Big Interview: Byron boss on burgers, breakfast and Brexit

It’s fitting that Simon Wilkinson joined Byron Burger as CEO on the first of May, aka Mayday, aka the universal call of distress.

Established in 2007, Byron was once a leader in the premium burger space, and it was sold for a very tasty £100m in 2013.

But it was subsequently troubled by a combination of competition and the general malaise affecting the sector and it came close to collapse. In January 2018 it underwent a CVA restructure that saw it close around a third of its 67-strong estate.

CEO Simon Cope stepped down at the end of 2018 and Wilkinson stepped in. So what did he find when he arrived?

“It’s fair to say it had a tumultuous three years,” he says. “Byron was the market leader, one of the first really premium burger brands, but in the last three years it stood still a little bit, it had lots of internal issues, and was probably caught up and overtaken by the competition.”

What attracted him to the tricky challenge to get Byron sizzling again was that the “new owners, Three Hills Capital, were very supportive. They injected £10m into the business in January to help us invest and get back on an even keel. And I just saw it as a really good challenge.”

Last week a new logo was revealed, but there is a lot more going on than that. A new menu will launch on 1 October, the first since food writer Sophie Michell joined Byron as director of food on 1 July.

“We did the final tasting on Wednesday night and one of my favourites is a new item (his current favourite is the Chicken Smashed Avocado burger). But I won’t tell you what that is until it comes out. Sophie has only been here for five weeks but she has got under the skin of it and we have a plan over the next six months to move the menu, the products, the quality, our cooking methods, everything. She is doing a really good job.”

But Wilkinson is also keen to stress that he has no plan to “over-complicate. In fact, the menu we are launching on 1 October, which is the first time Sophie has had input, won’t be a massive change, but it will be reduced a little. When businesses struggle there is a temptation to add more but really we just want to tweak it, take a few things off and make what we do have better.”

Breakfast
One little detail that emerged over the last few days was the mention of brunch, a first for Byron. But Wilkinson reveals Byron is planning to trial opening at 9am, so in reality, Byron is also gunning for the breakfast crowd.

“We are calling it brunch but although we haven’t nailed down the opening hours it will absolutely be 9am at weekends when we trial it in our first refurbished site on Kensington High Street. It will have soft seating and some communal tables, which lends itself to people plugging in a laptop and doing some work, with really good quality coffee and maybe some brunch as well.”

The dishes are still being tweaked and finalised but there “won’t be a traditional English breakfast, it will be an indulgent English themed breakfast. If you think Dishoom do a bacon naan, it will be something like that. There will also be a nod to our American roots type offer, so maybe pancakes or waffles. Then there will be a vegan or vegetarian offer and a type of pastry or cake. So just four items, but each looking after different consumer requirements.”

As for the wider menu overhaul, no new categories will be added. Instead, the focus will be on removing some existing dishes and improving the quality of those that are staying.

“For example, our fries will change on 1 October. We will be going to do skin-on fries and we have our own secret magic salt which we did the final tasting on this week and it was fantastic. We have also changed the quality of our bun which will hit the system over the next couple of weeks. There is just a little bit more malt in the bun and it will hold the juice in the burger better.”

Amid all the changes, he is also bringing back some old favourites as specials, a traditional Byron tactic. “We are bringing back the most popular burger in our history in October,” he says. “I cannot disclose it just yet, I wasn’t aware of it, but someone who has been around here a while was telling me it caused the most uproar we ever had when it was removed.”

Then there is the new logo. An interesting thing about Byron has always been its disregard for the traditional branding principles of consistency, with every site unique, including – extremely unusually – a different logo and fascia on each building. But the new logo will eventually replace each logo on every single restaurant and a new colour scheme will be introduced across the estate. 

“It won’t happen immediately, we will do it over time. But one of the things I noticed is that if you come out of a tube station in London and you look down the street, you might know Byron is supposed to be down there on the left, but you don’t know what you’re looking for. You can actually walk past a Byron because you don’t recognise or don’t see a logo.”

He says each site will retain an “individual feel” but “if you’re going to reposition and drive a premium brand in our marketplace you have to have a unified identity. We have a pallete of two or three colours (he won’t say what they are) and it will be a combination of those alongside the logo whenever possible. By next Summer we will have refurbished around a third of our estate.”

Operations
What is striking about Wilkinson’s arrival is the scale of the operational overhaul he is undertaking. As well as the sites and the restaurants, the senior management team is also being revamped.

