‘Leadership and entrepreneurial talent will see us through’

In the past few weeks our hotels and conference centres have been packed with hospitality’s leaders discussing the past, the present and the future.

Presentations have been dominated by a myriad of challenges – from the cost of living crisis impacting volumes, a labour shortage pushing up costs and impacting service delivery, volatile energy costs, the ever spiralling costs of food and drink, and a government so caught up in its own problems that it has ceased to manage anything important.

One might expect our operators, arriving as they have on the back of two pandemic years that have devastated balance sheets, to be swivel-eyed in panic, or throwing their hands in the air in abject defeat.

But listening to speakers, and networking in the coffee breaks I didn’t see any of that. What I saw instead was resilience in spades, radiating from entrepreneurs who are quietly determined to press on regardless of the stormy seas that still surround us.

As a sector, hospitality is way more fragmented than our colleagues in food retail, so it was all the more exciting to see so many unique and innovative strategies emerging.

As our sector is fundamentally about people then where better to start but with one of the most impressive examples – Hospitality Rising.

It’s a collaborative movement formed to create the biggest hospitality recruitment advertising campaign in the UK. This week has seen its advertising launch, leveraging the coalition of progressive businesses who pledged £10 per employee to make the campaign a reality.

Complementing this I’ve listened to a wide range of leading operators (such as Gail’s and Soho House) with superb people-based innovations, delivering radical change by creating compelling cultures and work environments – which in turn are supported by a huge surge of focus upon the increase of diversity and inclusion.

Be Inclusive Hospitality which is on a mission to accelerate racial equality, and Plan B Mentoring which aims to surpass a target of 33% female board representation in our sector are just two excellent examples of the fundamental culture shift that is now well under way.

But it’s not just in the area of people that our sector is innovating so radically. It seems to me that there’s a big shift in the mentality of operations too.

Historically, when the chill wind of recession has been in the air operators have reached instinctively for the P&L to cut cost lines first, all too often without any thought for the consequences for diners. Whilst a combination of cost management and value delivery will be essential, it does seem that this time the emphasis being placed is more on how we enhance the operational experience so that we retain our valued customers. This feels logical to me when compared to causing long-term damage by delivering below expectations.

In similar vein I have had countless conversations in recent days about how to mitigate food and drink inflation whilst simultaneously improving the diner’s experience. Operators are starting to understand that it really is possible to have both sales growth and inbound cost deflation, even in this environment.

But perhaps most impressive of all is that (in spite of two-years of pandemic, and a year of post-Covid chaos) there is so much continued effort being spent on carbon reduction and sustainability.

There is of course a very long road to travel here, but a huge part of this will need to be through collaboration with wholesalers, manufacturers, farmers, and specialists like Zero Carbon Forum, so it’s been especially pleasing to see the whole value chain starting to appear in this autumn’s conference schedules. We will only succeed when we play our part in a single food system.

All of the above (and more), requires a mindset open to innovation and a steady resolve to deliver it.

My experience of recent weeks has confirmed to me that in hospitality we have the leadership and the strength of management to drive change at a scale that other sectors will both envy and struggle to emulate.

Resilience will of course be the watchword for 2023, but let’s add Innovation too, for it will surely see us through the year ahead.