Rising labour costs: 8 tips from Honest Burgers & Deep Blue

2. There are alternatives to price increases that boost revenue, too

“Price increases could potentially happen to try to recoup that labour expense. It’s always a very, very last resort because we try to give good value to our customers. But sometimes you have to, and if we do it, it’s usually just a few items on the  menu, not the entire thing.

But there’s other things that we’re trying to do, more around increasing the sales to to handle the increased labour bill. For example, we’re looking to launch loyalty. The goal here is to try to to get our customers to visit us more often, so that means more sales coming through the door. 

Another thing that we’re planning on launching with Vita Mojo is Pay at End. So giving our customers the opportunity to to pay by scanning a QR directly at the table. The goal there is to try and turn tables faster,  so again – to get more sales through the door, but without actually spending anything on labour.”

 

3. Retain the human interaction, even with increased tech 

“You’ve got to have that interaction, whatever that looks like. Whether that’s one person at the til, or somebody out helping people at the self service kiosk, I think otherwise you’ll lose something. 

For some of our elderly customers, that interaction might be their only interaction all day, so they don’t want to talk to a screen. 

One of our key things when we launched kiosks was that we had somebody out front to come to to say “We we’ve introduced kiosks, would you like to try them?” And then if they said no, somebody will serve you the till. If somebody said yes, and it might be an older person that’s not used it before, we spent time with them showing how to use it.”

 

4. Think about the reasons behind new tech 

“When we introduce tech, we always put our team and our customers in the center of the decision. So if it doesn’t make our team’s life easier or doesn’t enhance the customer’s experience, it has no place.

That’s generally the only goal of tech. It doesn’t come from someone in finance or someone from marketing. So that’s a really good place to be starting from.”

 

5. Give customers the choice between different channels

“We introduce tech, but we always give our guests the choice.

So take Click & Collect, which we introduced back during COVID. We don’t force people to go and scan a QR code or to order through Click & Collect. We still take, takeaway orders when people come to the restaurants,  and we still have phone orders. 

“Every sales channel that we have comes through Vita Mojo, with Click & Collect, delivery integrations, pay at table, kiosks, and POS. So we understand that different people have got different needs, and at different times of day, different things work for people, so we don’t force things on people. I think it’s really important that people interact with us the way they want to.”

 

6. Include your teams in the tech process 

“Whenever we introduce tech or a new platform, we always get the teams involved. So during during the entire process, all departments in central support – but also restaurants – are part of the process.

So, we we take their point of view as a key factor in whether it’s going to make life easier for them, which means that down the line it has champions. And because we build it with their help and with them in mind, it becomes a system that just makes sense, they understand the the results behind the change. And it makes it much easier to implement.”

 

“When getting the team involved as early as possible, you’re really giving them a sense of ownership and a sense of belonging that they understand why we’re doing it, what the benefits are to them.”

 

7. It’s less about cutting teams, and more about redeploying them 

“We didn’t aim to reduce the number of people we had. 

For us, normally have two people on the til, two people packing, and two people frying. And we said, okay – rather than try to reduce the people we hire, we speed up the process. 

So now we’ve got one person on the till and three people packing, because that’s the slowest part of it.

So, actually, our throughput increases because we’re serving customers a lot quicker. That helps cover the increased labour percentage.”

 

“We’re trying to leverage technology when it comes to forecasting and building labour models. It’s not always about saving hours or saving labour, but just having it redistributed. So you have more people when you’re busy and you don’t overstaff when you’re quiet.”

 

8. Create a positive culture to drive retention

“We start by choosing the right people.

We’ve got a robust interview process that’s mostly based on values and behaviours more than experience.

And then once we’ve got people on board, there’s a huge focus on induction. They they learn about the foundations of our founders, how everything started, why we do things the way we do, and why we want to keep it this way.

There’s a huge focus on internal progression. We want to be producing all of our head chefs, assistant managers and our GMs internally.  So people will have a career path if they want to, we’ve got a programme to to support them.

We have Honest conversations once a month, where we explain exactly what’s going on in the company, what’s the directions we’re taking, what are the goals? 

So there’s a clear communication with all of the managers, they understand the vision.”

 

“We’re a business that’s been going for 20 years. We do everything you’d expect of a business of that size so we’ve got all the benefits. But what we are really proud of is we recognise our team. We have a lot of in house competitions, bonuses, profit share schemes. Because we really wanna celebrate success with them.

 

When we’re recruiting somebody, what is so vital is we don’t sell them the world and on day one, deliver an atlas. Because what happens is the recruiters come in and start telling people the incentives and bonuses .

What they forget to tell them is it’s very difficult as well. You’re gonna be lumping bags of potatoes about. You’re gonna be cutting fish. You’re gonna be behind a fryer. They don’t tell them all these things. So what we said was, we need to be honest at the beginning Tell them there is an upside. But you’ve got to tell them the truth.

So then when they come in, they understand it, and anything else is a bonus.”