WE NEVER WANTED to run a hotel. We were a well-off working couple who lived in a detached house near Cambridge, Hilary a freelance trainer and a governor of one of Britain’s most successful state secondary schools, in her field she was fast becoming something of a guru, the type of person who gets wheeled in at prestigious events and causes everyone under the age of forty to groan into their hand; and I was a director of information technology for a subsidiary of a Public Limited Company, a proper-job plc, and would drive to work each morning in my leather-seated automatic-transmission company motorcar with radio controls on its steering wheel. In the year preceding the one in which we took over our hotel we went to New Orleans in the spring to see the Lousiana swamps and be assured they were the very original of the one you experience in Disneyland, to Italy in the summer to wait for the swifts to finish screaming round the Arena in Verona so that Verdi can creak on long into the darkness, and to Moscow and St Petersburg over Christmas and New Year to eat smoked fish and beetroot and get snow on our boots. We were wealthy enough to afford both the excesses and the excuses.
There was a nagging worry, which was where was all this heading? We were facing the difficulty that many people go through on their rise and fall through life; we might have to leave behind the technical expertise that we had become so proficient at and become a managerial company-person if we were to take a step further. We might compromise our social principles for the sake of comfort and convenience, then lose our spirit, our independence, our mind and our job one after the other. Of course not everybody is afflicted by this, some enjoy being the part and some can hang on in for ever, but we were too moody, too well-read, too mercurial in a true liberal Cambridge sort of way, too far gone to be a rescuable case as far company-person qualifications were concerned. Our detached house was in fact a pink-painted bungalow with more flat-roofed extensions than a toilet block in a camp site, we reckoned that looking at it from the outside was everybody else’s problem. For us, who mostly saw it inside, it was lovely. But we’d have to move if we were to play the part properly.
We therefore considered developing our own business interests in our specialist subjects; a combination of education, training and IT. Then we could put off joining the human race for a little longer. And it happened that in the area around Cambridge there was a market with a gaping hole in it waiting to be filled. There was practically nowhere that a group or organisation could go to hold a small- to medium-sized training course or meeting at reasonable cost. A meetings organiser could go for the grand and expensive, or for the cheap and dog-end strewed, but had very little choice in-between and what there was tended to get booked up months in advance.
What an opportunity! We would buy a property that could be adapted for such events. Hilary could develop her training activities complete with built-in venue, and could market her courses at low risk and thus be more adventurous. I could move towards developing the business which, since the need was so manifestly there, had every chance of offering opportunities for a new direction and challenge without the annoying downside of asking me to become somebody else.
First we spent numerous weekends following up estate agent brochures looking for the perfect place. It took over a year to find a suitable house, and eventually we did. The house was a bit peculiar, having been reduced to a third of its original asking price before we agreed it might be worth a look. Someone who could not afford it had purchased it in the credit-rich 1980s and had presumably got stuck with negative equity in a big way. The house was being sold by a building society. Someone, maybe the same someone, had been in to steal all the Victorian cast-iron fireplaces but had evidently been disturbed, so the fireplaces were still there, though stacked up against the walls. The erstwhile owner had attempted to install a plush, furry, modern en-suite bathroom in one room and this was about a quarter finished, but apart from that the house fulfilled just about all the items on our needs list. It was quiet with panoramic views, it had plenty of car parking, it was a characterful house, it had large rooms which could be used for meetings, and it was near enough to our existing work to make the transitional period, while we converted it, low-risk.
We did the sums, drew up a business plan, got a professional builder to look for any structural defects we might have missed, and then tried to find someone to lend us the money.
No chance! Not if it is going to be a business. And anyway, why do respectable people like you who have well paid jobs want to be running a business? My advice to you is to stick with your current positions – more secure. In the financial climate of the early 1990s, if you bought a house and turned it into a business it immediately lost thousands from its value. That this was so was partly a hangover from the 80s credit boom, when there had developed the attitude that the more a business borrowed the richer everyone would become. Such debts had had to be written off and banks now viewed a business as a surefire loser. Far safer to have a steady job, the bank manager told us. Then you can buy a big house and we shall lend you lots and lots of money. But a business? We don’t have any confidence in a business. Businesses lose money. And anyway, you are earning more than me, wince, wince, and I am mightily envious, (this last seen in the eyes rather than spoken).
So we could not get a mortgage of any size on a house that was to be turned into a business, and we could not buy business premises to undertake our vision because there weren’t any – that was the underlying reason there was such a shortage in the market. It took us a while to come to this realisation, since it wasn’t being reported at the time, as to do so would have been too inflammatory a position for the government of the day to accept. The early 1990s British government liked the image of lots of small entrepreneurs stimulating the growth of the economy, free from the evils of lifelong employment contracts and national subsidy. Trouble was, the bankers only agreed with them while somebody else was doing the lending.
What could we do? Someone suggested we might go to the specialist estate agencies dealing with hotels. There are a few of these in the country. We were told that we should have to buy a going concern, or better still, a gone concern.
We found that, had we wanted to buy a hotel and turn it into a house, that would have been financially a very sensible thing to do. Hotels in receivership could be had for amazingly low prices compared to a house of the same size. We could have bought a dysfunctional hotel, turned it into a dwelling, and entertained our guests in style. The bank manager would have been happy. Our work colleagues would have been happy. Our parents would have been happy. Everybody would have been happy except for us, who would have asked ourselves, privately and post drinks-party of course, where it was we were heading, with a resigned understanding of the rhetorical nature of the question.
The problem with buying such a hotel and keeping it as a hotel was nearly always location. The failed hotels tended to be on an island in a old trunk road that had been by-passed, overlooking the dual carriageway and ten miles from the nearest slip road, or they were next to a shopping centre in Great Yarmouth, or they were on double yellow lines in some hard-to-find and hard-to-park place like Wisbech. The hotel agents were very keen to sell us these and talked about what good value we would be getting, which was true in a sense. Perhaps we would have to look further afield. In devising your wish list, you know from the start that you may not be able to gain the ideal, there may have to be an element of compromise. Further afield was perhaps a possibility.
We sent off for details of properties and would receive the write-up boasting of wheelback chairs in the dining room, which always seemed to us a very odd thing to identify as a selling point, but was apparently of great significance to those in the know. Wheelback chairs became one our key rejection criteria. They spoke of a style that was not ours. They spoke of deep gloom and failure. There may be someone in the world who says, oooh!, at the thought of a wheelback chair, the estate agents obviously thought so. We have yet to find who these people are, though.
We visited a number of places as potential buyers or incognito, as guests. Sometimes, we thought the location might be OK, but something seemed to be wrong. For example there was a hotel for sale in the North Yorkshire Moors. We drove up in the leather-seat-mobile, checked in, went for a walk in the wild and blowy local terrain, then bounced back all a-glow for the dinner. We ordered a starter; pear with a blue cheese dressing. Sounds good. But the pear was from a tin. Oh dear. Why do they do this? We could do better than this. Never mind, we had a pleasant enough evening. All the other couples who were eating came in after us, though, plodded through their dinner with barely a word to each other, went to the lounge for coffee still polite but silent, then disappeared somewhere as ghostly as they had come, we saw them come, we saw them go. This place needs jollying up, we thought, is there something wrong with it? Could we make it work?
