really strong at is cost of sales. As an operator, I always had a strong cost of sales and I always think back to one occasion where for the first time in probably 3 or 4 months my food cost had dropped and it was because we’d had a fridge go down. We’d lost a lot of stock and my boss at the time was looking at numbers and we went on to a control call and he was overanalyzing the result because of this one mistake. But if he’d have looked at the trends, he would have seen that there was an anomaly and he would have probably asked different questions about that particular week’s cost of sales. So that’s since then, that’s why I’ve always kind of looked at data set and trends to analyse the business effectively and see opportunities before they arise. 

Robin Trimingham: You know, I love that you mentioned the chairs because personally there’s a couple of restaurants that I just won’t eat in because the chairs doesn’t matter how amazing the food is. If your back hurts, how can you enjoy your meal? Okay, so you’re getting consistent feedback. You realize that you have to recreate the concept, do some updating, particularly in North America. We’ve all seen those restaurant renovation shows where it looks like people come flying through the door from all directions and they just start jackhammering. And miraculously in 48 hours we have a brand new restaurant and it’s opening night. Yeah, yeah. An experienced restaurant are really perceived that way without creating a business plan. Or is that literally a recipe for disaster? 

Scot Turner: What we don’t see on TV is probably the amount of visits and work that’s gone into rolling in in 48 hours with a big team to deliver this transformation. You can do it that way. I just think ultimately you’re then going to go through an exploratory period once you’ve opened, and that often results in losing a lot more cash than if you properly planned and properly executed. Got data, spoke to the stakeholders, whether that’s guests, whether that’s your employees, because let’s not forget those guys hold so much content and so much information that so many people ignore that resource. But it’s probably one of the most powerful things that you have because they’re there talking to guests. They understand what guests know and they know what the pinch points are as well. I think, again, it’s about going in and saying you can have and you touched on it earlier, is having the nicest restaurant in the world in terms of design, the comfiest chairs and the most beautiful wallpaper, etcetera. But if you don’t have a concept and an offer and a product and the service to go with it. In my experience, you’ve just wasted a lot of cash that you didn’t need to waste because people go to go to restaurants. Ultimately, it’s an impulse. People don’t need to go to restaurants, so that’s why they vote with their feet really easily because they’re going there for a reason. So you have to make it craveable You have to make it solve a purpose. We have to really go back to those principles and look at it to go. If someone goes there and has the most amazing food with the most exceptional service, it’s personable. There’s lots of little touches throughout the experience that makes them go away and keep thinking about it in the brain. Then that’s what makes them going back. If they go to a restaurant that’s got really comfy seats, really beautiful design, but the food isn’t great and the service isn’t great, they’re going to go, What a nice dining room, but we’re not going back there again because it took too long to get our food. And when it did, it wasn’t that great. That’s why I talk about putting people first. It’s about having that clear vision that people can execute, that can make people go wow and come back for an experience. The design is the cherry on top of the cake that they also go on. What an amazing roof, because I know some concepts that literally anonymous thrown together with a tin of paint and a few bits of wood. But the most amazing concepts that people go back for again and again and again because of that service and because of the design and I use an example of the coffee house in my local high street, I would argue and debate that it’s probably not the best coffee in the street, but the service is exemplary. They know my order. I don’t have to order it every morning. They know my name. They you know, they always chat to my kids. They always look after my kids. And that’s what I go back for because the coffee is good. It’s not it’s not bad by any means. It’s this good. But that little extra bit of touch that makes me feel happy and makes me feel warm and makes me feel valued is the bit that makes me go back again and again. And that’s why for me, people should be at the heart of everything you do, backed up by data to create memorable experiences, essentially. 

Robin Trimingham: Well, I completely agree with you. If you want to have a long standing clientele, you have to give them a place to call home, you know, where they feel incredibly comfortable. One of the tendencies out there, though, is to really believe that ambience is everything and that you have to spend a mountain of money on the wall covering. I mean, I know a guy it was actually a project in Canada where the entire wall was covered with leather. You have any idea what it costs? I mean, it was insane. Yeah, but, you know, how do you marry up? How much to spend on ambience and other things that you really have to deal with? 

