Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however music has been cut or shortened due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers where the Shapers of Business join the Shapers of Jazz, Soul and Blues. Our guest today is Will Beckett; he is the Co-founder and owner of Hawksmoor, a group of British steakhouse and cocktail bars. The son of Fiona Beckett, the food and wine critic, Will vividly remembers the role food played in his youth. In 2003 Will and his old school friend Hugh Gott borrowed £100,000 to open a bar in Shoreditch – ‘we had three bars and restaurants before we opened Hawksmoor’ he says, ‘having been fairly rubbish at what we did for a long time there were almost no mistakes left to make so eventually we got reasonably good at what we were doing’ – humble words too. Now there is nine Hawksmoor’s in the UK and a tenth due to open in New York this year. They spent eight consecutive years in the Sunday Times Best Company’s To Work For list, they are shortlisted as one of the most sustainable restaurant groups in the country by the Sustainable Restaurant Association and they support Charities Against Hunger and One Water Foundation. Hello, thank you for joining.
Will Beckett
How are you doing?
Elliot Moss
It’s really good to see you, I am really pleased you have been able to make it today. I know that your mum was involved in food and I know that would have had an impact on you but many people whose mum’s were involved in food don’t go on to then do the lunacy of what you have done. Tell me why about 15 years or so ago you actually said ‘do you know what, I am going to go for this, I am going to set up my own things in the world of food and drink’?
Will Beckett
Yeah but, so the other Co-founder Hugh is, is my best friend and he has been since we were 11 years old, so that’s years ago and we both, we both came from food and drink families. We grew up around it and we had an inkling that we might want to get into this business. Our father’s more sensible voices kind of steered us away from it for a bit, you know, we went to University and got real jobs, both discovered fairly quickly that we neither liked nor were very good at having real jobs and yeah when we were 26 we thought we would, we would try and do something on our own. We opened a little bar in Shoreditch together and everything kind of just started from there. So we always had an idea that we wanted to do it but it was never really a master plan of any kind.
Elliot Moss
For those people that don’t know you, you now employ eight hundred people you’ve got a turnover of close to forty million quid which I think is obviously a significant business and for those people that like dining out at a certain point in the market, they will know you and they will not just know you and think you are fantastic and many critics have said it is the best steak around and so on and so forth which we will come to. Just talk to me a little bit about the fact that you followed your father’s advice, you said well you know partly that was his influence saying going and doing a Degree. You did a proper Degree and you got a Masters from University College in London, you even thought about a Doctorate. That’s a very far shift away from being the owner of restaurants and bars, I mean that’s properly being a good boy isn’t it? I mean is there some part of you that is not quite as rebellious as people might think?
Will Beckett
I am not sure anyone thinks I am particularly rebellious but I definitely didn’t pick the things that my dad would have wanted me to pick, I mean weirdly he would have liked me to study things like business, I went off and studied French and Russian instead. I did a Masters in Left Wing Modern European History and…
Elliot Moss
Very useful actually.
Will Beckett
In our world…
Elliot Moss
It will help us all understand what is going on.
Will Beckett
In a way it was quite useful because it, it made me almost completely unemployable so I didn’t, I didn’t really have a vocation to go into, a career to go into and that probably contributed to me ending up doing my own thing but yeah, I remember that period of being about to do or thinking about doing a PHD, slightly oversimplifying, but I remember thinking at school ‘well you know I am doing okay here, I’m doing reasonably well’. At University I remember thinking ‘I am not trying particularly hard, I am enjoying myself but I still seem to be coping okay’. The Masters I started thinking ‘this is a little bit difficult’ and then I went into a room with people who wanted to do a PHD, there were not many of us left and I am the least intelligent person in this room and I don’t want to spend the next three or four years of my life kind of feeling that so that was kind of the end for me and at about that time Hugh, who has always wanted to do his own business and you know, kind of unlocked this I think it was called Bengal Fried Chicken, this little thing in Shoreditch and said ‘I am going to turn this into a bar, you should come and do that to’ and so I did.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me to find out what unfolded and plenty has, as I said they have been rather successful and are still going really, really well. Stay with me for much more from my Business Shaper, Will Beckett; Co-founder and owner of the Hawksmoor business as well as Foxlow. Time for some more music right now, it’s Marcus Miller with Lonnie’s Lament.