The following morning we were surprised, upon looking out the window, to see the ground covered with a number of inches of snow. We did not really expect this in October.
Neither did anybody else. There outside the hotel were the other guests, with their steaming exhausts, grit, shovels and slippy Wellington boots, struggling, with a great deal of huff and puff, to get their cars away from the hotel, which was located in something of a dip. The owner was out there looking appropriately sweaty and concerned, helping with the huffing, puffing, and digging. I thought, well, there are no steep drops or walls on either side of the approach road, I think I’ll take a run at it. Which I did, or rather the leather-seat-mobile did, and with a little bit of slewing it was up to the top in one. Hilary told me I should not be such a bighead, I might just have easily slid off the road and then I would not be looking so smug; showing all these poor people up just because I have a big car that somebody else has paid for, with leather seats and radio controls on the steering wheel.
We did not know it at the time, but we were actually learning a lesson about our forthcoming customer base, who not only have nothing to say to each other over dinner, but also tend to make a gourmet meal not some much out of their dinner, but out of anything to do with motor cars and the weather, and especially the two combined. We had assumed that, like us, our fellow guests would be people with too much to do, who sometimes take a risk which does not work out and then have even more to do. They weren’t, but we were naïve and inexperienced then, we did not know what we know now, that there are two sorts of people in the world, those with too much to do and . . .
Anyway, we did not buy that hotel. As always the amount of expensive alterations that would be needed to turn the place to anything approaching our needs made the prospect beyond practical hope, and it had wheelback chairs, to add to the refurbishment costs.
Then one weekend, portents appeared. Hilary was running a training course near Cockermouth and I was due in Birmingham for a meeting on Monday morning so we thought it might be fun to spend the weekend in Cumbria rather than Cambridge. The Monday morning drive to Birmingham would, at that time, take a similar amount of time from either place. The course venue organisers kindly allowed us to stay for the weekend in the grand house where the training course was to take place. Couldn’t be better. We got some estate agents’ details of hotels in the area – this had become a habit wherever we went.
We looked at one or two hotels for sale on Sunday afternoon and thought that one had at least something to be said for it in that we didn’t instantly rule it out with a resigned shake of the corporate head at a vision of what to do with the wheelback chairs as we drove away. Was it a possibility? We at least didn’t spend the rest of the evening musing to ourselves, “How do they get away with it?”
In fact we did not have the opportunity to muse much at all, because we could not find our evening’s accommodation. Somehow, we had gone up the wrong side of the valley. After driving around in the dark and rain and eventually deciding that the other side of the hill might be greener and discovering that was just as dark and rainy and devoid of familiar signposts, we eventually stumbled entirely randomly across the place where we were staying, pulled into the drive and to our amazement found the car park full of Mercedes’, BMWs and Jaguars. We eventually found a parking spot behind the tradesman’s entrance, crept round the front of the house, peered in through a chink in the curtains, and to our surprise saw a man in evening dress playing a grand piano, his slicked hair all a-bouncing, arms flying wildly, while a collection of what were presumably local worthies sat seriously watching in their finery, their chins on their hands, their stomachs on their knees.
We slipped quietly upstairs for a shower before bed and were commenting on how especially creaky the floorboards were in that particular room, when suddenly the geography of the place came to us. We were creaking heavily right above the head of the mad pianist! We spent the evening moving from bed to bathroom and back edging round the room sideways with our palms to the walls.
The following morning I planned to get a 5am start in my business suit and tie so as to be professionally on-time for the meeting I was due to attend in Birmingham, and the house caretaker had kindly left out a key to open the gate to the drive to let me out. But the key would not open the padlock. Was there another way out? No. Could I get the car through the pedestrian gate? No. Try again. Still no luck. And again. Still no. Is it the wrong key? Back to the house to see whether another key or a note had been left out. Nothing. Only one thing for it, have to wake the caretaker. Knock, knock, knock on his door. Eventually an upstairs window opened and a man in pyjamas poked out his head.
Fortunately, the caretaker was very nice about it. He agreed that the fault of the situation lay entirely with the padlock, which seemed to be reluctant to accept keys. His master key caused it to spring open as if it had been springing open all morning, but clearly there must be something wrong with the key I had been given. Being of a friendly Cumbrian disposition he then had the customary fifteen minute chat about the state of the world in general, during which time the chances of getting to Birmingham on time were diminishing rather worryingly.
Anyway, not for nothing di they give me a shiny fast company motor car – well, actually they did give it to me for nothing but that did not make it any the less whizzy. Amazingly, I got to the meeting in Birmingham with seconds to spare. And the day-long meeting was depressing in the extreme. I did not want to be here, among these people in stiff suits and padded frocks, some talking, some nodding so seriously. I wanted to be busy getting on with the next stage in my life.
The omens were too demanding to be ignored. Follow this up, they said. Go to Cumbria, where life is fun and men in pyjamas have conversations as the sun rises, do not fester among a group of ponderous people in an office somewhere, where you fit like a tree dweller at a cocktail party. So follow it up we did. We made an offer on the hotel. The building was too small, only six letting rooms. It was in the wrong place, Sedbergh, Cumbria was not a destination on everyone’s lips, nor very much on anyone’s route to anywhere and certainly not an easy drive for those we perceived to be our target market. The hotel had a rather uninspiring name, Oakdene – sounded like a house in the suburbs of Croydon. It would mean a dramatic burning of boats as neither of had much prospect of work this far north. But it felt – not right exactly but crazy in an inevitable kind of way.
Like everywhere else we had seen, there was money to be spent, even after buying the property. The woman we were buying from was of a particular style that might best be described as Old British Guest House. She was a heavy smoker, with a cleavage and gold slippers, but essentially good-hearted and naturally keen to be helpful, to us as much, we suspected, as to her guests.
The problem was that her style was not ours. The immediate things that struck us as being in urgent need of change included the white painted woodchip wallpaper in the bedrooms, the candlewick bedspreads, the mess of brochures and leaflets pinned to a sagging baize covered board in the porch. We did not know it at the time but a large percentage of the bed sheets had cigarette burn holes, and we just had to do something about her ‘deluxe’ room, where the ceiling paper was held up in part with drawing pins.
The ‘deluxe’ room seemed to be ‘deluxe’ mainly on account of its bathroom, which boasted an avocado suite with bath and shower over. The room also had a brass bed, which was nice. The downsides of the room, apart from the drawing pins, were the avocado bath itself, which when you climbed into it created a jagged gap between itself and the wall tiles, and the bedroom’s fitted carpet. The carpet itself was perfectly OK, but when the wind blew strong from the south west, it had a tendency to lift as the draft penetrated the gaps in the walls, making walking on it a bizarre experience, like being on a real flying carpet, psychedelic in feel but rather cold round the ankles.