Scot Turner: This is very much about, again, back to the concept, understanding what that concept concept needs to be and who the person is, who’s going to be going to that concept. And that defines how much you should be spending on fixtures and fittings. Because again, you know, in the right environment, in the right location, luxury, five star hotel, that is all about ambience and that sets the tone for the room rates and it sets the tone for the for the client base. Maybe that leather is absolutely the right decision for them. And as a percentage of their overall budget, actually, it’s probably in proportion to a QSR restaurant painting the walls instead because it’s that’s that’s right. For their customers. So I think this is why that clear vision comes back into play, is understanding who the market is that you see as your ideal guest and making sure that it fits with with those principles. I’ve been in situations as well where I’ve seen exactly that. We opened a restaurant in the Palm in Dubai, and it was just extravagant, too extravagant for the market. And the market just didn’t understand. They just didn’t get it. It was just too much. And the restaurant always suffered that because people just presumed it was really expensive because of the way it was fit out. So there was already a barrier to the market to come in the restaurant because the fella couldn’t go in there in shorts. They felt they couldn’t go in there in a polo shirt, and it instantly made it a special occasion restaurant, which then we had to fight really hard in terms of messaging because the design was just too over the top. So yeah, it’s back to my example of bedrooms. You wouldn’t put all leather walls in a marble bathroom in a budget hotel because it just doesn’t make sense in terms of the business model that comes into it. So that’s all the bit that goes back to that clear vision. 

Robin Trimingham: I’m completely fascinated that anybody managed to design a place that was too over the top in Dubai. I don’t know how that happened. 

Scot Turner: I’ll have to share the example. You’ll see. You’ll see it was with Alan Ducasse, and it was a very typical Alan Ducasse restaurant. And he had the market just just didn’t get what it was all about. But it’s there you go. These things, these things are there to teach us. 

Robin Trimingham: Established in 2002 F.O.H is a woman owned global food service and hospitality company that manufactures smart, savvy commercial grade products, including plate wear, drinkware, flatware, hotel amenities and more. Driven by innovation F.O.H. is dedicated to delivering that wow experience that restaurants and hotels crave all while maintaining a competitive price. All products are fully customizable, and many are also created using sustainable eco friendly materials such as straws and plates made from biodegradable paper and wood and PBR free drinkware. F.o.h. Has two established brands front of the house focused on tabletop and Buffet Solutions and Room 360, which offers hotel products. Check out their collections today at FOHWorldwide.com. I know you always say that you should analyze trends over snapshots, but I’m not sure I understand what you mean by that. So I don’t know if all of our listening audience will either. Talk to us a little bit about this. 

Scot Turner: Yes. So I see snapshots, very reactive, and I look at trends as being very proactive. So I recently did a video on LinkedIn, which was showing how data can lie. If you look at it in a in a minute detail without looking at a bigger picture. And the particular example showed a week’s revenue and there was a couple of spikes in there and it was quite stable in terms of revenue. The spikes looked great. They were three times the amount of revenue on a weekend to through the week. So if I was an operator looking at a snapshot of that week, I’d be probably patting myself on the back, probably saying I had a great week. Everything was rosy. And you know, I was probably making decisions based on that. When I dropped in 13 weeks of the revenue, we actually saw that the revenue would declined on the trends. So where I was previously patting myself on the back, now I’m starting to go, okay, why is the revenue declining and what are the reasons for the decline from there? Then you can start drilling down and looking at what the opportunities are to start picking the revenue back up. And very interestingly, then when I dropped in 13 months, our year on year numbers, we actually saw that the decline was declining on last year, so that the dip after 13 weeks was actually quite a dramatic drop year on year. So against that saying, okay, why is there such a dramatic drop year on year and which are the areas that I need to go look at to see how I can make the change to start looking at growth? So it was just a really good example and I encourage anyone to go on and take a look at that of saying one week looked fantastic, but when I dropped it in year on year and against 13 weeks, actually the business was in a real decline. And from that, if we’d have been looking at that on a trend, we’d have seen that happening sooner. So we probably arguably wouldn’t have seen such a decline because we’d have started taking action earlier because we’d have started to see the decline much earlier as well. So that’s why I always believe that looking at trends is a much better way of running your business because it’s much more proactive in finding opportunities before they occur. 

