Honest Burgers now has the right management team in place to grow well beyond its 44 sites, and will look to regional opportunities under an evolved property strategy, CEO Frank Hayes tells MCA.
Over the past year the better burger brand has appointed Marcus Denison-Smith as chief marketing officer, Matt Brandon as chief financial officer, Maureen Sandbach as people director and Paul Hunt as head of technology.
The brand has largely managed to avoid closures over the past few years, which Hayes said was a result of its simple offering and model operating small footprint, secondary locations, largely in London.
However as the brand looks beyond the capital for new opportunities, it will look at high profile locations, given it is not as well known.
“We’re just beginning to think now, okay, where do we go next? And the vision of that is, it will be regions, not London, because we’re pretty well penetrated here,” Hayes tells MCA.
Hayes says while growth has been modest in the past 18 months, as he put the right exec team and foundations in place, the estate has avoided much in the way of closures.
“One of the features of our estate has always been, we’ve never had any obvious loss-makers,” he says.
“It’s just been a case of no obvious drags on the business that you’ve got to get rid of.”
On evolving the property strategy, he said the brand was able to justify higher profile regional locations outside London.
“We’ve gone for more high-profile sites, typically with a higher rent associated with – though of course, higher rented regional locations are typically still a lot cheaper than in London.
“Going forward our regional sites will probably be higher profile, it’s a slightly different property strategy.”
Alongside the property strategy, Hayes said the simple menu meant training and labour were more straightforward, reducing overall complexity.
“Because of that, you’ve got quite a low, relatively speaking, breakeven sales threshold,” he adds.
