The biggest struggle for restaurants, which is in every single newspaper today, is profitability margins people closing down in the newspapers. A lot of that is not because they have negative margins. When they set up the business model Like on paper it should work. It's just in execution it falls down.
How are you Welcome to the Entrepreneur Experiment podcast with me, Gary Fox. Today, I'm delighted to welcome back Conor Sheridan. Conor is the founder of Mad Egg, but not content with having one successful business, he's now started Nori, which has raised over $25 million to become the operating system for every restaurant in the world. Here's my chat with Conor Digitalization what exactly is it and how can it transform your business? Well, the local enterprise office have you covered.
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Talk to your local enterprise office today or go to wwwlocalenterpriseofficeie forward slash digital to find out more, or click the link in the description below. Now on with today's episode. Conor, welcome back to the pod. Good to be back. Good to be able to welcome you back. I love. These are my favorite types for like're like November 2019,. We chatted first.
Yeah, five years. Lots has happened, but it feels like yesterday.
Does it?
Yeah, genuinely does. It feels like I remember meeting you down by Temple Bar and we were just shooting shit, but yeah, it feels like it's gone, like that.
Really yeah. So to give people context, 2019, you had three Mad Egg restaurants, two just opening, the third, yeah, yeah and now it's all. It's all changed. You have a brand new company, not brand new. Now you have a second business. So bring me back to 2019 and kind of bring me up towards then kind of the idea behind Nori and why you launched second business yeah, for sure it's 2019, if I can get back into the headspace of where I was back then been a weird couple of years.
Um, yeah, for sure, particularly for, like, hospitality businesses. Um, say, 2019, we were just opening our third restaurants, which opened up successfully. We were going in to actually open the fourth in March 2020. And that was obviously a date in the calendar that everyone will remember. Everyone's burned it in memory. Yeah, we won't spend too much time in the pandemic because everybody talks about it.
It's weird, isn't it, though? People either talk about too much or just have like PTSD about it and can't even bring themselves to mention it. Yeah, I talked to someone the other day and like they just wouldn't even consider the impact it has had on their business, they were business as normal. I was like I don't think that works.
Yeah, 2024 yeah, no for sure, um, but yeah, like, obviously, pandemic popped in and put a bit of a a dampener on growth for restaurants. So we pivoted to like online delivery type model, as everyone else did. We're pretty successful at that, so we're able to trade through then keep growing the business on the back end of it. Because you had a really strong brand. Yeah, for sure, we were lucky.
Your brand was really strong, like it's not luck as in, like you'd built it and it was a really slick brand. Your, your episodes still gets referenced to me. Really. Yeah, people are like that guy Cause you said something about like you knew exactly. There's two things people reference. Even now, people will say, oh, my favorite episodes are this, this and this, and your one keeps coming up because people reference you had the beats per minute of the music.
Yeah.
You knew can you just briefly explain that to people? And you knew how many knives and forks you needed per restaurant.
Yeah, it can be a bit. I like data.
I like to be able to look at data which probably feeds into.
Nori, which we'll run to as well, I think pre-restaurant. Yeah, I just think you're taking a huge leap away from working in a company to starting your own business. The restaurants were my first business. I think you try to de-risk all the things that are inside of your control so you can't control how the customers will feel about the business, but you can control all the inputs.
So I think I used examples to say if you want to stand out as a restaurant brand, you need to create a really good experience so people come to your venue to get away from the fact that they're stressed at work or at home, want to engage with family or friends. So we tried to create a good experience and part of that was what does the soundtrack look like throughout the day? And then, with the beats per minute was like how do you get people to feel a bit more bouncy or pumpy in the evenings?
And potentially they buy more alcohol off you or they will just get a bit more of a better atmosphere and be able to engage more, and then you might do something a bit slower at other parts when the demographics are a bit different. So I think I mentioned maybe certain restaurants are in, say shopping centers. So you're going to have a different style for families coming in versus maybe high street in the city on a weekend.
People are going to go to your restaurant, then go out somewhere else you want to make sure you cater for that kind of atmosphere. And then, yeah, inputs around like knives and forks. You've got a really limited budget. Right, we were setting up a venue and your capex is this number. It's not stretching beyond that. You need to have cash flow for six months of the business, in case it doesn't work out. So you need to count your cents.
