The latest episode of our Three Things podcast sees our host Jamie Mitchell sit down with Thom Elliot, the Co-Founder of Pizza Pilgrims, to explore the incredible story behind the birth, growth, and success of his popular pizza brand.
Listen in for a deeply entertaining conversation, including why focusing on your team trumps obsessing over your customers, the unique strategies Pizza Pilgrims employs to keep their teams engaged and motivated, and valuable insights into Thom's thoughts on sustainable growth. As always, Thom rounds off the podcast with his Three Things - three pieces of actionable advice you can use to build a better business, today.
The latest episode of our Three Things podcast sees our host Jamie Mitchell sit down with Thom Elliot, the Co-Founder of Pizza Pilgrims, to explore the incredible story behind the birth, growth, and success of his popular pizza brand.
Listen in for a deeply entertaining conversation, including why focusing on your team trumps obsessing over your customers, the unique strategies Pizza Pilgrims employs to keep their teams engaged and motivated, and valuable insights into Thom's thoughts on sustainable growth. As always, Thom rounds off the podcast with his Three Things - three pieces of actionable advice you can use to build a better business, today.
We wrote this book about pizza and we did a lot of research into why people choose pizza. there's just so much evidence like pizza is the food that people turn to when their life's had a bad turn or they've had a tough day. if you are not obsessed
Jamie:with turnover, what are you obsessed
Thom:with? I'm obsessed with happiness. In the Declaration of Independence, They don't talk about you being happy in this new country they've created. They talk about creating a country where the pursuit of happiness is possible. I worked in advertising for seven years. I think by the end I was able to manage one person. If you come into hospitality with the right attitude you can be managing a team of 30 people in a year. The only reason I wanna grow is to give people opportunities to grow themselves. I look at what we've got and I'm like, Why? Why are we growing? I don't wanna grow for growing sake. That to me is the whole problem. We could do it. But it would be not as good.
Jamie:Hello, I'm Jamie Mitchell and welcome to All Together's Three things where I get to explore the extraordinary careers of some exceptional founders and CEOs and straight into the mix. Today we're gonna talk pizzas with co-founder of Pizza Pilgrim's, Thom Elliot. Welcome Tom.
Thom:Thank you for having me.
Jamie:For those, and I, I, I don't think there'll be many, but let's just, let's just play the game for those less familiar with pizza pilgrims. Tell me uh, your one line, your one line explanation of what pizza pilgrims is.
Thom:Oh, strange to the hardest question of the day. Pizza Pilgrims is a collection of pizzerias across London and the UK, selling the best quality Neopolitan pizza we possibly can, in a fun environment that looks somewhat, somewhat modeled on a sort of teenage boy's bedroom, essentially.
Jamie:Ah, that's how I recognize it. Although that green, the green is not necessarily a color that was in my youth. we, for those who've just started listening, we won't talk pizzas and hospitality exclusively. but by definition we're gonna explore the story of pizza pilgrims as we get to talk more about culture, I guess, and growth and, how to deliver a consistent, brilliant product and service and good stuff like that. the last podcast, full podcast I did was with the founder of Pension B, Romi.
Thom:And I love a, I love a business that has what it does in its name, pizza, pilgrims Pension B.
Jamie:But it, it surprised me given I knew a lot about the purpose of pension B cuz I'd been a customer for so long that we didn't talk about purpose until about, three quarters of the way through. So I just thought I'd kick off with it and I haven't found anything online to say what the mission or purpose or why or North Star, but by the way, that could just be my research, right? Yeah. But how, how would you describe why you get up every morning? Why the team get up every morning to sweat and toil, over hot pizza ovens for for their, for their client, their customers?
Thom:Absolutely. the reason you haven't found it online is we're redoing our website at the moment. So it's currently only exists on my iPad being written as we speak. Essentially. I mean, our, our aim is to leave everyone we engage with happier than when we found them. So that's, whether that's customers teams. suppliers, partners, anyone. What we kind of figured out is that that was, that was what we like to do. We like, you know, we like the hospitality thing, we like people to come and have a fun time. Obviously that's a huge part of hospitality anyway. But then we started looking into pizza. We wrote this book about pizza and we did a lot of research into why people choose pizza. And there's just so much online evidence like pizza is the food that people turn to when they're like, they, their life's had a bad turn or they've had a tough day.
Jamie:It's the comfort food. No,
Thom:it is, it's like a warm hug of a food People have the, the t-shirts like pizza is my boyfriend. Like, people talk about pizza, like it's their spouse. Sometimes, like people, you know, you cannot make everyone happy. You are not pizza. That kind of is, is quite pervasive and popular culture.
Jamie:so you are in the, you're in the happy business.
Thom:So you're in the happy business. And I think my, my fear with that is that it becomes sort of a mi maniacal, like, you know, everyone be happy all the time. But I think what, what we're trying to create is this, this idea of sort of a long term happiness is part of the journey type thing. And all of our values feed into, particularly for the team, obviously feed into like it being a long term, a a long term aim and happiness. And I'm, I'm obsessed with this idea that in the Declaration of Independence, They don't talk about you being happy in this new country they've created. They talk about creating a country where the pursuit of happiness is, is possible. And that is, I think, what we want for Peter Programms. We want to create an environment where, for people who want to go for it, we're setting up the right structures and the right goals and the right long-term solutions to pursue happiness in your career with peace pilgrims,
Jamie:or as a, as a customer coming in to
Thom:have a meal. Yeah. And I think obviously, you know, there, there's a version of that way, you know, our, our relationship with the customer is a long term thing because we'd hope they'd, you know, they'd come back to as many times and bring their friends and that journey goes with us and we have plenty of internal initiatives that look to drive both immediate short term happiness. Mm-hmm. Everything from, you know, our only question on feedback forms is did you leave happier to a whole initiative we have around, what we call super kind bombs, which is basically just fun things you can throw into a meal. Tailored to the particular table of wants and needs to make super kind
Jamie:bonds, super kind.
Thom:SKBs,
Jamie:SKBs. Everyone loves a three letter acronym. Everyone loves a three letter SKBs. Give me an example of an skb.
Thom:so it could be anything. It's just the little things like, you know, when you order in this kind of, you know, in the sharing platter restaurants them now everywhere and there's three of you at the table and you order the sharing platter of everything and two of them are on the plate and you're like, or four, what we're supposed to do with that. So it's just like acknowledge that when someone, if there's five people and they order a Mac and cheese balls and there's three in there, they want five. So like, either throw them in or like find a way to make that work or, you know, if people are choosing to pudding at the end, they can't decide which one to have. Give them the other one just to try as a fun idea. Um, do you,
Jamie:um, have rules around that? I think Prep have a, a, each team member can give out a certain number of free coffees a day kind of thing.
