I just love being dragged from my lumbers at 3:45 in the morning, it’s just amazing how loud babies actually are and its also a good job the I’m not the kind of guy who “sleeps in” at the weekends.
I find that my treadmill sessions are always good for reflecting on work and whilst last week was a pretty good week there is still a lot of work to do on the basics. Biggest thing on my agenda is to standardise our three brands, these are our restaurants, cafes and then the coffee shops which are in our home stores. Each brand has a different customer base and each brand needs to be treated differently but before we even get to this I need to deal with the many “one off” units which have sprung up over the years. These are units that have either very different equipment or menus which differ from the norm, if I had lots of central resource then managing a varied estate would be less of a problem but I have a small team and I need to maximise their output which means that expenditure valuable time and energy on just a couple of units is not on my agenda.
I am actually not looking to increase the size of my team at the office, we have just added an administrator to the team and besides this role I have a projects/analyst role, a buyer and an NPD role. I have a very talented bunch of people who have really responded well to the challenges which I have set them and this team is more than big enough for the current business needs as I just bring in specialists for individual projects.
Food wise, whilst giving nothing away at the moment (I like to keep you all in suspense) I can say that we are very much working on a freshly made, quality offer which will remind you of the comforts of home. BHS is a very traditional brand and we plan to remain so.
random outpourings 