But the main diversity between the owner’s style and ours was the food. She showed us her menu. It was printed on parchment-style paper and had an air of permanence about it. Chinese dim-sums, American deep-fried clams, prawn cocktail. We could not make head or tail of it. Where, or more particularly what, was the style? From what she told us it seemed like all the vegetables were bought and cooked fresh, they seemed to be the best part of what was on offer, but there was no vegetarian option on the menu. We asked her about guests who express a preference not to eat meat.
“Phaw! Don't ask!”, she exclaimed. “I go into kitchen. Say we got bloody vegetarians in dining room. Paul chucks pans into the air, stomps about, curses and swears. Then we generally do them a pizza. They like pizzas you know, bung a bit of salad with it. They’ll say to me after they’ve eaten it: ‘Ooh, that were luvly’”.
The owner realised that we were new to the business and did her best to be helpful. She opened the refrigerator and showed us so plates of salad, ready made up. “Do the salad as a garnish. The people round here like to have their garnish. And you have to remember to put plenty of onion with it. You’ll be in trouble if you don’t. Ooh, they do like to have onion with their garnish.”
It seemed that this plate of garnish was served with everything. I had a phrase in German running through my head as she was explaining this: gar nicht (absolutely not). Garnish, gar nicht.
When we asked her about serving coffee, she replied, “Ooh, I give ’em instant. Put a couple of spoonfuls in a jug and serve it as freshly-ground. They won’t bloody notice!”.
“They won’t bloody notice!” This was to become one of our saviour phrases, to keep us from crying when we made our mistakes in the early days. It still is.
The business we were being asked to buy had a style and there were, and are, people who respond well to that style. Whether there are enough people who respond favourably to such a style it is hard to be sure. How do you sell it? Do you put a sign outside that says, “Come and meet our proprietor. Watch her drop the cigarette ash down her cleavage as she serves you a perfectly spherical and uniform disc of turkey meat with brown gravy and GARNISH”. That would probably work, but not for us. We don’t smoke.
To be fair, our seller was far too experienced and professional to serve dinner with a cigarette in her mouth, but still the style seemed as if she might. We never wanted to run a hotel. We wanted to run a training and meetings centre. It requires a different image. The lady with the gold slippers asked if we would be prepared to keep her son on as chef. He had no other job he could go to. We refused. We might have been green, but had been around long enough to know that there is only one thing you can do that is worse than criticising someone’s children and that is to criticise their mother. We wanted to alter the style and . . . here’s the golden rule above all other golden rules – don’t go into competition with mothers!
THEN WE HAD TO GET SOMEONE to lend us some money to buy. One of the first things you do in these circumstances is to take a deeper look at the business you are contemplating buying to make sure that the accounts you have been given have not been too outrageously overstated. The figures we were presented with in fact showed such a low level of business activity that they were either correct or had been cooked to avoid tax liabilities, but in either case the effect for us was the same, we were buying a business which was not booming. This was OK; we did not want the business in its current form so we would not be paying for something we did not intend to use.
How much is a hotel business worth anyway? A small hotel, pub or restaurant runs on the personality and reputation of its management. If the front of house people survive a change of ownership and there is no intention to make dramatic changes to the image of the place, then the goodwill of the business can have some value. But if the image of the establishment is going to change then the chances are that the existing customers will choose to go somewhere else. So the business as it stands is worth very little. Maybe its turnover was impressive. So what? You are going to change it. This is a difficult problem for somebody selling a small hospitality business to have to face. All of their hard work over the years will only count for something if the people they are selling to wish to continue the business in essentially its present form, which in a changing world where money does not grow on trees is unlikely to be a wise move by the buyer. All there really is to sell is the building and the furniture.
That is what we bought. Though even then it is not necessarily easy to finance. The problem is that it is hard to get a loan to buy a small hotel business because what is being bought is not really the business and it is hard to get a loan to buy the property because it is to be used for business. Really, it would make more sense to do what almost every other type of business does and rent its premises. Quite a number of hotels and pubs are available on leasehold. The difficulty with a small hotel in this regard comes with the need to be there. Someone running a small hotel and living in a house elsewhere will find that their house becomes their holiday cottage. To lease a hotel or guest house and live there too is perfectly possible, but that means you are likely to be a bit strapped for cash when the time comes to move on, which could be unwise.
A trap, a trap! We would have to buy the property, live and work in the business, and if we fail, we lose the lot, home, source of income, furniture, fittings, everything. Are we mad or something? Er . . .
Yes. So what was our small hotel going to be? A guesthouse? A restaurant with rooms? Or was it trying to be everyone’s expectation of a small hotel at the time, the same as a large hotel but smaller? We had to bear in mind that if option three then we would probably have to look towards the luxury end of the market to get the sums to add up, and invest a lot of money that we had no chance of raising, and if option two then we would have to know something about running a restaurant. Little choice, really, we chose the first option, the guesthouse image, and with the help of a mortgage broker recommended to us by the estate agent managed to find a building society who would lend us the money to buy the house and furniture for business use.
Even so, the basis upon which the loan was made was the same as it would be had we been purchasing a house: two-and-a-half times current salary, with 30% down as a deposit. That we would probably lose our current salary soon after we moved was not seen as a negative factor in the calculation. British banks and building societies are famous for their belief in the value of the short-term. They are not geared up for lending money to finance a business venture; they prefer to look at what your assets are now. If you lose your assets the moment they have lent you the money then that is not in the equation. British banks and building societies think short-term. It is their Unique Selling Point.
For us this happened to be all right. We were in well-paid work, we had sold our house and moved into rented accommodation so could prove our assets to the lenders. All the numbers added up in two columns and the totals came out as a balance. The building society lent us the money to buy.
We suspected, though, because we had our software and some experience in using it, that the numbers did not stack up at all. With no experience of the hospitality business, we had calculated that the minimum number of rooms to make a profit on was eight, and we were getting six. We had calculated that the minimum number of people to be eating per night in a restaurant before you pass the break-even point was about seven, and to achieve this we would need a year-round average occupancy rate of 58%. It is certainly possible to achieve 58% average annual occupancy, but very few establishments in rural locations actually do, so the lenders were, in effect, setting us up to fail. Why would they do this? Do they want the property at a knock down price? Surely not. Do they want to lumber people with debts that last a lifetime with no chance of ever being repaid? No. Much too small fry. Why then? We now believe that there are some sensible people in the finance business. These tend to be either the older guys, who can tell a poor or good risk by rack of eye and twist of gob, by the feel of the thing based upon experience, often they are the freelancers, running their own business. For the officials, though, the company-crawlers who follow the rules with a serious will, the reality of whether someone is being set up to fail probably does not come into it. What human being would want to work for a building society anyway?