Robin Trimingham: Okay. Let’s talk a little bit more about the right way to analyze the PNL, because in the restaurant industry, in my mind, this is a really complicated thing because you have to project how much food you’re going to need. You have spoilage issues, you’ve got supply chain issues eg spiked to 795 carton. How do you wrap your head around that and really understand the difference between, you know, cost just going crazy and whether or not you’re trending up or trending down. 

Scot Turner: Yeah, This again is about looking at the data as often as you can. So looking at data in on a daily basis or weekly basis and not just waiting until the end of the month to get the PNL and finding ways to have that data available to you so that you have a better understanding of your business. And what we always encourage people to do is many people get daily flash reports, revenue reports, but it’s about seeing that revenue report for the previous day against the the month. So same time last month and against last year and seeing it on a daily basis so that you can start picking up on where trends might be starting to happen. So if you seen over a month period that your revenue year on year is down, when you start putting that into a graph, you’ll you’ll start taking action. So I think first of all, it’s about how regularly you can see the results of what’s happening in the business then when it comes to revenue. A lot of people just look at daily sales and make judgments based on those daily sales and that’s great. But I also encourage people to drill down slightly and look at covers and look at average check and start looking at the correlations there because your average check might be going up, but your covers might be dropping and that starts opening up lots of conversations around, you know, does the market think that you’re overpriced so you’re making more money out of less people, or is it actually that people are just spending more? So if you can bridge that gap, there’s an opportunity of where you can increase revenue. So it just starts asking questions there. I think on cost of sales, we traditionally in FNB have looked at actual versus budget. I think since Covid we started looking at it very different in terms of actual versus theoretical and it’s for the exact reason that you’re saying it’s that fluctuation in cost at the minute and based in the UK. And when the invasion of Ukraine happened, we started seeing spikes in number of different supply chain routes that was coming into the UK. When you look at actual versus theoretical, what you’re seeing is. Based on the sales mix and the cost of and the GP of those products. What should your chef be achieving from his cost of sales? And then versus the actual what is the actually achieving? Because if he can’t influence the buying price because of market fluctuation, etcetera, and he can’t influence pricing because that’s done by the fab director or GM or another person in there, he can only affect the sales, it can only affect what he’s selling. So that’s then comes into looking at yields and how you can improve. So if that if that chef is achieving an actual versus theoretical, which is pretty much aligned, you know, he’s managing his business effectively, if there’s then a variance, that’s when you can start looking at ways to improve. So it’s just little ways to to overcome sitting in meetings with your operators and them starting to say, but price of mushrooms has gone up or the price of eggs has increased because actual versus theoretical takes that into account. Same for wastage. You know, monitoring wastage daily is a great way to understand how the kitchen is performing. And I think what what I would back up on all of this and back to that people centric approach is that people shouldn’t fear data. Your team shouldn’t fear data. They should be using data to improve performance. And that comes down to managers using data to look at where you can improve and look at opportunities and not use it as a as a stick and an excuse to to kind of beat your teams with on a weekly basis, because all that does is disengage them. So I think it’s about people having that power of data and using it effectively as a team to increase performance rather than using it as a tool to manage performance. And that’s something I really kind of that never works. No, it never works. And but it’s amazing how many people do do that. And, you know, people have control meetings and cost meetings every week and fear them because those conversations aren’t taking place in the right format. But yeah, I think it’s that’s knowing your numbers to to understand. 

