Leaders Series Mark Cribb Creator & Managing Director Urban Guild

Mark Cribb is the Creator and Founder of Urban Guild, a portfolio of exceptional Hospitality Businesses that includes Urban Beach, a boutique hotel, bistro & cocktail lounge, UrbanReef, a sea front restaurant, Urban Garden, a unique garden, bar and restaurant and The Wood Oven, serving Neapolitan style pizza cooked with fire overlooking the sea.

Marks passion for the artisan, food and celebrating all there is to enjoy about the Hospitality industry saw him flex his creative muscle once again this year with the launch of a new podcast for the independent hospitality sector. 'Humans of Hospitality is a weekly podcast, showcasing stories and insights from the world of hospitality – the human beings rather than the big brands behind our food and drink'. Quite simply, it's compelling listening.

In the latest of the Leaders Series, Mark shares his utterly engaging insight in to the challenges he has overcome to turn Urban Guild in to one of the most dynamic independent brands in the hospitality sector.

What was the inspiration behind Urban Guild?

We’d been “winging it’ for years without really having a coherent strategy behind our growth. There had certainly been reasons behind opening additional venues beyond Urban Beach over the years, mainly centred around elongating our seasons and therefore increasing the spread of revenues across the calendar for what was a very seasonal business. We’d make money in the summer and lose money in the winter and needed to open additional venues to address that challenge.

Urban Renaissance, for example, was in the Russell Cotes museum, a place where people would head inside to escape the rain rather than heading to the beach. This gave us somewhere to sell our freshly baked cakes, cookies and breads on a wet day, to sell product that otherwise would have ended up going to waste.

We opened Jenkins and Sons - it didn’t have a lot of outside space which we felt would enable it to do better in the winter. It’s in a different part of town and we thought that might help to balance the seasonality of our other venues. What we ended up with was multiple venues, but with no clear strategy and a lot of people did not know our venues were connected.

We started to look at how we might start to join things up - a website across all our venues, a loyalty card, buying things in bulk like coffee cups by way of example, but there was no parent brand for all of that. So we bought in some consultants to help us to look at how we start to pull everything together under one brand.

We started off by looking at three things - brand, financials and culture, but branding was the one thing on which it all hung together. We really needed an umbrella brand that we could hang our culture on. The team, who were all working in different venues, could identify with a parent company that would encapsulate a core DNA across those venues.

We actually already had the name. When we opened Jenkins and Sons, we thought about trading as Urban Guild, the ‘Guild’ being a collection of artisans who look after a particular trade in a given town. That definition worked really well for us. In food and drink we represent a wide range of suppliers, whether they make lovely beer, fabulous meat or incredible cheeses, all of those merchants do a wonderful job and our job as a restaurant is to represent those merchants and their amazing goods, put them on a table and not mess it up! We liked the name Guild, what it stood for and represents and that became the name for the company.

What have proved to have been the three biggest challenges of the last five years?

We serve thousands of people each week across our venues in a sector that has hit a wall over the last 18 months. It probably needed to - Venture Capital started to take a real interest in the space and undoubtedly saw the explosive growth in casual dining as an opportunity to make money. However, that opportunity was not seen in the traditional restaurant or hospitality model, but instead by focusing on the property play.

They would buy units, say 50, double that number over a relatively short period of time with the plan to double return on investment. They would flip the business to another fund, who would buy what was now a 100 site business and look to double the number of venues again over a 3 to 5 year period, double their money and so on.

The money was being made from an artificially inflated growth trajectory that ultimately flooded the market with too many restaurants, with chains that all looked vaguely similar, who in a rush to establish a competitive edge, started to compete on price.

We had a plethora of discounts, vouchers, special offers, all in a race to the bottom by businesses that were heavily indebted. However, because of the investment these businesses had attracted and therefore the cash they could call on, they could afford to offer the discounts. At least in the short term, they could afford to operate at a loss to try and drive up covers because cash generation was not an issue. They were not operating on a level playing field with the small local restaurant.

At the same time we’ve had the likes of Groupon coming in to the market with a heavily discounted offer, whilst established businesses like Pizza Express started discounting heavily. All of a sudden, you find yourself competing with someone who was flooding the market with vouchers, who didn’t need to make a profit to survive and had a massive marketing machine behind them.

Luckily, some of those businesses over the last 18 months have started to find their fingers burned as the consumer has made a conscious decision not to see the High Street looking the same shade of beige, formulaic and chain - like, from one end to the other across the country. The ‘Insta - worthy’ generation want to go off and have their photos taken in genuinely interesting places with more authenticity.

The challenge of over supply has also met with the introduction of the national minimum wage that has caused wage costs to spiral. From the human perspective, I am a strong advocate of people being paid as much as possible. We are in a sector where traditionally staff have not been paid as highly as others, competing in a space whereby customers expect their food to be priced at a certain level.