Thom:But there's a limit. We've actually flipped on his head and like, we set a target that you have to hit. So we have a button on the till, which is like, did you do a super kind bomb? A super kind bomb? And then each store has a target of like, this is what you need to be super clean bombing this week.
Jamie:And for those sorts, they're really good at it. what happens if they're super kind bombing everybody, it's gonna
Thom:hurt at some point. Yeah, I mean, I think, look, we're very much a, a company about, you know, forgiveness, not permission. And I think obviously if you're, if you're, if you gave away 20% of your turnover last week in super crime bombs, it's probably a little conversation to be like, you've, you've moved over into the wrong side of this. But I, I think just making sure that people feel not only free to do it, but excited and encouraged to do it. Like,
Jamie:so, we, we are heading into the world of some of the, the, the areas I wanted to cover around team. But let's deal with this, this particular bit at the moment. This bit about giving this autonomy. not just to your managers, but to everybody in the business. Yeah. to go above and beyond for their customers. I kind of liken it to the early days for those who were old enough to remember a Virgin Atlantic. I always felt they had that kind of, or Southwest Airlines is the other one that's famous for it. They sort of didn't have the rule book, there wasn't the process to follow. and the box sticking exercise, there was an expectation that you think for yourself and you make sure the customer's getting a great experience, really hard to build. Into cultures and, and, and, and have at the same time enough controls that it doesn't go mad.
Thom:It's really interesting. I think something that we learned is obviously, you know, us having started a business, we quite like a bit of white space and a bit of like, you know, just you, you do you and, and see what you think and we really still encourage that. But actually what we increasingly have to do is codify a bit. we're moving into an area that I would like. Here are some clear examples of a situation and a super kind bomb that would match it so that you can kind of more easily get people to go, oh, that thing I read about that, that's just happened. Let's do that. So I think you've got to give the people who are not confident to go. Examples to go for it. Examples. And I think
Jamie:what, how do you share beyond the examples that you have codified great practice inside the business when it happens. So if someone in, I don't know, your Oxford store does this really creative, super kind, bomb skb, does it get
Thom:shared? Do people, so we have an internal channel called Happiness Days where people share the team get happiness days. So go and do something that makes'em happy, paid off. So that's where that began. But that has also morphed now into things that people are doing. Super climb bombs in store for customers. I did this great thing, this happened, you know, they left this note or whatever it is. but how do you share the, it goes, so we have, a Facebook workplace internally. Everyone is on which has been a game
Jamie:changer. I put, I put Workplace into, into Tom Dixon and loved it. I loved it because obviously, everybody knows Facebook and therefore it was like the, the adoption is, is straight away. Cause everyone knows exactly what it is they're doing and, and, and, and what it's there for. And it's well designed to encourage sharing and, and all the rest of it. Whereas I always found Slack, for instance, really hard to get used to. Cause I, I'd never it
Thom:it's not familiar.
Jamie:Okay. Let's, let's go back to the purpose. They say happiness. This is the purpose you have developed. You've been quite honest in the past about your origin story. it may be a throwaway line, but at one point, in the previous podcast, I heard you say something along the lines of, all I wanted out of this business was to get out of advertising. Let's Tell the story because I am, and have been ever since the innocent days, a huge fan of origin stories and, their impact or their, how they act as a foundation for a really interesting and engaging brand. Okay, and yours is one of the best origin stories. but give us the short version as much as you can, from the very first, moment that you and your brother decided we should do pizza.
Thom:Well, yeah, I mean, it, it, it is been a crazy journey, but we were, we were literally sat in the pub, it was probably May or June, 2011. we were bemoaning our, I was working in advertising. He was working in TV production. Neither of us were enjoying it. And we had been trying to get into food and not really had the capital law, the experience to get the capital, to do it. And what we are watching is suddenly a version of food taken to the streets in front of us and like genuine premium brands and products existing out of a van in Kings Cross or Peckham or whatever. And the world of street figure. The
Jamie:street 2011. Yeah. Yeah. When, I mean,
Thom:it was beginning to pop, I guess. I, I reckon that was like absolutely like 2011, 12. And I think if you look now at the London food team, the amount of the great brands that started between 2010 and 2012,
Jamie:Is incredible.
Thom:Okay. So,
Jamie:you were in the pub. You, you, you've been trying to get into food. Trying to get into
Thom:food is, what does that mean? We, we'd like to get acquiring a lease on a pub. Just didn't have the money. You wanted to be a pub landlord? Yeah. Well, we, we'd grown up in pubs. Both of our parents had run pubs all of our lives, so we kind of literally had grown up above a pub. Okay. And so we kind of really had that kind of, That sort of hospitality DNA thing.
Jamie:let me, let me understand what's going on in your minds during this. Is it we should buddy up, partner up brother and, and run business in hospitality? Is it I hate my job, I want out. This is what I know.
Thom:it's a little bit of both. Like genuinely all of. E everyone in my, in our family has always like run their own business, like little businesses, like antique shops or, you know, it's in, it's in your dna. It's, it's, it's definitely there in the family. Like, you know, entrepreneurship. I don't like that word at all, but you know what I mean? So that was definitely there. I think, you know, we really didn't enjoy our jobs either of us, and we did enjoy the idea of like taking what we kind of thought we knew and, and doing it in London. And it would be fun and it would be, you know, high energy and it would be exciting.
Jamie:And, and did you think you'd just open a pub and you'd happily sit there being a pub landlord? Or were you already building ambitions of, you know,
Thom:no pub empires? The, the ambition was to open a pub, like not to open a hundred pubs and change the way pubs are done. I forget the
Jamie:fact, but 50% of restaurants I think fail in the first year and 90% within, you know, two and a half minutes or whatever the number, I mean, it's the biggest, yeah, failure rate is, it's
Thom:comical. which, what makes it such an interesting industry? Because so few people go into it to make money.
Jamie:But you didn't go into it because you had some deep passion to bring, authentic Neapolitan pizza to the population. So let's talk about how pizza came about.
Thom:The pizza bit absolutely. Was just like, No one's doing pizza. This seems like a gap. It wasn't the, the hospitality love
Jamie:was there. No, no love of Italian food. No, no grandmother.