He’s just appointed David Pepper as “director of operation excellence, who started on 31 July” and “over the next few months I will have finalised the new senior team. Our new FD, Michael Toon, who is currently FD at Chopstix and formerly of CDG, will start on 1 October. And we are very close to appointing a new marketing brand director who will start just before Christmas.”

As with any operator in hospitality, people are critical throughout the organisation, he adds. “One of the biggest challenges as a brand is that it is only as strong as its weakest team member. For your brand to differentiate and stand out you have to invest a lot into people and training. So we spent a lot of time in the first month looking at how we have trained people historically, how we develop people, how we retain people and motivate them. 

“We have just put in a new plan in terms of how we will do that at all levels. If you can get your workforce bought into your vision for the business and train them and give them the tools to do that, you have got a fighting chance. This time next year we will have a new team, a new brand, an improved menu and improved operational excellence. I see this first year as building a platform for sustainable growth in the future.”

And he’s not worried about Brexit. Or at least that’s what he says. “I haven’t watched the news for three years. I have a saying in life, why worry about something you can’t influence? I have got absolutely no influence into what is going on, so until something happens I am not interested at all. Until we know what is happening it’s all speculation. Seriously, I haven’t watched the news or Question Time or anything for three years.”

Really? You’re not aware of what’s going on? “Well, we know through UK Hospitality that incumbent EU workers will be safe, and I hear things and see things on social media and on front of the Evening Standard when I am walking past the station, but to be honest, unless it’s within your sphere of influence… I’ve got a friend who was stressing about Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un a year ago, that there was going to be a war, but what will be will be. You can’t control it. Just enjoy your life.”

 

Byron’s New Logo: Four design and brand experts, plus Byron’s CEO, deliver their verdict

 

Simon Wilkinson, Byron CEO
“I really like it, I think it’s very disruptive, it will stand out. It represents people sitting at the table and there is a spare place for someone else to come and sit there too. The concept is very simple. Too many people eat alone at their desks or over their phone. You need to provide an experience in restaurants to get people out of the house and no technology can replicate getting your friends or family around a table and having conversation and good times. This logo encapsulates that really well. And I’m hoping it sets the tone for our repositioned brand when we launch it in October.”

 

Steve Sharp, Mystery
It’s certainly a step in the right direction for Byron and it’s great to see them recognising the importance of refreshing their brand with modern times. A modern design reflecting its new strategy is a good start. Some will struggle with the legibility but I hope they buy into the rationale as it tells a story to the consumer, which is fundamental. Let’s hope this is the start of a new lease of life for a great brand as there is so much more they can do.

 

David Chenery, Object Space Place
It looks slightly odd on first glance and the story needs explaining for people to get it. However, I think the question of whether it is a good logo or not, is not really the point. The job of this logo is to act as a flag for the new business and give them something to rally around. Obviously they have chosen to bring a sense of mission and purpose to what they are doing and have brought this, in a pretty literal way, to the main logo. It will be interesting to see how this mission plays out in the rest of their brand and restaurant experience. As for the mission itself, it does seem on the face of it to be a very generic position they are taking. Surely the idea of people sitting together around a table applies to every restaurant in the world?

 

Mark McCulloch, Supersonic Inc.
It’s a very literal logo, which is interesting as they have such a diverse estate of fit-outs and signage, so it will be interesting to see how the new logo gets showcased, whether it will be mainly digital and POS. I was surprised that the strategy is about bringing people together rather than the burger and celebrating the ingredients, but it could be a multi-tiered strategy. It will be super interesting to see how it plays out, but 10/10 for effort, bringing Sophie Michell on board for the food, the new logo, they are working with Bacchus, which is a great agency. I just want to see Byron back to its best and really fighting against the great casual dining places out there again. It’s a fresh start for them.

 

Ian Dunstall, Dunstall brand marketing
The key positive to me of this symbolic change is that Byron has a plan to evolve – and in a challenging demand market where brands have less to invest in innovation and are becoming less distinctive, this is a positive move. What is important for me is not the change of logo, but how they develop their offer and communication around their new thinking to help them positively stand out. For me an initial strength of Byron was the distinctive signage and cool ‘independent’ approach they took to each restaurant signage. The new logo design is visually disruptive with its lack of symmetry so is challenging to instantly like, but like many bold design changes it may grow on me over time. But ‘bringing people back to the table’, whilst highly relevant, is a difficult concept for a restaurant brand to uniquely own, so it will be fascinating to observe how Byron develop this concept as a distinctive and differentiated brand idea.