It would have been so much better, for the country as a whole as well as for us, if there were someone from the lenders who could have worked with a small business such as ours to advise on taking forward-looking decisions, designed to improve our income and our profitability, thus enabling us to afford to borrow more over time and so expand our business further. That way everyone would win. Some hope! As it was, we were not so stupid as we looked. Both of us had saleable skills that we could fall back on. I can write computer systems and Hilary can train people to train people. Neither of us knows really why anyone else cannot seem to do this so well as we are told that we can, but while the praise is there, we shall not be complaining about it.
So I informed by boss of my provisional plans to move on. He could not keep the smile from his face, but was able to keep his professional composure enough to suggest that, should the hotel option go ahead, he would propose that I spread the three-months notice to quit that was defined in my contract over a year, working on computer programs – for me like relaxing in an armchair with a crossword puzzle – for the company, from home. Hilary gets booked up for training courses months in advance, so she had plenty of fee-paying commitments. Between us we could probably have survived financially for a year with no hotel income at all. So despite the dangers in getting involved in any way with the finance industry we went ahead and bought the place. We were taking a risk that was recoverable. The building society were taking as risk that was, well . . . bizarre, though as it turned out, they did not suffer any losses.
Next, the vendor decided not to sell.
Oh well, we began looking around for other things to do and Hilary got to a two-person shortlist for what some would regard a prestigious job. Then the vendor of the hotel fell ill and decided she had to sell urgently. This coincided with Hilary coming second in a job race and before we knew where we were we were moving. Contracts were exchanged on a Wednesday and the deal completed on the Friday of the same week. Friday morning we threw some of our sentimental belongings, for example the pussycat, into our cars and drove to our new home and business. Friday afternoon we welcomed our first guests.
But we never wanted a hotel. We wanted a meeting centre for training events. Circumstances had meant that the closest we could get was a small hotel. Circumstances in the form of guests in the hall meant that we had to run a small hotel at least in the short-term. So we had to learn how to do it.
I had always pontificated to anyone who bemoaned their position in life that everything a person did was a consequence of what they did yesterday. You do not wake up one morning to find that you are suddenly the receptionist at a Japanese sauna bath, you steer your life; what you do today will be a consequence of your previous experience and that if you want tomorrow to be different, now is the time to be sowing the seeds. I had been on the management course, you see.
And then here we were, smiling at some guests who wanted a dinner and some B&B. How did that happen? Just yesterday we were . . . and what about that theory of consequences? But no time for analysis, to the kitchen!
One of the things that shocked us was the apparent dearth of commercial sense that seemed to pervade our new-found profession. Very few people we spoke to seemed to have any idea of what they were providing, who they were trying to sell to, how much to charge, what their profitable and non-profitable activities were. All of this seemed to be done on fantasy and hope and this was a surprise to us 1980’s hard-nose business-indoctrinated types. Evidently it had not been too much problem during the borrow-and-spend 1980’s, when it seems that anyone putting a sign on their door saying, ‘bed ’n brekfust’, could be sure of someone knocking. Guesthouse owners in the Lake District during this time told us that the only way to get any peace during the summer season was to turn off all the lights and sit in the cellar with earplugs. A No Vacancies sign had little effect.
But now in the 1990’s, the customers had disappeared. Surveys by the local tourist board asked traders what they attributed their downturn in business to and the most common reply was, ‘lack of customers’. Not a joke this, a large number really did give this as a supposedly intelligent answer to the surveys. What had been demonstrated was that in times of excess demand it is not difficult to make money. In more ordinary times the traders who have nothing special to offer, either in terms of product (or brain, it seemed), will struggle. We had something special to offer, but not as a hotel. This meant we could view the thing a bit more objectively than someone who came in learning the ropes, though for the time being we had to be doing the ropes. The industry was really in such a sorry state that two amateurs like ourselves could come in green and be swinging the ropes straight off.
First though, we had to find out how to undertake the practicalities: how to stock up on food and drink; how to cook effectively for dozens of people at a time; how to keep the linen clean; how to satisfy the Health and Safety regulations; how to stay sane in a crisis; how to make a guest feel special; how to get any guests at all.
How did we do this? On that Friday when we and the still rather heavily-sedated pussycat took a long journey north, we did not have any time to think about best practice and procedures, we just had to get on with it. Suddenly, at the ages of 47 and 48, we had changed our careers; we were now in the hospitality business. Juniors again.
We had some bookings. In addition to the guests arriving that very day the outgoing proprietor had announced proudly that on the forthcoming Saturday we were presenting a dinner for fourteen Methodists from Ormskirk – worthwhile money this, she assured us, she was visibly aggrieved that we were gaining this business on account of the prompt sale. She told us what we were cooking for them too: roast lamb.
The first thing we had intended to do was to change the menu, though unfortunately it was too late to do anything about the roast lamb. In fact we produce quite a palatable roast lamb. The problem with roast lamb in the UK is not how well you cook it, the problem is that however you present it, it will not beat the best roast lamb the customer has ever had. The finest roast lamb in his experience will have been cooked by his mother. Lesson number one – I’ve said this already – never go into competition with somebody’s mother.
The first night of our new career we muddled through, being upfront with our guests and cracking a bottle of champagne for them. Hilary’s mother had been a domestic science teacher so she felt confident enough from learning at mother&rsquo's knee that she could do the cooking. My grandfather had once managed a café in Holborn so I did the front of house. It’s not so difficult really; just copy the people you’ve seen before, who can do it with a flourish.
The following night was our pre-ordained roast lamb dinner, for the Ormskirk Methodists. Having at the time none of the experience we have now, we were not to know that people from Ormskirk and Methodists constitute two of the most demanding classifications of people we ever have to deal with. There are reasons for this, slightly different in each case.
Methodists, relative to other beliefs and creeds, seem to have a social shortcoming in their difficulty with expressing anything approaching a gushing appreciation. If you visit the museum in Bristol dedicated to the life and work of John and Charles Wesley you will, it is true, not get much of impression of cuddles and kisses from the life histories of the founders of the movement, but that is probably equally true of the origins of many shared-interest groups, yet as time has gone by most groups have become more attuned to others among whom they find themselves. Not so the Methodists. One of our weirdest experiences in running our hotel came after some years, when we hosted a group of Methodists for a week of rambling in the hills. During the entire week we were certain they could not be enjoying themselves because, though they did not actually complain as such, they never seemed to say thank you and mean it. When the time came for them to leave, they packed up their cars without a smile, and were just on the point of driving away when the organiser of the group returned to the house from the car park, sought us out, and told us that he just wanted to say how impressed his friends had been, with the ‘cleanliness’. Then he shook our hand, returned to his car, and drove away glumly. Two weeks later we received the most complimentary letter through the post, telling us what an exemplary time his walking group had had, and especially how much they had enjoyed the wonderful food we had provided them with. We had been doing it all just right all along, we just had not had the feedback to know that we were. That’s the Methodists. I think the problem may be that they don’t drink much booze.