Thom:Italian grandmother, or not one. None of that. The only connection to Italy, which I think, we've sort of dialed up maybe more than was really the case, but James had gone to do a cooking course. I love,
Jamie:I love I love that. Thank you. Yeah. You know, you're nothing
Thom:but if not honest about this, like, James had gone to do a cooking course for his 21st birthday in Italy for a week. Right.
Jamie:Uh, okay, so, so this is, this is great cuz this is actually the truth of how so many businesses start. Yeah. Which is looking for the gap, looking for the opportunity, looking for the problem to be solved. Yeah. this is not the world's most pressing problem, but the problem is, customers are coming to street food, and and they can't get a pizza. Yeah. We're gonna solve it.
Thom:Why was there a cap? because we figured out very quickly that to cook a pizza you need to carry around a one ton stone oven. Whereas to cook a burger you could basically carry what you need on the tube.
Jamie:You couldn't use one of those electric. Uh,
Thom:no, no. If you wanna do proper pizza. And also there's something so gloriously visual about those ovens and I mean, they're gen You
Jamie:couldn't make our pizza and, and, and, and putting a one ton pizza oven into the back of a van and moving it to the next pitch and then putting up your tent. And that's not possible. So how
Thom:did you solve that? Well, it is, it is possible, but um, it just had not called carry one ton van can. Oh, I see. Oh,
Jamie:see, so you'd have to have the whole va. Yes, of
Thom:course you could do the whole van in the van. So it was just like that slightly higher barrier to entry. And I think we, we, you know, we,
Jamie:we you were riffing in the pub basically going riffing, how do we start this thing? Yeah. And tell, tell everyone that what, what, I mean lots of people know this, but what did you end up deciding would be a good
Thom:idea? So we ended up deciding that we would buy one of those three wheeled vans, that you see used to see back then doing coffee called a pi ape.
Jamie:and because that would feel. Authentically Italian to it had a sort of
Thom:authentic Italian is, it had a sort of silliness, which I think was there from the very beginning of like a sort of a slightly ludicrous vehicle. And we were buy said vehicles and we, we were like, great, that's the vehicle we want. We started looking into it and we quickly figured out that it was cheaper to buy one in Italy than it was to buy one in England. So that's where the idea of like going to Italy to get it came from. Yep. and then that was sort of the beginning and the idea is we'll put a pizza oven in this van and then we'll have a van that looks cool and a bit silly with a oven. The
Jamie:specs are, it can hold a one ton pizza oven. So we
Thom:called PIO and said, can this take a one ton pizza oven? And they're like, absolutely not. The limit is, I think it was like 750 kilograms of the payload. So we were like, okay, we got you. We hear you, but we're gonna ignore you and just cracked on anyway. but yeah, so, so we, I guess what, at that point we then met just a whole suite of raised eyebrows from every single person. So, you know, whether that was like my employer, me telling that I'm gonna go and do this or our parents or our friends or anything like that. Everyone was just like, this doesn't seem like a particularly solid idea.
Jamie:So everyone's saying no
Thom:and yet, and then, and then, so then the, the, the moment where it's just like, this is gonna happen and the whole thing just exploded into a bigger idea. Whereas we, I emailed my boss in the advertising agency that I worked for, and said, she, I'd found out that she was gonna go and start a bakery in Cambridge, leaving the company to do that. And I just emailed her out the blue and said like, you are gonna start a bakery. I'm gonna start pizza. Let's talk dough. We've gotta go and talk. Dough went to our house in Camden. I had not known at the time, but her husband is the legendary food critic, Tim Hayward, who is just the biggest ball of sort of positive energy that has ever existed potentially. And he was just the first person who was like, I know my stuff. This is awesome. Do
Jamie:it.
Thom:And, and then we just sat and we drank and we talked about this trip to Italy and it just kind of grew legs right there. And he was the first person who was like, you should get someone to come and film this because this is gonna be a great trip. The bit we,
Jamie:we just skipped over, for those who dunno, the stories is, is the plan was also to drive while driving it back to the UK all the way, you were gonna stop off along the way and, and learn about how to make a brilliant Italian pizza because you didn't actually know We've never made a all about it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and he suggested doing a TV show, which he did. and, I've, I've watched bits and pieces of it. that's all
Thom:you need to watch. No,
Jamie:that's always too much. In fact. but this is, this is the truth. You didn't know anything about pizza. You were falling in love with this idea of, of of, of authenticity and, the, the authentic Neapolitan, but it's, it's a, a common theme, right? Frank Manka, home Size, you and frankly every other Independent. Now it's all about bringing the authentic Italian to, to London. So what makes you different today, other than, you know, perhaps some of these purpose things in terms of the product I'm talking
Thom:about it, it's a really interesting one. I think we, we are, And I would say this obviously, but I think we are the most authentic. I mean, there are others, like Santa Maria is still absolutely legendary as a pizza place to me. But I think we are the closest to trying to take what Naples are doing as a specific city. Not Italy more generally, but like Napoli and what they're about and what they stand for. I think we're we're the closest to, to sticking to those guns.
Jamie:I did an informal, consumer panel before I came over here. Yeah. With Jasmine and her colleague at True in Uh, uh, and when I said I was coming here to to do this podcast with you, both of them, it was, it was their favorite, their favorite pizza restaurant. But then I had my, so I, I'm, I dunno. I'm. 50, whatever. Probably not. Your target market hadn't been to pizza pilgrims until one of your NEDs took me a few weeks ago, embarrassing story but true. Um, my first reaction on the menu itself was, it doesn't sound in terms of the recipes authentic, there was combinations that I, that didn't feel very Italian.
