W e spoke to Julie Yeo, who runs the Yeo Group business with her husband Tim, to find out how they have coped over the past two tumultuous years. “When Covid happened in Spring 2020 we were doing very nicely. We were planning to bring our managers into the business more, so that Tim and I could step back a bit. Covid was a huge shock and quickly became a terrifying prospect. We had over 100 people on the payroll, and it was a horrific thought that, having been forced to stop trading (we closed before the government mandated it) we might have to start letting some people go to save the business. When the furlough scheme was announced within days, we popped the champagne. It was a huge relief to know that our colleagues would receive an income whilst we were unable to trade. We have a number of European staff and they stayed on through Covid, however as staff could receive furlough and legitimately take on other work during lock downs, it was natural that some of our people would take on additional jobs. It was therefore inevitable that when the lockdowns ended some people decided to stay in their new jobs, feeling more secure as key workers. This however was not predicted by the hospitality sector (we had all been under the blissful illusion that if we were one of the survivors of lockdown, there would be plenty of skilled people looking for work) or the government.
We did not have enough trained people to reopen all our venues. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that everyone else in the hospitality sector was in the same boat as us, and we were all frantically recruiting simultaneously and competitively. It is a dreadful scenario for everyone – added to which is the general long-standing issue of skills shortages. Many colleges have closed their catering courses, (it takes a lot of expensive kit and space to teach chefs) so there aren’t the same numbers of qualified new staff coming into the sector as there used to be. Our response to the staffing crisis was to broaden our search. We have always had a good relationship with a recruitment agency in Poland and returned to them to help address our staff shortages. Our HR manager, Mel, jumped through numerous paperwork hoops, and we paid the various fees to get a Sponsor’s licence from the Home Office, enabling us to recruit from outside the UK. We were only allowed to recruit higher paid staff to work at a specific venue. Tim and our Group Head Chef, Preston, travelled to Poland and conducted multiple interviews. We purchased and furnished two delightful static caravans to provide accommodation. We now finally have two Indian and two Sri Lankan chefs in our kitchens, although getting them here has been another challenge as the appalling situation in Ukraine meant long visa delays. From a financial perspective, we are thankful that when lockdowns happened, we were in a strong position. As a well-established business our years of debt are behind us, and we now own the freeholds of two of our venues. We have been in catering – a cash positive industry - long enough to know that although we may have a healthy balance on our bank statement, a large chunk of that money is in fact owed to our creditors. When we stopped trading, we immediately paid all outstanding amounts to our suppliers. This has further cemented our good relationships with our suppliers, and we nurture and treat those relationships with great respect. We took advantage of the lockdowns to do some extensive refurbishments and maintenance in our venues: bars were pulled out and refloored and refitted, equipment replaced, areas redecorated, new leather banquet te furniture built, and toilets upgraded. We also revamped our main office, installing air conditioning, recarpeting and redecorating etc, as like most public venues the back of house areas are the last to receive attention. That’s one of the reasons all our venues have open kitchens, so that our customers can see for themselves that we run a clean and professional food business.
We also overhauled a plethora of our IT systems, with the help of Scrutton Bland’s consultancy. We moved to Xero for accounting, to ensure our card payment machines could be fully integrated with our tills, and our accounting processes are fully streamlined and compliant with Making Tax Digital. We installed new HR and Payroll systems, a new phone system, re-wrote our website, upgraded our credit card machines, changed our card merchant, and became a cashless business. Boy has that saved us time and money. Running the two parallel systems of card payments and handling cash is hugely expensive and time consuming. Going cashless has meant it’s much faster and easier to reconcile tills. It means we don’t have to keep large amounts of cash floats in our tills and change safes, and our insurance premium has gone down. As the volume of card payments has doubled, we’ve also been able to renegotiate a lower rate with our card merchants. Yes, it has disgruntled a very few customers, but curiously those who have complained, complain on behalf of other people, saying it’s not an issue for them. In mitigation, we have made it possible to buy our digital gift cards online. So how are things this summer? Well, the good weather has helped get people out and about, and we are finally in a position to be able to reopen The Alex Brasserie, initially at weekends only. There are still problems – the escalating cost of living means that people are thinking more carefully about going out for a meal and at the same time all our costs are rising dramatically. But we have built a reputation on delivering high quality service and good value food in some of the most attractive venues in town – and that’s what we and our excellent colleagues intend to keep doing.”
www.yeogroup.co.uk
LEISURE AND HOSPITALITY | SCRUTTON BLAND | 1 1
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