So it's very much like how many knives and forks, how many covers? If we wash these, how many turns can we do? Uh, what do we need to have all this kind of stuff? So you just have like an input factor to go. Every single euro is accounted for because you're trying to make that money back as fast as possible, right, to make sure that your, your investment is going to have a positive return. So that's, that was my approach I think I mentioned.
My business partner was a bit shocked about how anal it was, but, uh, the devil's in the detail.
I said this all the time how you do anything is how you do everything. Yeah, and like people might say, oh, the music doesn't really make an impact. No, but it's the hundred other decisions you've made like that that make the impact. Because if you take that much care about what soundtrack it is, you'll care about every single thing, you'll care about the chicken, you'll care about the process, you'll care about how things are handled.
I think that really is an indicator of like a really quality business that you care, you actually care I think, like I say today to the teams in both businesses Nori or MADEC is I sweat the details when somebody joins. Definitely don't want to be like micromanaging people.
You hire great people to be able to run functions or parts of the business better than you could, but as like a founder, as an operator, you're in the details because it's everything to you the business and the experience your customers get and the value you give's everything to you. The business and the experience your customers get and the value you give is everything to you, otherwise you wouldn't do it.
So you want to make sure you're in the detail and if you want to have valuable conversations with people, you need to know the details right. So I think, early on, when you are the person doing everything, you own the details but then, as the business scales, scales, you need to stay in them.
How do you walk that line right? Because that's something I think a lot of founders have fallen down on is that they sweat the detail in the early stages. And I've done this, I've done this repeatedly. You sweat the details a lot because you are doing everything, you know every rule because you've done it right. You've done front of house, you've been in the kitchen, you've done cleaning up, you the podcast, so I know exactly how long it takes to do every single step.
But how do you then handle the transition away from that? Because you can't stay there, otherwise you wouldn't have all these restaurants and you wouldn't have a second business. So how do you transition away?
it's a really good article called giving up your legos, which you probably pin to the show notes.
I think it's really cool the title alone has got me.
I've got a lego tattoo on my left, on my sorry, on my right, on my right hand yeah, it talks about that transition from being like hands-on everywhere operator to, if you really want to scale and be successful, you need to a have the right people on the bus and be empowered them to be able to to take the business further than you can. So and that's it right you ultimately have to understand where your superpower lies in terms of where you add the most value. Stick there if you enjoy it.
For example, certain CEOs or founders you've had on might be really focused on technology or product or sales, and so stay close to that and then build an operating team around them in other areas. So that's a big one. Right, structure around your own skill sets, bringing people who can take ownership.
And you need to trust these people, because if you don't let people run with it and make their own mistakes which is the big fear right, you're like I know I can do it, but if you hand it to somebody else, it's going to be rough. You just have to be able to get over that to realize the bigger picture is there. To be able to get over that, to realize the bigger picture is there's no really big successful companies that have one person doing everything right.
There's a reason why they scale out their executive teams, departments and everything. How did you do it? Yeah, it's probably two things there. I think from the restaurants it was bringing an operating team who could be more on the ground around running different pillars of the business, so someone to run the people side, so the entire employee experience. Someone to run ops, which is, say, profitability and efficiency.
Someone to run the back of house, so help run supply chain and menu management. And then you've got someone to run the marketing side, so you've got the different pillars of the business and you're able to empower them with like strategic direction or goals and how we want to move forward and then give them like advisory or coaching to do that.
And then with nori, um, which we'll probably get into a bit of detail in, it was about bringing in, as it's slightly different business, it's like a b2b SaaS, like technology business, um. So you've got like similarish verticals. You're bringing senior executives to run different departments. You typically stand something up yourself. So for nori, for example, I was the first uh product person. You're directing what should be built. You're the first customer success person.
You're the first customer support person, you're the first sales person, you're the first marketing person. But then as you start to get like traction and figure out like how this works, so you can start to bring people in to backfill that like executives to build it out.
I'll give an example I would have done the first million revenue maybe by yourself, because you've figured out how to sell the product, why people buy it, what the best kind of buyer looks like, even if you're not a really skilled salesperson. And then you can bring somebody in to go help me build a playbook for how to scale this globally, because this is your skill set. If I can't hire you to figure out, do people want this?