Thom:So I think that that is the, the line we've always watched is that when, and this has changed during time, that when we went to Naples in the first instance, like it was very much like, this is how you make a margarita. Mm-hmm. And any deviation from that. Don't you dare is, is not a margarita. You shouldn't, you can't call it margarita. We won't even look at it. But yeah, so, so we walked this line for a long time of like, well this is how it's done in Naples and we never mess with it. And actually we still use Caputo flour from the mill in Naples. We still get that in. We know Anima Caputo really well. He's a, he's a mate. We still get our tomatoes from, from Italy and outside Italy. The same producer that we've worked with for a long, long time. We still get our few de lattes, you know, they're based in Naples and all, it's all made there, our pure latte mozzarella. So this is the real truth of Italian
Jamie:food. Yeah. The reason. Three ingredients on a plate works is they have the quality,
Thom:the equality
Jamie:is there, and, and let the, the product do the, the flavor. And you don't have
Thom:overcomplicated. We've always done that. But then what we've always tried to bring is a bit more of some of this other influence when you go to New York or like just bring a bit more fun. Well, and so lit silly things. Some of them, some of them cause controversy. So we've done a carbonara pizza that's got pasta on it and Italians are not a fan right now. Today, this week we launched probably one of our most controversial of all time as a, as a special called the Americana. It's got chips and oh, frankfurters on it now. You're annoying me now. So this is the really interesting thing about it though, right? It is probably the most legit Neapolitan pizza there is in terms. Every single kid growing up in Naples, that's the pizza they're brought up on. And so all of our neopolitan chefs in pizza pilgrims are in Raptures that we're serving this. Okay. Classic Neopolitan chef. And I think this
Jamie:is the truth, right? So, people like me, think they've learned a little bit about Italian food with, probably a snobbish attitude. forget the fact that it's still a sort of street food in, in Italy and Italians are creative food lovers, and they're gonna
Thom:do all sorts of things with their pizzas. They're, they're incredibly protective. But I think that the point you're missing, that you keep missing is like this thought that Naples is not Italy. They're different. Like if you haven't been to Naples, it's nothing like the rest of Italy. It's got this insane different energy. The most perfect example of why Naples is not Italy is in 1990. Italian 90. Argentina played Italy in the semi-final. And some moron thought it would be brilliant to host that game in the Naples stadium. Madonna played for Naples was a God in Naples. Naples turned up at the stadium and supported Argentina over Italy because they are so much more about Napoli FC than they are about Italy. And I think what's just a broader thing, there's such interesting thing to me about Italy because they have created probably the greatest food country brand that exists in the world. Sure. This is a country that is not even existed for a hundred years and is formed of a billion different food cultures. You know, Pulia feels like Greece, Northern Italy feels like Austria, like, you know, the west of Italy can feel a bit like France. Somehow they have got together and created this global image of what Italian food is. And it's actually not really that true. It's hugely diverse across the whole country.
Jamie:I think, I think it's, this is a good segue into, into this, this thing called brand. and, you know, I, I, I started with this origin. Did we finish the origin story? Pretty much. Very quickly. You, you got pitch. There's a whole story around how you got your market store, your market store by being an annoying person for Westminster Council. but shows again, some of the characteristics of entrepreneurs, persistency, the resilience you need for the knock backs. But you did a year of, of, of events and, and a pitch in, in soho, before opening up a restaurant because you didn't want to do another winter. I'm gonna leave it at that. Perfect. But let's talk about brand. I, did, I loved my conversation with Aaron from Bloom and Wild a few months back, and he convinced me that the way anyone creates a truly wonderful, engaging and differentiated brand, which is a word I don't like, is by obsessing about the customer. And, and you know, he makes. basically, everything was about how does this improve the customer squares? How's this improve the customer squares obsessive to the nth degree. And of course, in many ways what we mean by brand is how excited and engaged are your customers about you? Do they go and tell all their friends? Do they you, are they your ambassadors, your marketing, all the rest of it. It all links to that. Now, when I said this to you on our, our, our phone call, that could have been a, a podcast, you said, our focus has been about the team, not the customer. Talk to me, what's the theory here? Why are you so obsessed by the team?
Thom:I just think hospitality has a unique position in this country, in the world, in it hires so many people into their first, or one of their first jobs, and it has a, that's a huge responsibility. And I think we have seen so many people come into pizza, pilgrims. All varying different, you know, skill sets and attitudes and what have you. But I just feel so strongly that it's our responsibility to look after them, show them how to do a good job, give'em the opportunity to be themselves. That's one of our values. Be yourself and, you know, and grow themselves if they want to within the company. Because, you know, I worked in advertising for seven years. I think by the end I was able to manage one person. If you come into hospitality with the right attitude and the right skills, even not the right skills, to be honest, you can be managing a team of 30 people in a, in a business making, you know, turning over two, 3 million pounds a year in a year. And the stuff that you learn in that time earning, by
Jamie:the way, an exceptional wage. yes. From, from that,
Thom:from that transition, earning a wage that would make every parent who doubts hospitality raise an eyebrow and be like, oh, right, okay. Okay.
Jamie:But, so I could riff with you for the next half hour Yeah. On how poorly the hospitality industry has represented itself but is that really what's behind? You know, did you wake up a, a, a pizza restaurant, number one, and go, you know what, we need to take our responsibility serious in this regard?
Thom:No, I think the responsibility has come later. So many people start a restaurant business having done 20 years in restaurant businesses. Mm-hmm. And they're like, oh, this is how it works. And it's like that thing, you know, at school when you get to the top and you kind of treat the people at the bottom like crap. Because that's how you were treated when you were at the bottom. And someone's gotta break that cycle. Right.
Jamie:Especially in sh in, in the kitchens. I think it's a, a big thing.
Thom:But yeah. And I think we, we just came to this without any experience of hospitality and it made no sense to us. That grew, you grew up on top of a pub. Yeah, but we were sort of 11 and 12 and we'd never really engaged. I, I guess we'd never seen a version of it. You know, this was a pub where everyone was treated Right. And it was, we'd never seen a version of it. It was like, just get in the kitchen and work 80 hours and don't bother me. Like that just didn't come into You were two
Jamie:young heads, took young kids. You were two young and. People, how old were you? What, when you opened your first restaurant, say
Thom:in Pizza Pilgrims? Yeah. I was, it was 10 years ago, so I was 29. Yeah.