Robin Trimingham: I think you you said something really important. You mentioned very quickly looking for opportunities. I think looking for opportunities is huge when so many of the other things are much, much harder to control. You know, if I would say it’s not just looking at how many covers or the average spend, I would be actually looking at what do these people purchase? What are they buying? Is it all appetizers? Are we serving cocktails? Are they ordering wine? If so, what kind? So that you can look for what could we do more? Because people are really enjoying that. 

Scot Turner: Yeah, absolutely. And I think what I would encourage hoteliers to look at is find ways to analyze your fab business the same way as you do bedrooms and event spaces, because so many times you speak to hoteliers and they’re used to using data every day. They’re used to looking at the market. They’re used to drilling down into revenue streams and diversifying revenue streams in in the room side. But they don’t adopt that then into fab and start drilling down into that level of data. Sometimes it’s because it’s not there, sometimes it’s because they don’t understand. And that’s really where I look to help by coming in and going, okay, this is how we can analyze data and this is where we can look for opportunities. And I’ve really started using that word opportunity quite a bit recently because I think it is about looking at where you can find efficiency and find revenue to grow your business rather than seeing things as problems and challenges. It’s how can you build on those little bits that kind of gives you those marginal gains that over time can help you kind of grow sustainably so that your payroll costs can go up in line with it. You’re not putting your people under pressure by suddenly seeing spikes in revenue because offers are there and things like that, and then how you can sustainably grow so that you can keep the revenue where it is rather than upsetting customers and staff. And then that obviously leads to decline. So for me, sustainable growth is much better than kind of impact marketing that delivers high revenue on certain days. That puts everyone under pressure and ultimately impacts the guests at the end as well. So everyone wants that that kind of sustainable revenue every single month. I completely agree with you. A lot of our listeners happen to be boutique hotel or independent owners and they have fab in their establishment. Can you give us some kind of ideas regarding how to. To diversify FNB revenue streams if you don’t really know where to start. For me, it’s about creating a buzz within those spaces. And I say this for a lot, for a number of different reasons, is if there’s a buzz around your public spaces, it benefits a few different reasons and a few different ways. When your guests arrive at the hotel, if there’s a buzz and there’s an energy and there’s things going on in the public spaces, immediately the guest is shoulders will go up. He’ll feel more confident about the hotel. He isn’t walking into a quiet space. And how many times you walk into public sorry, boutique hotels and it’s often very quiet and you can hear a pin drop and that type of thing that then breeds a confidence in the whole experience, which helps from a rooms perspective. And let’s not forget a great FMB experience and a great FMB revenue stream improves rev par, which helps overall performance. So that’s the first one from it. From an internal guest point of view from an external guest point of view, I think it’s very much about how you can develop something around being a hub of the community. So it’s a place where people go to meet and greet and go with friends and they don’t see it as a as a barrier that is in a hotel. So if you have a street entrance somewhere that goes straight into an FMB space or can go into an FMB space, how can you utilize that entrance so that it breaks down all? We have to walk past the lobby because it creates a barrier for people. So I think the first one is, is how do you create that community hub that makes people from the local community feel like it’s a place they can go and they can they can have a great experience without spending lots of cash and that type of thing.But then the other thing then is how do you sweat the asset? You know, look at underperforming spaces, look at spaces that might be star rooms or might be just kind of light switched off and no one goes there. All conference rooms. And how can you utilize those areas? How can you bring them into revenue generating areas? And there’s a number of different ways that could be could you make a little coffee place in there that’s a little grab and go coffee space where guests can go and it’s just convenience. So those who don’t have inclusive breakfast might be able to just go and grab a coffee and a great croissant, focusing really on quality. That means they’ll go there over a Starbucks or a speciality coffee place. You know, again, if you have spare kitchen space and we did this with one operator, we he had a banqueting kitchen that was really underutilized a lot of the time. He used the main kitchen for banqueting because it took extra people to man the other kitchen. And we rented that out to a local operator and he ran a dark kitchen from there. And the benefit of that was that on the room service menu, they had the they collaborated with the local hero and the food went up to the room as room service, and then the guy ran a kitchen out of there because it was a great opportunity for him. So he had a revenue stream from that as well. So the added value to the guest, the generated revenue for the for the partner, which was great for the local community, and that took a rental, a percentage of revenue from from whatever he generated from there. So it’s just those little bits that can really about thinking differently and a little bit more out of the box to try and create some extra revenue coming through from there as well. But for me, I often look at boutique hotels and think they’re the ones with the most opportunity because they’re the ones that can really, really focus on detail and touch points and and doing something different. 