Because that's not a good use of their time yeah you're bringing in a specialist to help scale that. And then same thing with customer support. What does onboarding look? Look like, figure out a V1 of it, do it Understand it? Be in the detail, like we said, so you can actually understand the DNA of it, and then go okay, this is working somewhat. I'll bring someone in to build that out successfully who's better than me, but at least we'll have an understanding of what works.
This is a really, really important point. I've heard the story repeatedly of people bring someone in to fix it. Yeah, if a startup isn't working, can't get product market fit, can't get traction, and then they try to hire their way out of it. Yeah, it doesn't work. That's a really important point you just made.
Yeah, no, 100%. I think for us it's like you have to like hard, things are hard, you have to figure it out. Like you can't 100, can't hire, hire your way out of it, but different parts of the business, and it's not to say that it will stay like that. Um, you bring in a, an operating team, to help you scale right, to help they'll improve it, but they're there to take something that's working, albeit not perfectly. No startup is perfect.
It's usually a mess behind the scenes usually, but for sure you don't want to bring someone in to figure out why your product doesn't do, isn't working, or people won't buy it, or these kind of things bring me back to what you said there about hiring people.
In madag, you said you built out a people team, and that seems quite logical and obvious, and you, you know, hire good people and put them in relevant places. Why don't more companies do this then? Is it that they haven't got the margins to do it, that they're not able to hire it? What is it? Because this is the turnover of staff was super high.
So in hospitality you've got like 100% turnover rates per year. So for every team you're kind of turning through it once a year and there's a couple of reasons for that. Right, obviously, the industry kind of how a lot of the staff tend to be, say, working part-time or they're studying or they're doing other things, and they kind of age out of it or move on. Other people are doing it for a period, not for for a long time, so it wasn't always focused there.
Like a lot of the, the kind of people function was originally like, say, hr or payroll. It wasn't. What is the employee experience like? What does your employer brand look like? Why would people want to work for you versus somebody else? What differentiates your brand? What can you give them that other people won't? And what does that journey look like? Because we see the data in ori that the turnover rate, uh, is super high.
But you see it, it's bike where people have not been onboarded properly. So our first 90 days the experience isn't what they expected, right, like it's these kind of things. And it's become much more popular now, because previously it was like we can't get people, now you can't keep people in hospitality. So I think the industry has now started to look at a people function as something that is incredibly important.
Like your employee NPS, how they feel about the business, can you create a career for people? All these things are foundational to whether the business is going to be successful, because if you're turning over your entire team every year, you can't get any consistency in pay manager operation, the guest experience, the brand you know yourself, you win somewhere and you're like it's a new person every time and then the experience is very different.
Whereas you win somewhere and if you're like a regular and you get like good treatment and you kind of you develop a relationship with people in a, in a restaurant and a cafe and you like I will go out of my way to go to a specific cafe because I've got like some sort of relationship with the people that work there and you feel almost involved, whereas if you go somewhere every time there's somewhere new.
You're like this just too much hard work yeah, and you feel that internally in the business as well, and then, yeah, carry that forward into Nori as well. You try to like. I firmly believe in any industry whether it's technology, whether it's hospitality the only moat that you have is the people.
Technology is eating itself so quickly that, like you could build something today, that is a big differentiator in terms of product value, but something's going to eat it tomorrow, you see what the AI right now?
100%.
Every day you're seeing something new so the biggest differentiator defensibility to that is having a ambitious and mission driven team who can you can stick with them and they can stick with you so bring me back then in time.
So Mad Egg to three outlets post pandemic. So we're coming out of it when did you get the idea for Nori?
Yeah, so it was in 2019 as well, so it's pre-pandemic, I think. When we spoke last time, I had a listen back, which was interesting to hear yourself so green.
I've done a couple of hundred episodes. I try not to do it too often, but sometimes I do just to see where I should be improving.
Yeah, but I just wanted to hear even my own perspective on business by then and, yeah, super interesting. But I mentioned something like you talked about. How did? I talked about being data-driven. So I tried to build tools and systems for the business that were like analyzing, say, operational performance or profitability, and that was really the kernel of the product.