Whether this tendency of Methodists we have played host to is general among the faith, whether the jollity-eschewing countenance of the Wesley brothers had pervaded down the generations, or whether it is just that they tend to avoid getting tanked up on alcohol, we are not too sure, but a phenomenon it certainly seems to be, and on our second evening in our new occupation, what were we playing host to but a group of Methodists! And from Ormskirk!
Ormskirk in a small town in East Lancashire surrounded by fields of potatoes. It is only a half-hour train ride from Liverpool, so is a city dormitory for many. It is a reasonably well-heeled town with some pleasant features and is a place that many people in the country have never heard of. The respectable backwater nature of the place means that its inhabitants tend, in our experience, to have an old-fashioned view of what is right and what is wrong. This firm view of the rightness and wrongness of what they see, hear and eat about them is not confined to people from Ormskirk, of course, it is somewhat typical of large areas where cosmopolitanism means little more than the occasional meal at a Chinese restaurant, that someone told them about once, but for us Ormskirk came to epitomise the attitude. Though of course we did not know anything of that at this early stage.
Right, in terms of the dinner, meant that what they needed as a starter, to precede their roast lamb, was prawn cocktail, essentially shelled prawns in a pink mayonnaise. A man arrived in the afternoon to check that this would be available.
Prawn cocktail is more than a dish, it’s a social statement. It is very much a dish of the 1960’s and 70’s and had practically died out in city centres and the cosmopolitan South East, in fact it had become so passé in London that it was at the point of coming back into fashion. To ask for it in certain social layers in England was, and probably still is is some places, to make a point that says, “I want what I feel comfortable with, what I could order with panache when I was young and handsome. I know what I like. I like what I know. And what I know, from my days when I was impressing my wife with my urbane worldliness, is prawn cocktail”. This is what the Ormskirk Methodists demanded. Strange for Godly sorts really, to want something representing no-change, as the one thing in life you cannot have is no-change, no-change makes an anti-life, anti-Christ statement in a sense, because if you believe in a God-ordained plan, then until you face the final certainty, that you will die, about the only thing you can be absolutely sure of is that you will be faced with change followed by more change. It has always been so, people who believe in plans from on high, will know that if there is a plan, it must be a plan for change. But we thought we had better not get into a theological discussion, on our first big night, and under the circumstances.
So we made a prawn cocktail, which is one of the simplest dishes imaginable so is no great hardship. Actually no, it is not that simple, if you make the mayonnaise properly. We had just started. Our mayonnaise was coming out of a jar, mixed with some tomato ketchup to make it pink and sweet, so the folks will like it. This is NOT how we intend to continue, we reminded ourselves.
I had trouble in the bar, too. The Ormskirk Methodists wanted a confident-looking barman whom they could be snooty to, whereas that is not my style. If I don’t know what a drink is, I ask the customer. I pride myself on being human wherever possible.
“You look so uncomfortable”, said one of the Ormskirk Methodists, *ldquo;Haven’t you been on a training course?“ This last question is a stock-in-hand of the snootily-inclined, especially those who are concerned to hide from anything that attacks the bounds of their order of things. It means, don’t do anything unusual, or I shall not know how to behave and then I might not look like a big chap.
“No, I’ve only been here a day, I don’t know where anything is, and I’m in grave danger of running out of pineapple juice, since there’s been such a run on it, with you lot guzzling little else but the stuff, and what is more I’m the world’s worst barman!”
“Well, it’s fortunate we’re all Methodists here, because that means we’re more tolerant.“
I took an opportunity of excusing myself while I went to the kitchen to see how Hilary was getting on with the cooking, and to tell her the story so far.
“I’d punch him in the teeth”, she said.
I went back to the bar, but the chap’s poor teeth obviously had an existence of their own and it seemed a shame to take it out on them. I got my own back though.
“I’m a retired VAT inspector“, he told me next, rather patronisingly as if this were another area of the business I would be inadequately prepared to cope with, “I advise people about VAT, if you ever need any help with your VAT, you can give me a call”.
“Oh, VAT! That’s easy, that is! I can handle VAT returns standing on my head, it’s running a bar that I need help with – that’s a much more demanding subject than VAT. VAT – simple stuff!”
It amazed us at the time, but the party went away full of smiles, shaking me my the hand and laughing, feeling generally proud of themselves for having been so kind to us in our first-time difficulties, having had a dinner which they said they enjoyed the taste of, and if they ever come back, I shall pretend to be out.
That is the trick, if you can do it, make your customers feel proud of themselves. Make them feel they have achieved something, or failing that, gained something. That was one of our first real lessons.
On this occasion I was greatly encouraged by two of the other guests, an undertaker and his wife, who stood in the bar drinking pints of beer, occasionally giving me an clenched-fist African-style salute and mouthing, “You tell ’em, Bas!”.
We took stock. Can one make a business out of serving prawn cocktail and roast lamb to Methodists? Hmmmm.
And how was the dinner? Some of the lamb went out not hot enough. We knew that because the Methodists had lost no time in telling us so, but we knew that anyway. How do you keep it hot for large numbers? After all, fourteen is not so large a number. I telephoned my friend Colin, who has done this sort of thing hundreds of times before.
“Well, there are essentially two solutions. You can get it cooked in advance and then keep it hot in warming trays or you flash it under the grill to finish it off, but the best way is to pour a hot sauce over it at the last minute. Water holds heat for longer, you see, so the sauce will stay hot and no one will notice that the meat underneath it is tepid.”
“And what does that do to the taste?”
“You hope they are all too pissed to notice.”
“What, fourteen Methodists?”
“I’m used to doing weddings for 200, where they all want roast lamb so you have to do this sort of thing, taste doesn't come into it, you just need a hot sauce and an army of ducks to get it out there at record speed.”, (Ducks in this context is the technical term for women in black and white dresses), “But if you can’t get the ducks, I can give you some recipes for some brilliant sauces. No flour, just reductions.”
“I can just see it, they’ll be asking for theirs without the gravy because their mother always served that in a stainless steel gravy boat”.
”Yes. Roast lamb can be difficult. I’d avoid that if I were you, too tricky to get right. Now, I’ve got some brilliant recipes for flash-grilled chicken. Would you like me to send them to you?”
The previous owner had liked this group of Methodists. They were among her best customers. Hmmmmm.
Such a lot to do, such a lot of money to be spent. No hope of borrowing any more because the lenders had done their bit, so far as they were concerned. To have invested enough to give the hotel some style and appeal would have paid off in time, that we knew. But sufficient investment in the short-term was out of the question; we would just have to take it slow and gentle.
Starting with the food. I had a feeling that, rather than do a poor to medium job on the food, we may be better advised not to do any food at all, or at least, just do breakfast. This was an option, but it raised the question of whether we would get any guests if they could not get dinner; whether we would be cutting off a source of income beyond just the restaurant. In a country area, where there is not a charming bistro on every corner, or even a charming bistro at all, the accommodation-provider is pretty-well obliged to produce dinners, otherwise there will be no dinner, and the customers are unlikely to return to the door for that.