That was Marcus Miller with Lonnie’s Lament, nice and calm for us here with Will Beckett; Co-founder and owner of Hawksmoor and also as I said earlier, Foxlow. So you, we were talking back after the University point where you realised you may not be the smartest person, I am sure you were just as smart as the rest of them, it was just a feeling inside rather than a truth but that enabled you to go ‘you know what let me try something else’. That first bar experience, I mean I keep reading, you have written many, many things and have been interviewed many times and you often sound very humble because you say ‘well that didn’t work, and that didn’t work, and that didn’t work’ and basically you made every mistake you could have made so by the time you came to Hawksmoor it was going to be brilliant. I am assuming the first bar wasn’t easy?
Will Beckett
No, we sort of, we embarked on let’s say five years there of about the most expensive kind of business education that you could possibly get because we, we ran that first bar, we had a Mexican bar restaurant, we opened a pub, we did our first Hawksmoor and the first three things, Hawksmoor was the fourth, were all different shades of failure. It was successful in some ways, we quite often, you know, we were good at you know, food and drink, we were good at customers coming in and having a good time, but we were awful at running a business and we made a lot of mistakes then but not often make the same mistake twice and we tried to work out how to run a bigger business. You know when we had four things I remember thinking we were drastically in over our heads, I remember calling everyone I could think of who had a business that was the same size or bigger in our industry and just saying ‘please pick any of our restaurants and can I just sit down and buy you a meal and ask you endless questions about how this works’. I started reading a lot and just kind of slowly, slowly, slowly coming out the end of that five/six year period by 2008/2009 and thought I think we are starting to get the hang of how this stuff works now but year it was, it was crazy.
Elliot Moss
What sort of things were going wrong? I mean obviously I am assuming cash flow was an issue, I am just guessing?
Will Beckett
Yeah I mean you know, whether it’s kind of the, whether it’s just stuff that you know you have to get right but we didn’t like how you employ people or motivate them or laughable stories like when we took over the pub we signed the lease first and then did our research after that and by research I mean we typed the name of the pub into Google and the first result in like the Islington Gazette or something was an article saying the pub from hell and the previous landlord had been hospitalised by his customers or something. Anyway we took that over. We signed the Hawksmoor lease before we’d signed the loan document from the bank and the bank changed its mind. So we were about two weeks from going bust and Hugh’s parents had to re-mortgage their home, they didn’t have to but they did. My stepdad lent me his kind of life savings of about £20,000. Just catastrophically stupid things that somehow we managed to survive.
Elliot Moss
So how do you think you have survived and more than survived, now you are flourishing. Obviously there were this collection of experiences that you had where you go ‘we’re not doing that again, we’re not doing that again, we’re not doing that again’…
Will Beckett
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
…you work out due diligence, you work out the order of things and all those other things that you’ve just alluded to. How have you then really translated that into a proper formula where not only is the product fabulous, the experience fabulous but you are also making money? What’s that pivotal moment for you? Or set of moments?
Will Beckett
It was probably around 2009 I think. We started to kind of sell some of the things that weren’t Hawksmoor and we had decided we wanted to see if we could grow Hawksmoor. And we were, we were really aware that we’d had a bigger business that was not a good one and we had a smaller business, the one Hawksmoor restaurant that was you know, was great where we had got those same things right, the food and the drink and the customers having a good time but also staff stayed and we just had a really, really good working environment there and we tried to pin down what is it that makes this small business great and how do we go about making sure that those small number of things stay real in the business irrespective of how big we got and you know, we just, we had spent time thinking about how to run a business and I think somewhere in there is where some, some independent restaurants, it is not an unusual story is it that a small great independent restaurant tries to grow and somehow diminishes the greatness that made it successful in the first place. In a way we were so, we weren’t key to the success of that first restaurant, by the time it opened we already ran a business, we had to work that bit of it out. So yeah, I think we just spent and still spend an enormous amount of time thinking about how do we keep those small number of things that makes Hawksmoor, I hope, both a great restaurant and a great company, how do we make those things real at the scale that we are at now and how do we run a business that is this big or a bit bigger than the one we run now.
Elliot Moss
And I want to find out a little bit more about the specific small thing which we shall come on to in a little bit so hold that thought, you are with me, Elliot Moss here on Jazz Shapers and my guest as you know, you’ve been hearing, is Will Beckett; Co-founder and owner of Hawksmoor and Foxlow too. He’s coming back in a couple of minutes but first we are going to hear some advice from our partners at Mishcon de Reya for your business.