Jamie:you are almost, almost in your thirties. So you are young, you are naive, you've never really operated in this sector before. You've learned about pizza, and you're hiring people for the first time and you are having fun. you're gonna build a culture that's
Thom:Yeah. About that fun. It just didn't occur to us to, for it not to be. And I think, you know, for us to be watching people working stupid hours or you know, we are getting tips in, obviously they're going to the team. We're not gonna take any of that. Why would we. But I think someone coming from 20 years of totality would be like, well, you know, 20% of that goes to the management team or whatever. Now everybody in
Jamie:hospitality will, will say, yes, of course. You know, you, you, your, your team being engaged and, and I don't think they'll use the word happy, but engaged, is key to having low staff turnover and good service. Yeah. What's different about your attitude? I, and there's a lot. So, you know,
Thom:I, I, I mean, I, I am not obsessed with turnover because I, I think people do choose hospitality and happy days that they do because they've got six months to fill before they go traveling. And for that person to come work with us for six months, have a great time, get through a summer, you know, maybe get their first boyfriend or whatever it is, you know, just that kind of, that whole like social element that goes through. So if you are not obsessed
Jamie:with turnover, what are you obsessed
Thom:with? I'm obsessed with happiness. So where the, the industry then marks that person who left after six months going, you know what? I had the best summer ever and I love Peter Peel cause I recommended it to anyone but traveling. No, stop. Totally first. That's a, that's a negative. That's a, uh, oh, you lost another person after six months. I'm just like, if we lose that person for the right reason, I am all for it. Just wanna know the pizza place next, next door. Yeah. They're going to the pizza place next door. What on earth happened? this is a
Jamie:personal thing. Oh, it's, it's
Thom:huge feelings. If someone leaves, if someone leaves, I really wanna know why they've left and what we can do. What did we do something wrong? And I think increasingly, I, you know, I I, I'm sort of maniacal about it. Like, you know, I, I literally wanna sit down with every single person and go like, but of course why you have to. but I, but I hear other founders who have that same feeling about customers. If a customer leaves and wants star review, I want to go and sit down with that customer and understand why. And I, I, weirdly, I don't. Obviously I care hugely that customers have a great time, but if a customer has a bad time, I wanna understand why they had a bad time. But I don't wanna go and convince them otherwise, necessarily.
Jamie:Something, Aaron said, not in my podcast, but he did a, one of our CEO circle events, which small round tables. and he said when he was thinking about, choosing direct consumer business models, he said, I knew it'd be good for me because that bit of me that's insecure, that needs, you know, needs to be told I'm doing a good job, would obsess. Over things not going well for every individual customer transaction, and therefore I'm going to be really good at driving that key measure of, of, in his case, net promoter score, which is what his main measure is. But to a certain extent and that the world's full of insecure overachievers who are entrepreneurs. are you tapping into, into some of that? Is there I definitely
Thom:have that and I think I, you know, partly love me, don't leave. I just want everyone to like me. Exactly. Right. And I often to my detriment you know, I will, we definitely made a mistake early on of people going, oh, I think I should be the manager. And us going, okay, that sounds like a good idea. And not going well, you Because they want it. Yeah, they want it. And so like, great. That's exactly what we should do for them. We should just make them the manager. And then watching that become, Not a success for anyone very, very quickly. And I think, you know, as you grow up, you're like, we would love you to be the manager. Here's the three things you need to nail and then we'll have this conversation again. And probably here's
Jamie:how we're gonna help you nail it. Yeah. And
Thom:absolutely. Which, and building your journey. And I think that's the thing hospitality really, really, really can do. And so many businesses, because it's sort of laying out that, that trail of breadcrumbs. But if someone goes, I'm going
Jamie:over here, it's, and it's not a complicated trail of breadcrumbs either. I mean, managers do have to be quite, they are quite unique beast. They have to learn quite a broad set. They're a ceo, they learn, learn a broad, broad set of skills. Absolutely. That's ceo. But they have to have a force forceful person. They have to be a leader that people want to follow too. Yeah. And, and to drive, have the energy to
Thom:drive that. But what's so interesting to me and like that of trusting is like we had our managers all together on Tuesday afternoon. 20 of them in the room. It's just like, can't believe we have this many managers. It's insane. Mm-hmm. and I think they all, you know, go through the values again. They all really believe it. They really, you know, so many of them that have been with us for a long time now, they all have such a unique style to get to that place. So, so for us to go like, this is how you do this job. Well, you've
Jamie:got a culture that requires people to be themselves. So by definition they're
Thom:going to be lots of you. Absolut, I love it. But I think, you know, if you looked at a bigger company or you know, the dangers, you're like, well, no, no, you can't do it that way. That's not the way you do it. You do it this way because that's the
Jamie:checklist. Or, or, or indeed, you know, the monoculture, of innocent back in the which is no longer, the right way or appropriate way to run a business. not the right way, because diversity of thought is really important. Not a moral way because you're basically just hiring a load of young, well do middle class graduates out of top university. I wanna come to something you've said before in, in another podcast. walk. you, you said, the way you framed your approach to, people, or at least I interpreted it as this, it, to get that. Level of longevity, engagement, happiness, et cetera. You were sort of saying, what can we do that's just gonna take the crap out of the way of their day-to-day so that they can focus on what matters? Am I mishearing? No,
Thom:I, I, I think that's right. I think, you know, trying to make sure that we are not just cluttering things up for, cluttering things up. Say, I mean, a classic example of this that I just love is we have a sort of internal chat listing program. You know, so when you open up a restaurant, you can kind of make sure that you've done all of stuff. But at a, at a, at a managing get together. Six months ago someone was like, have you seen it recently? And it was like, no, I haven't. It was like, do you know what the first thing on the list is? And I was like, no, I haven't looked. It's like, turn on the lights. It's like, that's pretty patronizing. And obviously it was an example, but it was a great example of like, Don't tell people how to, like, don't tell people how to do like the most obvious stuff. You've gotta trust people a little bit. You've got to give up. And we try and do that across everything from like, the guys can pick the music in their tick
Jamie:doors, this, this autonomy and trust
Thom:bit again, and, and back again. Like, you know, the dough in the pizzerias. We have a recipe like this is basically what it says. One
Jamie:of this, surely that is regimented individual
Thom:pizza. Pizza don't be, they, they have to because if, if it's five degrees hotter today, you can't just follow the recipe because it will
Jamie:not be as good.
Thom:You've got to look at the environmental situation around you and go, do you know what? Today I need to put five grams more yeast. In this though,
Jamie:you're asking a lot out of a, a relatively low
Thom:paid, they're not relatively low paid as a head chef. Hmm. They're relatively well paid on a proper salary with, with a And
Jamie:you are training them to be this, is this like training someone to be a barista? Because it's the same sort of real understanding of the day-to-day
Thom:recipe. But, but it's the absolute, it's the absolute like apex of not over promoting. Hmm. So like, even, and I had to say the team really like, really did amazingly on this, even at the height of, you know, the recruitment crisis. Which, you know, difficult. but yeah, even in the heat of that, the team did such an amazing job to be like, you are not, either not culturally a good fit for us, or you're not ready for this role. So like, but they
Jamie:held their nose. Someone had to work out what the dough needed to be that day in that
Thom:restaurant. Yeah. And that, that quite often meant that like some of the people above had to do a little bit more to get, to get that over the line. It was, it was tough. It was really tough. But the bigger mistake would've been just fill all the roles of people who have, you know, are nearly there and we'll be fine.