Robin Trimingham: Sometimes they have a different problem, though. True story. One hotelier that I knew, a small operator actually quite a few years ago, he needed to pay off the mortgage in a certain amount of time. And what he did, although he had a very sedate high end property, he hired the most popular band on the island I live on and turned happy hour on Friday nights into basically a free for all. He had a thousand people out by the pool and guests had kind of a mixed response to that.But he was rubbing his hands together with glee because he was achieving his ultimate objective pay off the mortgage. But not every establishment wants to be known as the Friday night hotspot. As much as that sounds great initially, that’s just not for everybody. How do you go about cultivating the right sort of clientele base for your vision? 

Scot Turner: Yeah, I mean, this comes right back to the start of when we when we began the episode, which is about that clarity of vision, and it’s about building that sustainable growth. That means you execute your vision into a sustainable growth that gets. The revenue to where you need it to be. And I’m not naive to understand that some people do need cash, and cash is king. It helps pay the bills and pay off mortgages and things, but trying to get there sustainably and grow it properly is the thing that will make it still last. The standard. The test of time and I think we’ve talked about a lot of things in the last 30 40 minutes about all the different touch points that mean by implementing those, you can deliver what is right for your business. So it’s back to that whole thing around clarity of vision, building the right numbers and forecasting them properly to allow you the time to get to that sustainable place of revenue. So if you’ve over budgeted and you’re expecting a payback quicker, you have to make decisions that you would make on a normal basis very differently. You have to do the smash and grab events because you have to generate cash to pay back the bank. Whereas if you do forecast sustainable growth, you might not feel under so much pressure to do it. We also talked about solving that craving, looking at what that impulse purchase can be and building value for your guest, because that’s fundamentally the thing that will keep them coming back again and again. And it’s you know, there’s stats out there that says guests that come back again and again spend 67% more than a new guest. So it’s more sustainable to build naturally and to get repeat customers because they spend more. And then when the spend more, they also bring friends who have a great experience and come back with other friends and spend more. And before you know it, you’ve got repeat business that’s increasing average check. And you know, every week you’re going to be fully booked with the right customer spending more cash because you’re delivering the right experience. And that is for me about how you build it properly to be able to create something that you have the clear vision for at the start. And that for me is the ultimate goal of success is, is by sitting there after a period of time and going, Do you know what these are exactly? The guests we would like. These are exactly the you know, this is exactly what we need to be bringing through the tills to pay back the bills and the mortgage and that type of thing and go from there. What I would say we haven’t touched on it is about going through that process. You can have a very clear vision, but it’s also about not being too stubborn about that vision. If the data and the guests aren’t telling you that that’s the right vision and it’s about not procrastinating on facts, data reviews, feedback and being agile enough to understand when that vision needs to be reviewed and needs to maybe be refreshed or reviewed and and then don’t sit on it too long and sit on your ego, accept it and make those changes to adapt and to be able to go forwards. Because the original vision isn’t always the the end vision, but it’s about getting there sustainably and doing it in the right way. 

Robin Trimingham: Yeah, I totally agree with that. The mark of success is that you’ve been around long enough that you do need to evolve. Really want to thank you so much for your time today. You’ve been watching the innovative hotelier join us again soon for more up to the minute insights and information specifically for the hotel and hospitality industry. You’ve been listening to the Innovative Hotelier podcast by HOTELS magazine. Join us again soon for more conversations with hospitality industry thought leaders.