There are many ways for you to enjoy all our former Jazz Shapers and indeed hear this programme again. You can ask Alexa to play Jazz Shapers and there you can hear many of the recent programmes or just put Jazz Shapers into your preferred podcast platform and you can enjoy the full archive over there too but back to today, it’s Will Beckett; Co-founder and owner of Hawksmoor and they are a group just in case you didn’t know, of British steakhouse and cocktail bars which is a nice way of saying you make amazing steaks, you serve really nice drinks. The small things and it is that moment you absolutely nailed it by saying that independent restaurant, you have all found the one, it’s the discovery, it’s local, you love it and then they make the cardinal error of saying ‘let’s get two, and let’s get three’ and it all falls apart because those small things that you loved about restaurant one, are dissipated, are lost somewhere along the journey naturally. Just give me one of those small things that has been replicated at scale for you in that has underpinned the Hawksmoor success story?
Will Beckett
Well suppliers is a pretty good example. Again you know when we had, when we had one restaurant we got all of our meat from one farmer, I was going to say one farm, he had three farms in North Yorkshire, we got one kind of cattle, long horn cattle but obviously that is not sustainable, that one farmer thing when we’ve got eight restaurants and serve something like 17,000 to 18,000 people a week. So that’s a good example of something where right we’ve got to dramatically change the scale of it over time but we can’t do that and lose the integrity that underpinned it in the first place. The ethics of how he raised the cattle, the feed, the breed, whatever it is and that’s a constant challenge that we are having to think about, how do we adapt to scale without losing integrity.
Elliot Moss
It sounds to me and that makes perfect sense, it sounds to me also and again just from what I have read and what I’ve seen, that both you and Hugh are students of this world, not just of food today but of food yesterday, of heritage and of how people did it and the differences there in the way that food has been both sourced and then prepared and all that. It feels also like you’ve never taken for granted that you know this business. It feels like every day you are a student in it in a way and that’s what I pick up. How do you maintain that for your staff and your people? Do you inculcate them with the same ‘guys this is about keeping it fresh, it’s about understanding the history’. Do you do that or is it just what you two do?
Will Beckett
If you talk to Hugh, if he was here, almost everything he would talk about would be product. He just loves, he just loves food and design and he’s the guy who you know is interested when we opened in Edinburgh about what the Polled Cattle Society in the 18th century was starting to do with breeding stock and he could tell you what some of the names of like the first Aberdeen Angus breeds were, cows of the Aberdeen Angus breed. I’m, I’m kind of a bit more geeky about different things but one of them is kind of people I think of Hawksmoor as much as anything as a people business. It’s, it’s got a really strong culture. If you came into Hawksmoor and you talked to me and Hugh, if you went and talked to a waiter who had been there for three months or a manager who had been there for six or seven years, you would hear I think, quite a lot of comparable sort of stories about this is the kind of people we are, these are the sort of things we are interested in, this is what we care about and part of that is we talk about it a lot, we train people on it a lot but we also think really carefully about who we hire. We are lucky I think that we are considered one of the better employers in the restaurant industry which means we have a bit more scope to choose a certain kind of person and you know, that idea that you mentioned of trying to find people who are genuinely interested in what they do in food and who think about it carefully is definitely something that we try to find when we hire people.
Elliot Moss
Talking of finding the right people, you said earlier that you and Hugh have been best mates since you were 11, 30 years of friendship. That must make a huge difference to how this business is run because there is so implicit and explicit trust between you. Are there moments where if you’d been on your own we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would Hawksmoor not exist, could you have done it on your own?
Will Beckett
Oh I mean there’s no doubt whatsoever that neither of us could have done it on our own. We have said many times over the last however many years between us we sort of amount to one reasonable business person. Both of us on our own are hopelessly flawed. Hugh is so detail focussed and he cares so much about quite a small range of things whereas I do not have the patience or the kind of way of thinking to be able to really, really focus on any one thing. I like to kind of jump from biggish topic to biggish topic. I think if it was just Hugh he would have the world’s greatest idea and if it was just me, we would probably have a reasonably sized but probably quite mediocre product restaurant.
Elliot Moss
Now it also strikes me the two of you have fun and I’ve read here apparently that your Hong Kong opening didn’t quite happen – you can tell me that this is wrong – but apparently you guys decided you were going to drink a little bit and I think you left his suit on the plane and I don’t believe the opening happened quite the way it was meant to. Is that true?