Jamie:Let me put my cards on the table. as a young management consultant, I did a project for a chain of pubs that, was measuring team engagement. Customer satisfaction and profitability and doing nice graphs and whatever the statistical thing is to show the correlation, right? I then went to business school where I learned about this thing called the service profit chain, where some academics had done that on a massive scale and proven that, if you deliver and, and these words, you'll like these words. but internal service quality, what do you do for your team to make their day-to-day life easier? leads to employee satisfaction, which leads to retention and productivity. They work better and they stay longer, which leads to external. Service quality, I, they give a good service to the customer, which leads to customer satisfaction, which leads to customer loyalty, which is the number one driver of profit and revenue growth. Now it's a very nice, simple and pretty self-explanatory concept that they did. But give me some of the examples of the innovations you've, you've brought in.
Thom:it's, it is little things and big things, I think, and we've done
Jamie:social, the kindness bombs, which I think is a way of giving someone Yeah. A tool to having a good work experience.
Thom:Absolutely. But what, gimme some other things. some other things. So obviously we've built our academy in Camden, which, we put on a range of, so every manager or head cheff would start there and they would spend a week there. So they kind of get that sort of central point of truth, and they spent between a week and a month there, depending on,
Jamie:so the academy, idea of an actual, and, and it's a restaurant and, and a training facility. Yeah. In, in Camden. I love it. We spend ages on it, but it's a another, it's an example of this. We're gonna take your career seriously as well as Yeah. As well as give you the training. We're gonna take your career seriously.
Thom:Yeah. And so there's a lovely chain there where, you know, you join on day one in the academy, you know, our best, our best managers and head chefs. That's kind of like the place you end up, which has got a whole challenge around it. But that, that's where you want the people who are obsessing about this stuff. Right. To be there. and then at the end of their training, they'll have a graduation photo under the academy sign that goes on workplace. They are our most engaged post by miles mm-hmm. Of like, so-and-so has just been, you know, signed off. Everyone likes a celebration of something. Everyone loves it. Mm-hmm. And, and so that just, that creates a lovely circle of engagement there. Mm-hmm. Like people seeing that development. We then obviously host, you know, and this week we had a mental health, first day course. So everyone in Pisa Rican come, do you have mental health days?
Jamie:we have mental health sick days. It can
Thom:be mental or physical. Yeah, of course. Yeah, absolutely. So you can, you can take time off of obviously mental. Issues at which there are, you know, it happens for sure. And it's, it's definitely something that we, we wanna happen less, but you can only support it as much as you can. Yep. But every pizzeria, the aim is to have a, a mental health first aider in the pizzeria. Okay. So that they can spot that stuff. Great. So we do those in the academy. we have a thing called Hospitality Heroes. And so Hospitality Heroes is basically people who, really are great at their job and want to do more, but are not keen or ready to step up to like a more management role. So like, there's an opportunity to come and if you are great at service and you're doing something brilliantly, you become hospitality hero, you get a little bit more pain, and you get to come and sit in a group called Pilgrim's Progress, where we, it's, it's a non-management group to talk about like issues in pizzerias and how we could do better. So we get together once a quarter. There's no managers involved. It's just hourly
Jamie:paid. It's lovely. So basically I, I'm, I'm not ready for a manager, but this is my way of being on the stepping stone. Yeah. And a way of. It's, it's a
break
Thom:run justify giving. It's another break
Jamie:rise to someone. but more importantly, they are helping solve the problems and feeling
Thom:engaged. And they're coming back and you're like, do you know what? This is ridiculous. Why is this happening? Yeah. And then you can go away and be like, that is ridiculous. Let's go and fix it. What else?
Jamie:I'm just basically getting notes that No, let's,
Thom:but I mean, so I think mean it's ones like pay, no one starts on less than 10, 50 an hour pizza. Pilgrims, obviously plus plus trunk, which is a huge benefit to hospitality.
Jamie:It's in really important prep. We're very clear on this from day one. Yeah. Good pay. but the, the culture in each each restaurant, and I've seen it live at only one, but I'm gonna just take it on as read that each of them has a, a, a real unique team culture. And if not, you'd really consider that a problem. What else is going on to make this unique? What, how, how is it happening? it's the holy grail hospitality. Everybody knows. Happy team, happy customers.
Thom:Yeah. I, I, I know and it does, that's where I sort of start to go, like, yeah, but obviously like, why are you even telling, why have you spend an hour telling us this? This is completely obvious. And, but it's not everywhere. I, I think. I think what we've managed to get to is we, you know, we now have our MD and our head of people in that structure in place and they're, they're doing a great job of like controlling this and stopping the over promotion and making sure it's great. I think I just obsessed about this, like I'm onto people on worst place the truth. Chatting to people, you know, if you go into a pizzer ring, you can tell if there's something not right.
Jamie:Okay. But, and you're codifying it as much as you can in terms of making it part of the values. Yeah. And making it part of the, the, the business. But as you grow, this is gonna be harder. You can't stay, you can't talk to every leader. Well, you can't
Thom:get that like gut feel where you walk into pizzeria and let somebody's off here. And so what, what, currently the thing I'm most excited about, that I'm developing is, um, Uh, obviously it involves chat, G p T, uh, but otherwise, why would we talk about it? we've developed basically with, my mate Will, who helped us build our pizza in the post website. so we've taken chat G P t Learning Algorithm, and we've ingested all of pizza Pilgrim's Training materials. Yeah. Manuals. Yeah, like team things. It links to the pay system. So then, oh, no. So then you can use to, then we've got Workplace with a Bot. It's not live yet, but it's nearly there. You go on and you go, you can ask any question. So what is, how do I make a margarita? Here's the exact recipe for it. What is the maternity policy? Here's the maternity policy. How did we, how did pizza PN start? This is how,
Jamie:I don't have to remember where all these things are. So, so like, I mean, even in workplace, it's,
Thom:and all the rest of it, it's creating for Exactly. So currently it's on workplace with like a horrible thing. The hierarchy alone will be a confusing thing. You've gotta find the right pdf and then you've gotta scroll through 120 pages and you're like, are you sure a 19 year old person is gonna engage with that? Because they're definitely not. So this, this cuts out all that. I'm so straight excited, straight to the point. That's not the genius. Can I use it when it's, the genius is anonymously. We know where the questions are being asked and so we, we know not by person. So we'll never, we'll never see, like if someone says, I had this thing happen to me, we don't know who it is. But what we can see is that, although I'm not sure trust that, but Dean Street have had three people talk about bullying in the last month. Or seven people have asked, had to make an app on spritz in Camden, we go and train.