There was something else about the food, too. If we did it well we could use it as a selling point. It was something we could improve dramatically with a minimum of investment.
We looked around at other establishments in the area. What sort of dining experience were they selling to their guests? And here, there was something odd. For where we had come from, in the expanding fast-changing wealthy south east of the country, to have presented such as we were universally seeing now, would have been to tell your customers to go elsewhere. Here, egg mayonnaise and prawn cocktail seemed to be absolutely everywhere. Nothing necessarily wrong with egg mayonnaise or prawn cocktail of course, it all depends on how well they are done – it wasn’t that, it was the sameness, the lack of variety, the this-is-the-only-way-to-do-it feel that was so depressingly puzzling, for we knew that the ways of this area were not going to spread down to the wealthy south, it was going to be the other way round, and yet it seemed that we were being told we would have to invest in the past.
Things were changing in the food business, the fourteen Ormskirk Methodists who would be miffed to contemplate anything outside the realm of prawn cocktail and roast lamb was not the market of tomorrow. This was our belief, as absolute amateurs in 1993, and we could not have been more right. In fact the tastes of the British diner had been changing dramatically over the previous twenty years or more, but the 1990’s was to see a shift more rapid than probably anyone would have predicted. To have maintained the existing food regime at our hotel would have been to make a grave error. Fortunately for us, we stuck with our intuition. Though it would mean setting up what the theorists call a discontinuity in the market, we knew that.
The urgently pressing jobs in our newly-acquired hotel were essentially three. We had to have a falling-down chimneystack repaired, we had to get our garden pond repaired, and we had to do something with the menus.
We knew about the chimneystack before we bought the house. The lender’s surveyor had detected it and this had meant we needed to contact a local builder before moving in, to see that the job could be done as quickly as possible, before any masonry fell on someone’s head. We were given the telephone number of a builder and called him on his mobile.
“Aye”, he said, “I can see it now. I’m just working up on t’hill behind and I can see it from here. Right twisted it is. Looks like it could come down any minute.”
Thanks. So that job was pretty urgent.
The first adornment to our new venture was therefore roof-high scaffolding, the first thing you saw upon approaching from the bend in the road. Terribly depressing for us and tending to play on the mind a bit.
Among the first guests we inherited in our bookings book were a French couple and their daughter from the suburbs of Paris. We found when they arrived that only the daughter spoke any English at all and this not much, so I, as the host, naturally felt I should converse with them in French.
This seemed to be a sensation. The other guests listened to me checking them in at reception. An Englishman speaking French! They came to congratulate me, with a great evidence of awe in their voice. The French trio were delighted. In a fortnight’s holiday travelling the length of England and around Scotland, this, their final night in the country, was the first time a hotelier or member of the hotel staff had attempted to speak to them in French.
Is this not disgraceful? Do the people who run tourism businesses want any customers or what? At that time we were new to the business. We did not know that people in the hospitality industry are typically of the, ‘We don’t need to speak any foreign languages, everyone speaks enough English to get them by’, school. In other words the customer has to do it my way, and by the way, I’d like lots of customers please.
Maybe everyone does speak enough English to get them by. It depends on what you mean by getting by. Our French visitors had been travelling through Scotland for the best part of two weeks. They had apparently drunk no whisky and eaten no smoked salmon and, worst of all, sampled no porridge. How would they know to ask for it? We sold them all three. Of course, they did not like any of them very much, especially the porridge, but that is not the point. We were selling them Scotland, quite irrelevantly, but better for them to go home having had a bite of Scotland in England, than not having had a bite of Scotland at all. And all this on my barely comprehensible French, with its authentic London accent.
So bad is my French, that when the father of the party asked me a question, I took him by the hand and led him out of the front door, then pointed to the top of the embarrassing scaffolding and explained with as apologetic a tone as my French was up to, that the chimney was twisted and in danger of coming crashing on his head, were it not for the ugly but unfortunately necessary metal construction so spoiling the look of the house. It is a pity, and I am sorry, I told him. Desolée, I was. He looked very puzzled by this, and then repeated his question more slowly. I understood it properly second time round. His question actually was, “Why are the supermarkets open on Sunday in Scotland, but not in England?”. No wonder he had looked so puzzled by my answer, but then, why were the supermarkets open on Sunday in Scotland but not in England? And why, when you ask this question, does the answer seem to lie in the chimney? On reflection, I thought the chimney was as satisfactory a solution as any I could think of. I thought of Robert Louis Stevenson, on his Inland Voyage through the canals and rivers of Northern France, when he comes across a French factory worker of an excitable nature who keeps on describing issues in terms of their being logical or illogical:
“. . . it is not at all a strong thing to put one’s reliance upon logic; and our own logic particularly, for it is usually wrong. We do not know where we are to end if once we begin following words or doctors . . . Reasons are as plentiful as blackberries; and, like fisticuffs, they serve impartially with all sides. Doctrines do not stand or fall by their proof and are only logical in so far as they are cleverly put. An able conversationalist no more than an able general demonstrates the justice of his cause. But France is all gone wandering after one or two big words; it will take some time before they can be satisfied that they are no more than words, however big; and when once that is done, they will perhaps find logic less diverting.”
Quite right, Robert Louis! though quite what doctors have to do with it . . . but never mind, our French visitor had not only tasted traditional British porridge with us, he had got a flavour of the authentically cultural British way of thinking about life. What a lucky chap! And anyway, my French would not have been up to explaining the real reason for the illogicality of it (which was related to Northern Ireland politicians making an unaccustomed presence in parliament at Westminster to vote os something that was not going to affect them – it’s difficult enough to explain in English).
Of course multi-lingualism only goes so far. One of the languages we are very short on is Japanese. I can say, Hello, Goodbye and count from one to five. Our first Japanese visitors were, like the French family, limited to one English speaker with a hard-to-follow accent. He did what Japanese people are characterised as doing in English, he mixed up his Ls and Rs. Upon arriving with his wife, child, mother and father, dad replete with a fluttering, gaily-decorated fan, he asked for a grass of mirk and a grass of ragel. Hilary had to come into the kitchen, “Do we have any ragel?”
We settled the Japanese visitors down with their drinks, and Hilary remembered that she had omitted to put flowers in their bedrooms. One of our small affordable improvements was a little pot of fresh flowers in everyone’s bedroom. We certainly could not omit the Japanese. Hilary came downstairs and found me in the kitchen, “There’s a terrible smell in the old folks’ bedroom. Come and see what you think”.
I went upstairs and, sure enough, there was an awful stink in the bedroom we had put the elderly Japanese couple in, and we tracked it to the en-suite bathroom and, more precisely, to the carpeted floor, which was soaking wet and smelling of stale urine. With a bit of detective work we found that the cause was not in fact the old folks, but the cistern, which had developed a leak and was slowly dripping water onto the carpet, thus activating a unknown pedigree of antique dried wee. We had not got round to shampooing the carpets yet and presumably nobody before us had for quite some time. The Japanese folks had already used the bathroom, as we could tell from footprints in the sodden carpet. They were too polite or too afraid to mention it or perhaps thought that all British toilets smelled like this. We would have to move them to a different room, but how do you explain to a Japanese with little knowledge of English that you are changing their room on account of a smelly loo in their current one?
