Despite things not always going exactly to plan, MEATliquor’s Scott Collins tells Mark Wingett why some hindrances have turned out to be serendipitous
Delays in the openings of its two latest sites has not phased MEATliquor co-founder Scott Collins, who argues that any hurdles placed in front of the group in the past year have worked in its favour as it gears up for further UK and international growth.
“Just one look at the identity and you know it’s going to get messy… in a good way,” says branding expert Matt Bucknall when discussing MEATliquor’s logo. He goes on, “It says ‘we’re edgy, rock ’n’ roll, in your face and a bit naughty. Lucky the lights are low – the darkness will hide a multitude of sins spilled down your crisp white shirt.”
It is no surprise that Scott Collins, co-founder of MEATLiquor, approves of the assessment, but refuses to acknowledge the past 12 months have been some of the most challenging for the popular and influential fast-casual concept.
New sites in Bristol and Islington, north London, were set to open earlier this year, but Collins said that the postponed launches of both had worked in the group’s favour. “It hasn’t been challenging. Just like everything that has come about, it has been a happy accident – the obstacles that this year has thrown up have worked in our favour,” he says. “It has given us a lot of time to grow my ops team and the way Yianni [Papoutsis, co-founder] and I have divided our roles. We are ready for anything now.”
It just so happens that it now looks like the group will open three new sites in the last three months of the year. Islington will be in the first week in October, Bristol will open in November and it’s likely another site, in Singapore, will open in December.
Collins says: “If they had all opened as they should have a little bit earlier, it might have been a disaster. It has been good to take stock and get ready for the next stage of the company’s development.
“We take everything on the chin, it is not like we have £5m to spend, we have no one breathing down our neck, we have no debt, it’s just us. We don’t have to open one a quarter during the next five years, so we have taken it upon ourselves where we need to be.”
The Singapore launch again came from a “happy accident”, and a chance meeting on a trip Collins took with Restaurant magazine. He says: “I got chatting to Jacques Dejardin, then an operations director at Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group. I got to know him well and then he left to join the Blind Group in Singapore.”
Even then Collins admits Singapore was a massive gamble. He says: “We had not considered doing a franchise because we are very hands-on, but the experience was brilliant for us and all our staff. We didn’t even have a franchise pack for this, so we cobbled one together, which was an experience! Jacques and his team have been brilliant to work with. I had never been to Singapore before, I have been five times this year, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if our openings programme had stayed as it was. Those sites opening later didn’t cost us any money while the franchise has been generating good money. It looks like I will be off to Hong Kong and Bangkok later this month to look at sites there with the Blind Group because they want to push the business further. It helped to make that move because I knew Jacques. If he wasn’t there it wouldn’t have happened. I knew him and knew he was good at what he did.”
The international partnership is also benefiting the group’s UK operation and employees. Collins explains: “Six of our staff have been out in Singapore for up to six weeks, had a great time and learnt a lot. A lot of the stuff we have learnt from over there has been brought back. We will send more staff over there and there will be incentives for the guys and girls working over there to come over here for a time, visa permitting, but even if it is for a holiday, just to see what we are about in the UK.
“Jacques is recruiting people here that he used to work with for the Singapore operation and they will be trained in the UK, which will again mean there will be less of a need for us to make so many trips.”
Collins has just come back from visiting the group’s debut Singapore site with Papoutsis two and half months after it opened – and he couldn’t fault it. He says: “It’s our baby, for us not to be there was a new experience for us. It is all about trust and the team there and the Blind Group have excelled themselves. That is why we are happy for them to accelerate over there because we don’t have to pop in every day.”
With the proximity of the group’s sites in the UK (Leeds and Brighton, plus the remainder in central London), Collins says he is still at the stage where he looks to pop into the sites as much as possible, but that is changing. He says: “I pop in less and less, which is my own challenge. My ops team want me to let them get on with it, and we have had time to talk about that in the past six months. We have embraced every happy accident that has got us to where we are today. I am sure it would be different if we had venture capital (VC) or private equity (PE) backing because they wouldn’t like a change of momentum.
“We are still independent, which has given us a lot of time to concentrate on getting Leeds right, time we may not have got with VC/PE backing. It is not so much the geography of the site being furthest away from our other sites here, more the actual geography of the site in the city. It is positioned up the back alley of a busy shopping centre and we made a couple of judgments staff wise that were wrong and that we should have picked up quicker, but we have learnt from that. There should have been a chapter in our book (The MEATliquor Chronicles) about all the f**k-ups we have made, but it would have made it too long!”
The success of the business, which is chaired by David Page, means it hasn’t been short of investment suitors. At the start of this year, the business launched a fundraising round with the aim of securing £7m of new funds. It has recently completed a small fundraising purely to facilitate a share option scheme for key senior staff.
Collins says: “We are speaking to a couple of parties who are interested in getting involved, who will also bring a wealth of experience to the business. We have spoken to a load of people over the years in regards to investment and it something I have never had experience of, but you learn a lot about what they can bring to the business, whether they have got talent or hire it, which comes out of your bottom line anyway, so why not hire them yourself. Every day is a school day. It helps having made so many friends in the industry, who have gone through a process and are happy to speak about it.”
Collins is no rush for new investment and remains focused on the coming year, which could include looking for a new home for the group’s original site, after the NCP-operated car park at 74-77 Welbeck Street, under which it is housed was put up for sale.
He says: “We have got a lot planned for next year, not just in Asia, but stuff that is trickling through in terms of pipeline. London is going to be really interesting. Islington will be the first opening in the capital for us since MeatMission.
“There is nothing signed in terms of new openings, but there are three different dialogues going on about three different sites, two in London and one not on the Tube line. We haven’t ever looked for a site, it has found us. We have never paid a premium and get sites offered to us constantly. Most approaches have come from the Middle East and, although we have a massive Middle Eastern following in the original site, it is not on our radar as such.
“We keep changing, we keep evolving. We are not a burger restaurant and never claimed to be. We have a lot changes to our menu, structure and drinks menu taking place. We keep tweaking. We are like that football manager Claudio Ranieri – the tinkerman. We can still make those little changes as and when we like it.”
The group has taken on its first intern for marketing and is looking at growing other roles. Collins admits the company is understaffed “in our so-called head office” at present. “We have these brilliant ideas but our execution is quite poor,” he admits. Many would disagree with the last part of that statement and hope Collins encounters many more happy accidents.
