Our sector is the most complex of all the real estate asset classes, with multiple brands and numerous stakeholders at every level of operations. Within that complexity are specialist areas such as F&B, which is effectively an industry in its own right. One could almost look with envy at pure restaurant operators; if not for the fact that they’re woken up at 3am by the same challenges that we are.

The industry has faced significant issues over the past few years – from supply chain disruption and inflationary pressures to rising labour costs and the skills drain. For me, the keys to navigating these obstacles without hitting guest satisfaction are: building supplier partnerships and ensuring teams understand and engage with the wider strategy (and with us).

Within Kew Green Hotels we manage properties across multiple flags, which means that we are not taking care of one blanket F&B operation, but a portfolio of nuanced offerings and, when I joined the business, one of the first things I identified was unnecessary complexity across our brands. They all had different ingredient baskets and they all had different F&B offerings, bespoke to that particular brand.

And, although the supply chain has stabilised now since Covid, any intelligent business must realise that you can’t have six different burgers for six different brands because you might not be able to source them. So the solution for us was to rationalise our product ranges and just have the one burger.

In practice this means that the more value-driven brands are now enjoying a higher quality product, whereas the quality has been maintained at the top of the chain scales. Then, when you’ve got scale behind products, it becomes a lot easier to start to renegotiate your costs for each of those ingredients and that’s what suppliers are looking for. That volume makes it a lot more scaleable, a lot more efficient and the supplier doesn’t want to lose that, so they work a lot harder.

For us, it has meant that we have moved away from a transactional relationship of just purchasing products, to a partnership, where the supplier is making just as much of an effort as us to keep our cost base low. In our case they have mitigated all price increases, at a time when we’ve seen a lot of businesses have their cost base of ingredients go up.

By doing this we’ve improved margins on the food by 8% in the past 12 months and beverages, another 4–5%, and that’s without changing anything.

That makes my life a hell of a lot easier, because I don’t have to keep monitoring that basket cost of ingredients to see whether or not I need to pass it on to the guest. And from an operator’s perspective they’re a lot happier, because they have more confidence in what’s going to arrive when they order. This in turn filters down to the guest, because we know we don’t have missing items on the menu.

Supplier partnerships are only part of the picture, team engagement is equally important when delivering a cost-effective menu that is interesting for the guest. If you’re staying for four or more nights, the standard menu can become quite repetitive, so we have introduced the opportunity for chefs to create their own specials. They can create local dishes – using vetted suppliers – and it has been great for guest satisfaction but it’s also much more stimulating and rewarding for the team itself. It has meant that, in a relatively short space of time, we’ve moved away from brand prescriptive menus and given them a lot more individuality.

We check all the menus and we have created templates that generate the cost, allowing us to see where a new item would fit into the sales mix. If it’s low sales, low margin, we don’t mind, because it’s low sales. But if it is a high sales dish with a low margin, that’s when my team would say; “Hang on a minute, we need to adjust that price.”

I wanted us as a team to be more of a support function, working with teams, not just telling everybody what to do and, in the last 12 months we’ve seen a shift in how we are perceived.

People understand our strategy, they understand the directive and they appreciate that they now have more freedom to create what our guest individually needs.

I sometimes think I’m a bit old-fashioned, but we’re a people industry. We are people dealing with people, and we need to do that well. I think a lot of larger businesses are losing that engagement piece; it’s easy to email, it’s easy to text, it’s easy to do a Teams call, but we put feet on the ground every day. I’m still travelling around the country, training all the staff face-to-face. That’s not normally done.

They could get an instruction manual, but I want them to understand that they’re the owners of the business, they’re driving the performance of their individual hotel. For me, that’s what this all comes back to. Strong supplier partnerships help us manage costs, protect quality and create consistency. Engaged teams help us deliver memorable guest experiences. Together, they allow us to navigate a challenging operating environment while ensuring that cost pressures don’t have a negative impact on the people who matter most: our guests.

Because when partnerships are strong and teams are engaged, it’s possible to protect both profitability and guest satisfaction. And in today’s market, that’s one of the most important competitive advantages any hospitality business can have.