Hilary gave it a try, using sign language, pointing upstairs, making flushing movements with one hand while with the other holding her nose and exclaiming, “Pooh!”.
But then a sudden panic; “Oh, no! They probably think I’m insulting them by calling them you stinky Japanese!”.
In desperation, we took them by the hand, led them upstairs, took hold of their suitcases and camera from beside their bed, and bid them follow us to another room, nodding and smiling our approval of their new accommodation. They looked entirely puzzled, but were still too polite to say anything. Hello, Goodbye, and one to five were, I have to say, were exceedingly insufficient to cope with this situation.
The next morning the Japanese visitors took the full English breakfast, which at Oakdene now included real bacon with real fat and juicy locally-made Cumberland sausage. We served these and, as was our custom, returned a few minutes later to see how the folks were getting on. We found granddad vigorously and intensely cleaning his glasses. He was an extremely small man and what had evidently happened was that he had cut into his sausage and the fat from it had squirted up and hit him in the eye. So small was he, his eye would only have been a few centimetres from his plate. The others seemed to nod their approval and granddad eventually cleaned his glasses and cleared his plateful, so presumably there was no lasting ill-feeling. They appeared to go away happy enough. Syonara.
After the chimney, the next urgent job was the pond.
First impressions are most important. When our potential guests had overcome their delight at finding a building covered in scaffolding, they turned into the drive to find a damp pit full of watercress, which at one time had been a Victorian ornamental pond. Their first impression was of something falling down, followed close on behind by an artifact neglected. Clearly this was going to be a high priority. We discovered after asking around that the pond had always leaked, but had managed to sustain a family of ducks until fairly recently. The previous owner had had the ducks rounded up and had tried instead to stock the pond with fish. Somewhere in this exercise and possibly quite incidentally, the leak had got worse so that now the pond was little more than a pit with permanent puddles, and lots of watercress.
Ducks need feeding and food costs money, we think was our predecessor’s rationale for dispensing with them, whereas we took a different view. Ducks are comical. Ducks are friendly. Ducks are long on the, “aaah!”, factor. So ducks, like good-quality bacon, can be a low-cost and effective form of marketing. The builder, having finished his work at the top of the house, now went to the other extremity and drove his mechanical digger into the pit, to start clearing out the watercress. It took longer than we would have liked and it was expensive, but eventually it began to fill with water and we could dream of the day when we would adorn it with some cuddly, quacking, customer-welcoming, marketing-friendly duckies.
Where do you buy a duck? Nobody seemed to know. We tried wildfowl fanciers associations and we tried the RSPB but they were all rather snooty. They told us that, even should we be so socially irresponsible as to procure a duck or two from somewhere, we would have to have their wings mutilated so they could not fly off and contaminate the local wild mallard population with their fancy markings and colours. We almost got the impression that the duck inspector was waiting behind the tree at that very moment, ready to pounce with an official scroll of misdemeanours.
Then one day shortly before Christmas, Hilary told me over breakfast that we were going to visit someone – a surprise she said. Who could this be? Do I need to dress up? It was obvious I was not going to get very much more of a clue than she had already given, so I put on my shiny brown shoes and tweed jacket to cover all eventualities and drove the car following her directions, up into the ever mistier dank hills near Clitheroe. We turned off a B road onto a little lane and eventually came upon some houses. The cacophony of quacking as we opened the car door gave me a good idea why we were here. We had come to see Mr Barker the duck man.
Mr Barker had converted his garden into a set of areas separated and covered with netting, high enough in most places for a person to stand upright. In each of these sections wandered squadrons of ducks. White ones, brown ones, black ones, multi-coloured ones, and strange elongated ones which ran around looking as if someone had been trying to hang them by the neck. As always when you go as a novice to a specialist such as this, you can do nothing but ask a stupid question, “Do you have any ducks?”
Mr Barker told us he had had three nervous breakdowns, but that since he had turned to breeding ducks he had been OK. This surely was a good sign. We followed him into the netting, he carrying a net fixed to a long pole. At the sight of Mr Barker and his pole, all the ducks swam to the far side of the pond and huddled together, each trying to make its way to the centre of the bunch, but eventually he managed to divert one or two and trap them under his net. These were placed in cardboard boxes tied with string. We drove them home and, lo, we had some ducks.
Ideally we would have liked the type of ducks you see in the wild; common mallards would have done fine. But you cannot buy a mallard that looks like a mallard, instead you have to have mutants that are white, black, grey, blotchy, mottled, all sorts but the magnificent mallard. Because mallards are so widespread, nobody appreciates how splendid they look. If they were rare they would be loved much better.
With time, our ducks began breeding and over the generations the offspring revert to a mallard’s proper colours. They are not flying off and contaminating the wild mallard population because they do not fly anywhere at all much. Female wild mallards visit our pond, which has made us wonder where the expert duck wing mutilators get their evidence from – what do we know about the sexual prejudices of a duck expert; the instruction books on buying and running a hotel seemed to cover this aspect not at all. And since our ducks do not go anywhere, the duck inspector is happy to stay behind his tree. Whether the guests like them as much as we do, we cannot be sure. Perhaps some do.
Externally, we were taking a few steps towards a welcoming environment. Internally, the first priority was the menu.
In principle, we knew how the food should be: the food should be good. What good meant, we were not exactly sure, though Hilary had attended a course on professional cooking and food presentation as a preparation for our new career and had found the ideas she was encouraged to take up corresponded by and large with our own tastes and preferences, so we felt we were more or less on the right track. We knew it would all be a bit experimental. What we did not know, because nobody has told us, because documentary information was just about non-existent, is that one person’s good is the next person’s fear and horror. We had seen the lifestyle magazines, we had read the restaurant reviews, we had attended the commercial cookery course, we had lived in cosmopolitan and intellectual Cambridge, and we had not unreasonably made the mistake of believing that what we were being told by the newspapers was more or less true, when in fact it was only locally and slightly true. Our roast-lamb demanding Methodists turned out to be not just a blip. A large percentage of people who came to our restaurant wanted to eat something not too far removed from their old school dinners. They wanted exactly that which our erstwhile mentors, the restaurant critics and food writers, had told us was so dreadful and complaint-worthy &ndash soft-textured food with a minimum of flavour.