Whilst we have been experiencing hugely over - inflation pay rises and staff costs year on year, we are also experiencing significant rises in food prices, particularly meat. We have to be very careful as to what extent those cost increases impact the customer.

Cashflow is a challenge. We are in a tourist town, a seasonal town. We rely on the sunshine - our main restaurant is on the sea front. In rainy years it’s tough and even in sunny years, you still have to have to manage a restaurant that suffers huge fluctuations in customers. I spoke with someone who has a High Street restaurant with a fluctuation of 8% busiest to quietest month, whereas ours can be as much as 1200% based on warmth and daylight hours!

Recruitment has been the third biggest challenge. Historically we attracted a lot of staff from Australia and New Zealand and perhaps Pakistan and India. That shifted in recent years to become more European. The key for us, as it is for everyone in the hospitality industry, the leisure industry, is the ability to flex our staffing in busy seasons whilst ensuring we have access to the widest possible pool of talent. Brexit has undoubtedly proved a challenge, and perhaps the impact on the pound and the attractiveness of Britain from an earnings perspective has had an impact on the number of people we’ve seen wanting to come here to work for us from within the EU.

What is the one decision you have made that has proved to be the most significant contributor to your success?

Starting! Many people will talk about what they are going to do for years and yet spend time thinking about all the reasons they are not going to do it. It’s that paralysis of analysis, action will always beat intention. It’s said if you’re not growing, you die and so we will constantly be doing things to move forward.

I don’t know if I could pinpoint one key to our success. I can certainly look back at some ideas and think ‘ that was a shit idea I wish we’d not tried it ‘ but we are constantly trying to do things that can add to our business.

For example, when we saw Deliveroo start delivering food in to our homes, my immediate thought was, “well that won’t work for us, proper restaurant quality food simply doesn’t travel well on the back of a motorbike’. That got us thinking, what food does travel well? That ultimately led to us opening the pizza place.

Pizza travels well. However, I wanted to think about how we could do pizza differently from the high street takeaway. Whilst we use the traditions of Italy in terms of the flour and tomatoes, we also use really high quality British produce for the toppings.

We went about setting up our own delivery mechanism, bypassing the 33% delivery charge of a Deliveroo to deliver our own. It was hard work but it was all about spotting trends, our continuing evolution, seeing how we might adapt to be consistent with what we want to achieve at Urban Guild. We learned a tremendous amount from the experience, as we always do.

Despite your success, is there anything looking back that you would have done differently?

Not start!

That’s a tricky one to answer. There are lots of things we’ve done that haven’t worked. We opened Jenkins and Sons ( restaurant ) and ran that for six years and couldn’t make it work, but that was a real learning opportunity. We are now clear that we will only do venues of a certain size in high footfall locations. As a result, we opened Urban Garden back in May, much higher footfall, much bigger place, but perhaps if Jenkins and Sons had worked, would we have been open to doing that?

Some of the things on which we have failed have certainly proved a catalyst to more interesting things. Fail fast, learn fast. The key is to ensure you are learning. There are perhaps things I wish I’d learned quicker, or that had proved less costly, but they have still proved invaluable lessons.

What was the inspiration behind the Humans of Hospitality podcast?

There were a few. I drove through the night to go cycling through the Alps 18 months ago. I’d arrived at a small village at the base of Alp D’Huez at around 7am and walked in to a small local boulangerie, ordered an Espresso and a Croissant and sat watching the world go by. As we sat there, locals would come in to buy their coffee and baguette, bread that would only last 8 hours. We all know with French bread, that if you don’t eat it that day it’s rock solid the next! As I looked out across the village square, I saw a host of similar boulangeries and patisseries with a real vibrancy and energy and I contrasted that image with the one in my mind of people on their way to work in the UK, pressing a button on a coffee machine in a petrol station and the distinct contrast between the two.

Take the bread alone, which typically we will buy in the UK wrapped in plastic, full of preservatives that will ensure it lasts a week. How are we losing our food culture in the UK?

Coming back to what I mentioned earlier, I also reflected on the growth in casual dining in the UK and the venture capital backed model. I just couldn’t work out the finances. How does a burger chain sell 40 units for £100 million? At £2.5 million per unit, I just can’t make the business case stack up.

I don’t speak to anyone who tells me what they love about travelling to France, or Spain, or Italy is that they get to visit all the same restaurants they go to in the UK. People talk about the food culture, they love unearthing that terrific local restaurant or little bar where they can truly experience the culture. With hospitality businesses, what you really remember is how you were made to feel. It’s rarely solely about what you had to eat or drink, it’s the environment, the company, the laughter, the whole experience.

We are at risk of turning hospitality in to a commodity, but I don’t think anybody is doing this consciously. When I talk with people about it, they seem to agree that we should be encouraging the independents, the local providers, the local experience.

I don’t think people are informed enough. I don’t think they understand just how much work goes on behind the scenes, how much love somebody can put in to charcuterie for example. So I went and interviewed Capreolus (Artisan English Charcuterie) to learn about the secrets behind the production of dried and rare breed meats.