Will Beckett
Yes it’s pretty close to true.
Elliot Moss
Pretty close.
Will Beckett
So we went, we were trying to open a restaurant in Hong Kong and we had been doing it for a couple of years and we found this unbelievably beautiful like heritage restaurant building which is pretty rare in Hong Kong, we applied for it, it was like a collaboration between the Hong Kong Jockey Club and the Government so you can imagine how bureaucratic it was and we had this absurdly long proposal together and they said ‘okay we want you to come in on Friday and present it’. ‘Like err we are in London, coming in for an hour, it’s not that convenient’. They were like ‘that’s the deal’. So jumped on a plane. Flew to Hong Kong, got a bit drunk on the plane. Hugh left his suit there. So kind of like you know, we get there, cope with the evening, next morning presentation is whatever it is, 11.00, so we go out at 9.00 to try and buy Hugh a suit. Hugh is six foot four, it’s not the standard size for Hong Kong but bought this suit with like laughably short arms and short legs, looking a bit like kind of, he looks a bit like Rodney Trotter anyway, so he looked a bit like kind of Rodney Trotter. We went to this meeting and a bit hung over, in this incredibly stuffy room with like kind of, it must have been thirty people and us and the Chairman of whatever this committee was, kind of walked in, everybody you know went sort of rigid with attention and it was obvious really that we were pitching to the Chairman and the other thirty people were just like his crew and the presentation was an hour and a half or something. He fell asleep after the third minute and had to be woken up at the end so obviously we left, thinking the chance of us getting that are none. But anyway, it was a good trip.
Elliot Moss
The bits when you are most happy is it when you are front of house, is it when you are just watching people, watching the service being delivered brilliantly, seeing that the foods fabulous, it smells right, the drinks are being done, I mean is that, is that it for you or is it actually looking back at the end of the night when you are with Hugh and you happened to watch people and then you are talking about it. Is there a moment when you are just in… because you strike me as somebody who doesn’t get stressed? This is obviously you know the old McBethian false face, must hide, what false heart doth know and you probably do get stressed but it looks like; first question actually – when is that happy moment and secondly, is there stress ever?
Will Beckett
Yeah happy moment for Hugh would definitely be eating a flawless meal which doesn’t happen very often. He will usually sit down and order an absurd amount of food, when you are with Hugh you are never allowed to order for yourself, he’s always like – even in other restaurants – ‘right I want to try this, I want to try that, try that, try that, this is what you are going to eat’. Fine. You know he really, in Hawksmoor in particular he eats to find flaws and if he doesn’t it only happens a small number of times a year. That’s his real happy moment.
Elliot Moss
And for you?
Will Beckett
My, I like walking in to a restaurant that is buzzing you know, if you go into Seven Dials is pretty close to where we are which is our second restaurant. If you go into that restaurant on a Friday night and it really, really is fun and the whole thing is kind of alive and people in the restaurant are happy and enjoying themselves, not just as it happens customers, although they are and food helps that but you can see you know, staff really, really enjoy that. You don’t get that feeling that you have seen in restaurants sometimes of like people can’t, people can’t handle it, it’s just too hard work. It’s a really nice working environment and when we get that bit right that’s probably the biggest joy for me.
Elliot Moss
I’ll find out about the stress in a moment. Stay with me for my final chant with Will plus, we will be playing a track from Nina Simone, that’s in just a moment.
That was Nina Simone with the brilliant Feeling Good. I am with Will Beckett just for a few more minutes. This business is successful, you’ve kind of done you know, you’ve done something brilliant, people know you, it looks like everything is super dandy and happy. Where do you go from here? Are you stressed? I asked you about stress before, are you stressed about where you go from here or is it just more of the same? Or have you got ambitions Will to you know, double the size and have another seven or eight restaurants in the future?
Will Beckett
Personally I don’t really feel stressed that much. I mean the job is stressful at times. I don’t know, I am quite naturally optimistic and I just assume things will be okay. Not naively but just assume things will be okay and I think a lot of stress comes from like deeply worrying about things which I tend not to so…
Elliot Moss
He says this with a big smile on his face. This guy doesn’t worry.
Will Beckett
That’s the stress bit.
Elliot Moss
But that means, probably on the serious side of that means you deal with stuff, it means you see it and you go okay, it feels like you are a practical kind of person?