This made life rather confusing for us, because to have provided what a significant proportion of our customers demanded, would have given us a poor reputation with a significant different proportion. How were we to reconcile this? We quickly learned that, though reconciling it was a puzzle to be wrestled with, we could at least tell, from the first few moments of a conversation with someone on the telephone, what they were likely to order for dinner. The clues came from their accent, their address, their intonation and a host of subtle hints relating to age, social class, occupation, religion, state of mind, what they were wearing, though of course we did not really know what they were wearing, we just quickly became good at guessing it. It became a fun game to play, surprisingly accurate, and an exciting new experience for us. In general, South East cosmopolitan equals cosmopolitan food, anywhere north of a line that at the time could be drawn laterally through Peterborough, meant, “I like what I know”. There was a north-south divide. Could it be that the people from south of the dividing line were richer, because of what they chose to eat? We knew that they were generally better off financially, was there any evidence to indicate that the well-paid job came before the sun-dried tomato, or could it be the other way round? We began to suspect, in the absence of any verifiable academic research, probably the second.
To be fair, this divide has been narrowing over the years. It still exists, though noticeably less than it did in 1993. Times have changed, in the UK at least.
Given that we came to be able to predict with a fair degree of accuracy what a person would order for dinner before they had even seen the menu, it should have been possible to please all the people all the time. And so it is, but to do this would be very, very expensive. Restaurants that specialise can make a profit, those with a broader focus and a moderate size are going to throw a lot of food in the bin, the cost of which must be passed on to their customers.
There is a way round this dilemma, by making extensive use of those three technological marvels: the freezer, the microwave and the deep fat fryer. With judicious use of these, costs can be kept under near to perfect control and, provided the customers like to eat a lot of chips, the people can have to eat more or less what they want. Unless, that is, what they want is fresh-tasting food cooked with love. We have found, on our travels, that a bit of love in the cooking seems to shine through and make the experience of the meal so much better. Can you microwave this from the freezer? You probably can, but if you cook it with love what you would be serving would in effect be the same as if you were not microwaving it from the freezer. It is not so much the mechanism, as the meaning.
We had a business to develop and we felt that if we were going to provide the food, it was going to be the best food. We still did not really know how to define this but we were sure about certain things it was not. In our opinion it was not pre-prepared concoctions, defrosted and fast-heated. Though the better quality versions of such dishes can taste quite good, we believed that if we were going to make a feature of the food, the food needed to have an air of individuality about it. Faking this would have been too much for our personal sensibilities to live with. Our vision would mean keeping a much closer and more frequent eye on costs, but we were convinced that if we failed to take the food seriously, we would lose money in the long run. We had a choice: keep the deep fat fryer and lose money, or throw it out and keep our eye on the sums. We threw it out and chose the sums. Once a week, from that day on, we brought our internal bank statement up to date: payments in, payments out. Then we looked at the money committed and income estimated over the following four to six months. The work that needed to be done we prioritised and scheduled into our spreadsheet. Then we got depressed until bedtime and then did not sleep too well.The following morning, one of us decreed what was to be spent and when, and the other generally knew that, because it is an intuitive decision based upon knowledge and experience and has been formulated under the shower, it is probably the right one.
From our scientific and emotional deliberations, we know that the business is basically unsound. It is trying to be too many different things at once, it carries high fixed overheads and it has restrictions on growth because the customer base is time-constrained, wanting to come when you are full and not interested in calling when you are empty.
Unless you are really hopeless, the restaurant always makes a profit when income is related just to the costs of supplies. But as soon as you introduce the staff costs, cleaning costs etc. you introduce a high element of fixed overhead, (i.e. the waiter gets paid much the same whether he serves one person or twenty, the cleaner gets paid the same to vacuum the floor however many people have been sitting there last night), the restaurant becomes a numbers game. The more people you serve, the better the profit can be.
That is all very well, but when we started we did not have any staff at all. We had sacked the chef before we took over, and there were no other staff. At first, we had to do it all ourselves, so in principle, our restaurant should have been inherently profitable, and in a sense it was, but . . .
There are some people who run accommodation and eating establishments who do it all themselves on purpose. They reckon that doing it yourself costs less, presents fewer headaches and is the best possible assurance of the quality of service the customer receives.
Our vision was a somewhat different one. We wanted to see the future as a development of the present. Whatever we would be doing in five years time it should be a movement on from now. We may be in the same location – in fact we were – but to have spent five years serving dinner, making beds and cleaning lavatories did not of itself have any great appeal and had we done that, we would have little opportunity of foreseeing anything different over the next five years. We wanted to run a business, and that involves growth, which implies time spent on business development, marketing, cost control and a thousand day-to-day administrative matters. It was a case of business development or cleaning lavatories and we chose the, for us, more appealing option.
Had we continued with the do-it-yourself approach, our restaurant would have made a paper profit, but a tiny one because its turnover started off tiny, and we would have had little or no time to do anything about it. At first, though, we had to get on with it doing everything as there was no one else to help shoulder the load.
We never wanted to run a hotel. We were serious, intellectual, business management professionals, and here we were stuck with a bloody hotel. But since we were serious business professionals, or at least liked to think we were, then to give up on a challenge would not be in the script. We had identified a gap in the market, we had bought a hotel in an inauspicious place, on a whim, and we were going to overcome the problems and make it work. At least we had begun to learn some practical lessons:
Lesson number one: do not allow your customers to define your product for you. The customer is always right, we are told, however that dictum dates from a time when the customer was an identifiable entity. These days there are all sorts of different customers and they cannot all be right, as they do not all believe the same as each other. We quickly saw the need to find a considerably greater number of customers than we were likely to get by doing nothing about it, and it seemed that roast lamb and gravy was unlikely to be an attractive proposition for those who were not already on the list, despite the undeniable fact that this was what our current customers said they wanted. Our product had to be what it said it was. Ours.
Lesson number two: listen least, to he who shouts the loudest. He who shouts the loudest is often shouting from fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Fear of tomorrow. Fear, quite often of taking on that which other people at other places in the society take in their stride. Where were we going to get tomorrow’s customers from? From the movers and shakers, we suspected, who were not noticeably making much noise at the time, since by and large, they didn’t need to.
So the place was going to have to change. Here lay our challenge.
To recap, then: a small hotel is a basically unsound business proposition because it is not one product, it is at least three: accommodation, restaurant and property management. Because the business has to at least partly support the cost of the mortgage on the property, the customer-facing elements of it are going to be high-cost, especially in relation to other countries where the property cost element is lower. The idea of branding, the very concept of the value of a brand, was just beginning to come to the hospitality business in 1993, especially from the larger chains who had realised that different people want different things in different circumstances; it might be epitomised by the French-owned Accor company, that ranged from the close to camping-barn experience of Formule 1 at the lower end, via Etap and Ibis and Novotel and Mercure and Sofitel – all identifiable brands each catering for a particular type of market. The hotel classification bodies in the UK were rather snooty about this idea at the time; a brand was seen as a rather distasteful thing to have, yet we believed that some sort of branding was crucial, so we were at odds with officialdom. And to cap it all we had little idea of what we were doing, having come to it essentially by accident.
An unsound proposition is perhaps an understatement. In the end, though, we did not go bust. In the end we did moderately well. But it was still an unsound proposition.
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