Jamie:I I hope your team, uh, are also fun loving, uh, and like a good wind up because this is gonna be good. They're gonna exploit I really, I, I did want to, to talk about growth and, and, and, and this question of how do you think about it and why, why growth is important. I also wanted to talk about customer obsession, but we're probably not gonna have time to do that. although it is worth noting that under that service profit chain world, innovative ways of measuring all of these things are really important. Yeah. If you want to make it really effective. Yeah. In my restaurant business that I share, we have amazing data because of everybody books. there's no walk-in. We don't have you don't have that, so you can't sort of do It's not that easy to do repeats or No. frequency analysis, cohort analysis, all this kind of good How do you know if it's working?
Thom:we do look at our online reviews, obviously very, very closely and track them and make sure that is a, a thing. It is speaking to customers and asking them que the, the danger of a number of views is you only look at the kind of extremes. You don't really deal with the people who had an okay time, but you do need to know that someone had an okay experience and it could have been a bit better. That person is
Jamie:Yeah. Because you want everybody to have an exceptional
Thom:experience. Yeah. So, you know, I, it's, it's, it's a challenge. I do have a sort of slight fear that, you know, if you ask too much, everything would end up the same.
Jamie:This goes to my, my question then, about, about growth. and, and you're growing fast. I, I did a rough count. You're probably 75% of the store count of, say, Francom Manka in London. I don't know.
Thom:Feels bad. I would say less than that. Okay. I think we're about
Jamie:40 in London. Really? Oh, I didn't count very 60 years. I wasn't very good at counseling. I, what I'm interested in is how do you make sure you don't become a plastic chain version of
Thom:yourself? and I think the answer is in growth to me. the only reason I wanna grow is to give people opportunities to grow themselves.
Jamie:the only reason you want to
Thom:grow, honestly, I just, you know, I look at what we've got and I'm like, well, why? Why? Why are we growing? I don't wanna grow for growing sake. That doesn't exactly. Size is not, it's
Jamie:an output measure rather than an input measure. I think that's
Thom:it. Perfect example. We're opening in Nottingham in a month's time. Mm-hmm. Big part of the reason I think we're opening in Nottingham is one of our fantastic chef from Common Garden. He's worked with us for five years, called Andrea. It was like, I'm kind of done with London, I'm gonna move. He was like, I'm gonna move. Don't
Jamie:tell me you're opening up in Nottingham. Because Andrea wanted to move back to, Andrea
Thom:wanted to move north, and so we were like, well, let's go and let's go and see if we can make this work. Give us six months. And he was like, cool. I'll give you six months. We went away. We found this pizzeria in Nottingham. He is now moved to Nottingham. He is opening the pizzeria. One of our old managers also had moved to Nott. And it was just like,
Jamie:this is a dream. Or I could, you could have been basically, we'd been talking about opening in the north for a while. How do we choose, where do we do it first? or that's great. When do we decide to move?
Thom:oh, we've got a chef. That's a great reason to do it though. Yeah. It's, that's a great reason to grow. Look, and,
Jamie:and, I have, other businesses in my portfolio for whom, who are employee owned, for instance, and they have asked themselves the question of why are we growing? It was there were shareholders before or a founder before who wanted growth. Mm-hmm. There was someone above who want, now it's us. Why do we grow? And the only answer is opportunity to develop and grow as people. Yeah. doesn't make it easy to decide how fast to grow. Well, how to fund that growth and whether or not, you know, you
Thom:know, very quickly, you know, it's that classic, like you wanna be in the zone where you're pushing yourself, which is also one of our values. Push yourself. you wanna be in that like push yourself zone, but not break yourself zone and not like, oh my God, this is all falling over, but I can't deal with it because I've gotta grown and open this next one. And I'm, I'm of the opinion that like I would. Been the next one to make sure that this is all ready. And I think we're getting, we're getting better at doing that. I think in terms of like getting better at opening stores. So like the next one coming sooner down the track is less of a problem. But I am, I am like Eagle lied on it and to the point where the border just frustrated with me now because, you know, I, I will always, you know, if you sit there and go, we're gonna open six slices year. I'm not, I'm all well, well up for setting a target, but I don't want five to be a failure. If we open five great pizzerias, we
Jamie:have, you now have a professional investment company on the board. They're great. Yeah. but they have their investors, they've made their commitments on their returns. When you say you're gonna give, deliver this, they need you to deliver it. Tension
Thom:arises. Tension. Bring on tension. I love it. Tension. Tension is good. But I think, I, I, that, that to me is the whole problem. Them going, we said, you said six, you're not gonna do six, therefore you failed. I'm like, we could do six. We could do it. But it would be not as good. So who's, who's, what does failure actually look like to you? Mm-hmm.
Jamie:And I, and my response is, well, don't say six then. Huh? Don't start with six.
Thom:Yeah. But look, and this is the tension between me and rmd, who is also fantastic and totally gets our values, but he's definitely the guy's like, come on guys, we can do six. And I'm the guy's like, why don't we just
Jamie:do five? And, and at the heart of your personal decision making, as well as making sure that, you, you are happy that everything's working in the rest of the estate before you open that next one. It's, is this right for our people? Are they gonna grow, develop? Is this career, management working at its
Thom:best? And do I, do I still get, and this is gonna sound like full like Vomity foundry stuff, but do I still get that? Like butterflies in your stomach feeling that I got in Dean Street when you walk into the site, because there's so many, sites that you could do, and you go there and you're like, why are we doing this?
Jamie:Um, what I really wanna do is go to the important thing, which is your three things. But I wonder if we can do this based on the conversation, the topics today. Whether there are, and you know, I'm, I'm gonna be pushing you for actionable bits of advice rather than platitudes. Whether there are three, three things that really stand out, whether it's to other hospitality businesses or to companies, businesses in general, organizations in general. Three things that you would recommend, people doing.