Will Beckett
Yeah, I am like okay you know take it on and that’s the thing that we are going to have to deal with now. We’ll work it out and we haven’t always, I haven’t always been proved right that optimistically it will all be fine when things have gone wrong. But yeah, anyway I, it doesn’t worry me that much. And in terms of the future, so Hugh and I are both 41 years old.
Elliot Moss
Young men in their prime.
Will Beckett
We are young men in our prime, that’s kind thank you and I don’t think we see ourselves as kind of serial entrepreneurs you know, we are not going to go up and do something else new and brilliant and try and build it. I think we look at Hawksmoor as life’s work. I like the idea that 10/15 years from now we will still be involved and thinking that way means I don’t want to get to 10/15 years from now or even, you know 5/10 years after if we are not involved and look back at it and think ‘I don’t like it anymore’. So you know, I really, I really enjoy opening restaurants, I really enjoy growing a business, I like the challenges that come with it, I think a lot of our staff and I kind of enjoy the momentum and the opportunity that it brings but never kind of at the expense of diluting the thing that we’ve just spent 13 years so far building and it has been the cornerstone of like our, our whole working lives. So we are going to open something in New York in September hopefully, but let’s just say the end of this year and on the back of that who knows really. I mean if that works then what a wonderful privilege that will be to try and open kind of these big, beautiful restaurants in another big, beautiful city and take it from there. If that doesn’t work then I don’t think, I don’t think we will regret having tried something like that.
Elliot Moss
The Gansavoort, opposite there, meat packing district where Pastiꞔe was, that’s where you’ve got to open.
Will Beckett
That was, that is… Pastiꞔe was a classic restaurant.
Elliot Moss
Classic restaurant and an amazing, and obviously meat packing district all those lovely cobble stones, it was my favourite when I used to stay in New York occasionally, that was my favourite place obviously meat packing, I am just doing word association.
Will Beckett
It says meat so should open in the meat packing area.
Elliot Moss
It has nothing to do with a decent place for business but we should just do that. And the money side of it, obviously you’ve got a good business, it’s turning over nicely as you’ve just said very eloquently, it’s your life’s work. But the money must be, and therefore you are not looking for that earn out and running away and selling the thing and all that. What relationship do you have with money? Is it about just having enough or is it about actually there’s other ambitions? Again it strikes me that the money is not super interesting to you?
Will Beckett
Yeah I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s nice. It’s nice to have, it’s a way I suppose of saying okay the thing that you have done is successful but it isn’t really that interesting to me, it’s not really that interesting to Hugh either to be honest. The best thing I ever read about money during that period when I was like reading every business book going was money is to business like oxygen is to life, like it’s not the point but business doesn’t work unless they are making money. So no I think we just feel if we, if we try to do a great thing all the satisfaction, the personal satisfaction for us and the people that work at Hawksmoor comes from that and if we succeed in doing a great thing the money will follow from that and that’s nice if it happens.
Elliot Moss
It’s been a really nice talking to you Will.
Will Beckett
Thank you very much. You too.
Elliot Moss
Thanks for coming in. I look forward to my next trip to Hawksmoor which needs to be sooner rather than later, because I’ve just realised it’s been far too long. So I am looking forward to that personally. Can you let me know, before I let you go, what your song choice is and why have you chosen it?
Will Beckett
Yeah, I picked, I picked Acknowledgement which is the first song on A Love Supreme by John Coltrane when I was in my teens, I lived with my mum, my stepdad and my stepdad is massively in to jazz, he died about three years ago but he was kind of a big influence on me and on how I thought about a few things and he was really into you know, hard bop and bebop so I thought I would pick this, that’s the nice emotive reason. The non-emotive reason is I just really like John Coltrane just starts going singing kind of … loves supreme, again and again and again on this, it makes me laugh.
Elliot Moss
So here it is right now, we’ve started it a little bit further into the song because those lyrics that you’ve just talked about Will, don’t kick in for quite a while.
That was A Love Supreme, Part 1: Acknowledgement by John Coltrane, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Will Beckett. He talked humbly about different shades of failure before Hawksmoor really got going in 2009. He talked about the secrets of Hawksmoor’s success is focussing on a very small number of things and making sure that they are followed right the way through with full integrity into all of his restaurants. And finally, a really nice way of putting it he talked about Hawksmoor being his life’s work. Really, really good stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a great weekend.
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