Boston Tea Party, the Bristol-based café and restaurant brand, is arguably the south-west’s best-kept secret when its comes to the wider eating-out market, but managing director Sam Roberts tells Mark Wingett that may not be the case for much longer
Sam Roberts, the managing director of Boston Tea Party, the Bristol-based café and restaurant brand, has a nice turn of phrase when describing his 18-strong business chain, “we call ourselves a delicate necklace”, he jokes. Indeed, Roberts has spent more time that most thinking about the ‘soul
versus scale’ debate, as he puts it, in regards to fledgling owner-operator concepts reaching that tipping point from a local to a national concern. A blog last year on the group’s website, which was republished in MCA, tried to get to the core of this debate and it’s clear six months on that Roberts is still grappling with this challenge.
Roberts bought the then three-strong business as a going concern in August 2005. He says: “It was set up by a couple called Ben and Nicky Saunter back in 1996, when I was still at uni. The name was a reaction to British colonialism, the historical Boston Tea Party event was seen as the birth of coffee drinking in the US. This place was always about coffee first and foremost. We bought the sites in Bristol’s Park Street, Exeter and Honiton, and also a franchise site in Bath. I was working in advertising at the time and my wife was pregnant, so it was that familiar story where we wanted to get out of London. I had catering in my blood, my parents ran gastropubs in London during the 1980s. I was brought up in them and wanted to get back into the hospitality sector.”
The Saunters had grown the business to a point where they couldn’t quite work out how to continue to scale it and not erode what they were doing, says Roberts. “It was very much a coffee shop, but it had a lovely Bohemian vibe to it, which I believe it still has. There is an anti-establishment/anti-corporate feel, which is still something we are keen to maintain. One of my biggest challenges as we grow is the soul versus scale debate.” As Roberts says in his blog, the trick to multi-site operations is to try to minimise, or even better, eradicate the erosion of the original concept as you grow.
He continues: “We are equally worried when called a chain. We call ourselves a delicate necklace rather than a chain. It is a mindset, what we are keen to do is not have that chain mentality, which is just churning sites out with the same feel and furniture. Every one of our sites should be different. We believe that people have relationships with their local café more than with the local chain restaurant. It should be a similar relationship that they have with their local pub. When you stop trying to be different, you lose a bit of your soul. It just becomes this homogenised thing.
“You also lose staff who become disinterested. We give our management the training and focus to be able run their sites in their own mould. We do have a similar menu, but we have banks of things. So we will have a bank of say 20 home-made cakes and they can select eight or nine that work for them and the local market.”
One of the ways the company has been able to grow the business is that it has opened, as Roberts puts it, “different sites in different locations doing slightly different things”. He says: “There is a core offer there, but what you have on your doorstep differs. The newest sites are more all-day cafés with food at the forefront, but that doesn’t mean we won’t open smaller units. Going back to when we acquired the business, it was probably around 30% food, now its around 70% food, that is where a lot of our growth is. Breakfast has remained massive throughout that time, that and coffee has remained our core offer, but beyond that we have developed a lunch menu, home-made cakes and tried to make sure that everything we do is made from scratch on-site.”
At a time when a lot of operators are trying to move into the breakfast market, Roberts agrees it is easier to have that foundation already in place as the business looks to enhance its lunch and evening offer. He says: “With breakfast, people have built up trust in a place that has become part of their routine. What we are seeing with evenings is that to get people to reassess who you are and what you do is really challenging. Our core business is from 7am to 7pm, we have historically looked at evenings and I am sure they would work in some locations but what I have learnt over the past 10 years or so is to stick to what you are good at. It is very easy to be seduced by incremental revenue streams and all you end up doing is trans-ferring a resource into an area that is less developed and harder, and take it away from part of the business that is thriving.”
On expansion, Roberts explains: “We are taking it steady, which is our own decision and one we can take as a privately owned company. We are doing four or five a year, which is the plan, but we also have the benefit of not doing four or five a year if we see a degradation in terms of execution. We are here to build a long-term, sustainable business. We have the benefit of not having someone sat on our shoulders saying ‘pipeline, pipeline, pipeline’.”
The group’s newer, larger model sites are currently generating average weekly sales of c£20,000. Roberts says: “The previous six or seven we have opened are at that level, while the smaller ones will be around £15,000.” Roberts says the company – which will turn over c£16m this year, up from £12m in the previous 12 months, with like-for-like sales up 8% – gets approached a lot when it comes to external investment. He says: “Those private equity guys are bright, capable individuals, but we have funding in place for the next three years through a mixture of bank funding and cash flow. It also comes down to a question of why? We don’t need the money, we feel like we have a strong board and management team, so we are happy to trundle along under the radar.”
Roberts believes that Birmingham/the Midlands can become the group’s next cluster area, with two sites already open and a possible three more to come. For 2017, the focus will shift to the south coast, with Bournemouth, Southampton, Brighton and Winchester targeted. He says: “We already have a café in Salisbury so there is the opportunity to develop from there. The challenge we and the industry faces over the next two to three years, is that there are towns where you look and think how big is the pie for all the concepts opening up there. That’s where people like Alex and Jake at Loungers have been very clever, going into those unfashionable towns where there is a demand and rents are lower. There are opportunities and, like Loungers, we like to keep our rent levels relatively sensible. It is getting harder to do that though. One of the things to our advantage is we are often a destination, we don’t need those high footfall sites. Our site in Plymouth is a great example, where we are in a great building but slightly off-pitch.”
So is there another way? Is it possible to upscale a business and retain its soul? Roberts and Boston Tea Party enhances the argument that you can. Time will tell.