Thom:I mean, the first one is probably blinding, but it's like, go and talk to your team. Have you talk to them already? Talk to them more. Find as many ways to deal with them, to chat to them and learn from them as possible and understand what is making their day difficult. So like everything from, you know, workplace where I can kind of, you know, chat to anyone in the company, I can just be like, Hey, it was great to see you today. That looked like it was a problem. Is it a problem? It annoys everyone in the management team. Of course, you're bypassing layers of, and I sometimes create bigger problems than I needed to, but for me, I just, I like seeing how things you say in a room over there translate over here. Sure. So like, you know, we went and did a big breakfast tour last year where we went to every single pizzeria over the course of probably eight weeks. And like just sat with the team was like, hit me what's what. And some of them were hard. Some of the pizzerias were like, do you know what, this has been really hard and this has been a bit crap. And you know, this person, we haven't had a head chef for a month because so-and-so is not whatever. But it's just good to listen and be like, okay, cool. This is all stuff we can learn and action from. One of our sort of things we say to people is, have
Jamie:an opinion. Have an opinion. But what about the, the potential of entitlement creep? it's a hundred percent a problem. You know, you ask people what's wrong enough and they're gonna expect you to
Thom:solve their problems. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And I think you just need to have a great answer as to why not. There's gotta be a reason. And what would you do? Well, someone says, how are you think we should sell burgers? We've got to go back and be like, that's not gonna work for these reasons. Record pizza pilgrims, or whatever. Like, you've gotta have a good reason. The worst thing you can do is just go like, ignore it.
Jamie:Okay. Number one done. I'll take that. Yeah. And, and, and I don't even need to ask you how you make that actionable, that's like teaching. That's, that's fine. Yeah. We don't do it enough for all of us, I think. Do, yeah. My thing
Thom:is that even if you do it, do it more. Okay. I just, DT there's two is Immediately start treating every single supplier you have as a partner. Hmm. It is not a one way conversation. You absolutely. Like I didn't see this one coming and I, it's a big one for me. And I think we, we've built, you know, genuinely our, our story is built on Naples and that first journey and, but we are still dealing with those, those guys in Naples. And I can call up Aner Caputo as the CEO of probably the most famous pizza flour mill in the world and be like, Hey Anima, we're coming to tonight, Naples next year, let's go next week. Let's go and grab a beer. You know, oh, this
Jamie:has come up. Why is this important? Because obviously, you know, most procurement practices is about price,
Thom:so hundred percent not relationship. And I think it's so narrow minded because when, for lack of a better word, the shit is the fan. The relationship is more important than anything. When there is a
Jamie:supply chain problem, let's say
Thom:a supply chain problem, and they, you know, there are 500 bags of flour and a thousand people want them. You are gonna be the person they give it to. And like, you know, obviously we probably pay a little more, but like you get it back in so many myriad other ways of like access in Naples
Jamie:or Yeah. But this is more than this for you. I can see that you, a business is a human endeavor. I've said that phrase before. It, it's, it's, humanity at work. Not an a corporation and an organization. Yeah. And relationships exist and can be treated in any way you want. Why would you treat them differently in a business environment than, than a personal environment? Your values aren't different surely, but they are. They can't be.
Thom:And the big one for me, the one that I definitely stumbled on my own sort of thought on this was, was, um, delivery partners. I very much started out with a, like, I'm doing this resentfully because I know that I. it was a
Jamie:long journey. And now, and now you are, you're good friends with Wilshire.
Thom:I, I'm good friends with Wilshire. I went to him, well it was actually quite a while ago now, but and I, you know, we had a meeting last year about how'd you get more emotion into a delivery experience? Because that's, I think that's, that's the good question. That's how we are winning cuz on the High Street, because I think it's quite an
Jamie:emotionally and there are legitimate concerns when you are about, the, the experience your customer has, having a third party. responsible for a big part of that experience. Of course there are, but I think, but I
Thom:think a better relationship, the mistake I made was like, well, we, we send it out perfect. And they, they mess it up and so like, screw them. The more, the closer we get together and we are like, okay, now how, what is the problem here and how do we solve it? And how do we get better? Yeah. The better everything is. Okay, number three. Number three is I think, I, I, I think you've got to, you've got to pick one kind of third party standard that you apply internally and like focus the whole company towards it. whether that's, you know, I wanna be a Sunday Times 100 employer, or I wanna be net zero or we are actually going down the, I wanna be a B Corp route and then like take all of those elements. So like, even if you just do it as a sort of exercise just to see where you're at with it. Like going through that B Corp survey about your company. It shows you so quickly where the pitfalls are, if that's the kind of company you wanna be.
Jamie:Is this, is this a recommendation to go to to go do B Corp?
Thom:not, no, not necessarily B Corp pit. What, what's the thing that you wanna excel at in the next year? Find, but, but say
Jamie:I want to excel at B Corp is saying I want to excel
Thom:at everything. Well, no, it's saying I want to put this stuff ahead of just pure profit making. Right, right.
Jamie:But still, you're not picking the one thing, you're not picking the one as in so far we've talked only about, mostly about team and maybe the Sunday Times is the best way of measuring, are you the best workplace? And it's really hard for restaurants to get on that. And, you know, maybe that should be,
Thom:yeah, maybe that should be the one. Maybe that's the thing that you should be doing. Like a hundred percent. We wanna be the best employee. Sorry.
Jamie:It's all right. I don't believe it. Because the point about B Corp is, is it makes them proud to be part is, I
Thom:mean, it's, for me, the B Corp thing is, it is just a sense check of everything. But, you know, I, I just think pick some
Jamie:kind of external framework and rally the whole business around it. Rally the whole business around Uh, are you in danger? I fear of missing, parents'.
Thom:Uh, no, I won't miss parents' evening. I'm missing the beer I was going to have
Jamie:before parents then. I don't mind. cuz this was a fabulous conversation for me. Oh, I'm glad I really, I'm not going to, I want to know where this story ends, and I'm gonna ask you where you think it's gonna end, but I'm not today gonna ask you that. Maybe I'll ask you another time and I'm certainly gonna watch it with, interest, because, you know, in my world, food and drink business and brands, the types of bra and I mean packaged fmcg, the source of stuff that you, you, you are doing uniquely and differently in hospitality. I feel very familiar to the FMCG world and packaged goods world, but it's not that familiar in hospitality. It's a lot harder to do in hospitality. it's a very different management challenge. It's a very different culture challenge. and, and very few people. get anywhere close. And I'm not saying you're anywhere close. I'm sure you, I'm sure you've got a long way to go. There's, there's always a long way to go. but I'm so, I'm so pleased, the journey so far and your focus on careers in particular is, is so important and I think we've gotta figure that out as an industry. Thank you for your time. Sorry we've gone over. It's such a pleasure. No one will understand what that means when Joe edits this down to 45 minutes. Yeah. good luck Joe. and thank Joe. Thank you, Tom. Thanks for having
Thom:me. Pleasure.