I looked at people who dedicate their whole lives to the development of one particular product. William Curley is widely recognised as the best Patissier and Chocolatier in the country. He has spent 13 years getting his Master of Culinary Arts, which I’d describe as the Cooking Olympics. He went back 3 times for something that only takes place once every four years.

Coffee Roasters, Craft Brewers, there are so many different people dedicating their lives behind the scenes to ensure the rest of us can enjoy a huge variety of culinary experiences. Their stories are amazing and yet they don’t supply the big 1000 site chains, they simply can’t because they are too small and remain in many cases under the radar.

When you go to your large chain, your chicken might well be imported from Thailand and your beef from Argentina. Subconsciously, we are losing the locality and personality of the supply chain. I thought that if I start telling the stories and people would listen to these amazing suppliers who are so passionate about what they do, may be next time someone is walking along a High Street, instead of turning left in to the big branded chain, they’ll be encouraged to turn right and go and support that small independent that in turn supports all these people behind the scenes.

It’s not that I hate the large chains. I respect them as they all started small. They give consistency and do a good job. I just don’t think they should be the only option on the High Street. I’m concerned for the industry that we get to a point where the only businesses that can make money are those that have the size and economies of scale to be able to buy in bulk and sell at a lower price. My hope is that people will take the plunge and spend that extra pound or two to experience the quality experience the independent has to offer.

Ultimately the podcast is about celebrating the ‘Humans’ in hospitality as opposed to the brands, to enable the consumer to make conscious rather than sub - conscious decisions about just where our food and drink comes from.

What do the next 3 years look like for Urban Guild and Mark Cribb?

If you’d have asked me 12 months ago, I would have probably said we plan to sit back a while and see how the challenges the sector has faced evolve. We’ve seen the likes of Jamies Italian disappear and Carluccios contracting, Byron Burger going through a CVA and closing down sites. With the exception of Wagamama’s and Nando’s, everyone else seems to be contracting. I would have wanted to see how that was going to play out.

Having said that, there are always interesting opportunities coming along for us. Take Urban Gardens. We were not planning on opening a new restaurant, but it was such a unique space. For me, it’s about how that space makes you feel. When I stood on the terrace overlooking the Bournemouth Gardens I could feel the potential of the space and we ended up going for it as a result.

So there may well end up being other unique or special opportunities that crop up and we might explore them, but otherwise I think it is about going deep as opposed to going wide. By that I mean rather than opening lots of new venues, what can we do better with what we already do and have?

We are looking at acquiring some production space to look at how we can break in to food gifting. We’ve got great cocktail makers, great Bakers, great Chefs. How can we sell the great products they produce through a different channel? Without acquiring the vast expense a new venue incurs?

We’ve set up our own store online, we will do the Christmas markets. We are looking in to offering a personalised range of food and beverage gifting products by post, we do great cocktail kits - our own spiced rum or the mix for a really good Bloody Mary. These are products without any nonsense, without any preservatives or bad stuff, made available to make at home.

That might well lead to frozen food deliveries to the home. We’ve tried delivering fresh food I don’t think the model really works with the quality representative of what Urban

Guild is trying to achieve. However I recognise people want convenience and certainly want to be able to access restaurant quality food at home.

I’d like to look at the dishes our Chef’s make that can be frozen and re - heated at home. Not in the ready meals, preservative market kind of way, but again consistent with and representative of the quality and values of Urban Guild. Just really good food that we can develop that can be in your freezer at home. Clearly I’d love for you to come out for dinner, but if you’re not, I don’t want you to sit at home eating weird shit that is bad for you!

I’m also really excited by the opportunities, perhaps yet unknown, that the podcast can throw up. Perhaps to organise some events around the hospitality industry, get involved in speaking on topics I’m really passionate about in the industry.

For me personally, I was tempted to get out of hospitality at the end of last summer. We’d had a really tough year and with all the changes and challenges the industry is facing. After 15 years I’d started to consider may be my time was done. Time for a new challenge, I’m very aware of the need to diversify.

That being said, that 15 years has given me an insane amount of knowledge that I am adding to all of the time off of the back of the people I am interviewing through the podcast in particular. I am really enjoying being part of the conversation around what we ‘should eat and drink’, not just ‘what do we want to eat and drink’.

From a health perspective, if we know more about where food comes from than the average consumer because it’s our industry, our job, do we have a responsibility to inform? To become more advisors to people? To enable people to live longer, healthier lives?

We are seeing huge health issues, for example around obesity and diabetes. I feel working in the industry we should assume some of the responsibility for helping to address those issues.

The environmental issue is a huge challenge. How are we going to be able to grow enough food to be able to feed 7 billion people (and rising) without screwing up the planet?

I’ve learned so much and I don’t think you should just earn money from your sector without having some moral responsibility to give back. My personal journey may well go towards more of the nutritional and environmental issues and areas that the food and drink industry can address.