So early on, early on, I noticed like um, you can have a really good product for a restaurant, a really good brand, some great people, but as you scale the business into multiple venues, it really starts to stretch the connective tissue, and what I mean by that is scaling restaurants, all consistency. You need to have a consistent experience, consistent margins, consistent ops.
But as you bring in like hundreds of people to help you deliver that, with varying degrees of skill sets, decision making, particularly around how to run the business, can get a bit fragmented and a bit disjointed. And I found it wasn't a lot of technology in the market that was actually coaching or helping frontline teams to run a better business. It was more like how do we digitize work that was done on paper or in Excel into like a mobile phone?
I remember you saying to me at the time there's all these different functions 100%. I'm kind of having a flashback as we talk, you know you were saying there's all these different types of apps. Different parts of apps. None of them talk to each other and you have to use this for this and this for this, this. So that was kind of the friction point you're wrapping up initially right.
You've got all these people doing things in a business. Um, I'll give you an example. You've got like people trying to understand demand in their business so they can better plan for what staff you have, or understand what food you should prepare in a kitchen or what you should order from an inventory perspective or when guest experiences go to bad. And you're logging into seven different systems and none of it speaks to each other.
But but the data is not contextual or rich, it's just data on that specific job to be done. So we were trying to pull it together into the basic spreadsheets that I was doing initially with like different models and stuff like that to analyze it. And that was like the kernel to go.
Why is there not a system that it can actually really be a core operating system that takes all the mission critical stuff you need to run your operations in a restaurant from like the behind the scenes all the way from the people, the supply chain to the profits and everything like that, and actually be smart enough to analyze the data?
and tell people or coach people what they should do day to day to make sure that they are actually making the right database decisions and they're actually controlling that consistency.
So not just a data entry thing, not just another thing to have to do not actually something that makes you smarter.
Yeah, we say internally in Norya, like we don't want to be just another tool to do the work on right. The idea is like we want to be the source of truth or the operating system for a restaurant group or a restaurant to say, if I'm the cfo or the frontline worker, I'll go to nori to understand how my business is doing, but what I should do next. So, like we mentioned there, what, what can we do around guest experience? What demand can we expect?
What chefs make in the kitchen, what should they order, what staff should be there, those kind of decisions. But then also have all the other uh workflows that a restaurant needs. So like maybe I'll just explain it a little bit. It's like as a product, we classify it as an operating system, which means, um, if you think about a restaurant, like a pnl, we cover everything from sales, your cogs down to your ebita, um, have all that data, but then cover all the workflows.
So how you hire people, recruit people, pay people, communicate, staff them uh performance, manage them. How you manage your supply chain, speak to your vendors, how do you manage your menu management, profitability, ingredients, putting together all of that stuff into one platform. You're doing all of those workflows. So everyone in the business is working on it, whether you're a chef, you're a cfo, okay, so it all ties together. It all ties together.
It's a one platform and we're using ai models then across each part of that business to so everyone in the business is working on it, whether you're a chef or you're a CFO, right, okay, so it all ties together.
It all ties together. It's in one platform and we're using AI models then across each part of that business to help them optimize. So the biggest struggle for restaurants, which is in every single newspaper today, is profitability margins. People closing down it's in the newspapers. A lot of that is not because they have negative margins. When they set up the business model, like on paper it should work. It's just in execution it falls down. And it's similar to what I mentioned.
As you have transient teams or people who maybe don't have operational experience or a high level of financial literacy or data literacy, it can be challenging to run a really really fast moving business. It can be challenging to run a really really fast moving business and we come in to say, hey look, if we can put this system in, we can ensure consistency in decision making, consistency in profitability and a chance to scale. So that's kind of the idea of the product.
It's like a full OS, and then we're adding on things like lending financing. So if you can, if we can help you be successful, then why wouldn't you open more?
This was kind of like the large company from Ireland that were doing it for online retailers. So you can see their data, you can understand it's a good business. If they can replicate this further, why wouldn't you? Okay, why did you set up the second business?
Yeah, so good, good question.
To be a founder is tough. To be a double founder, I would imagine, is very difficult.
Yeah, I ask myself that question on a day-to-day basis. Why right? What's the big? Why the compelling? Why no? I think in 2019, the scale of my ambition was not what it is today for Nori, and the idea is not what it was today. It was like, okay, this can actually help me.
Okay, so you're scratching your own itch. You were like initially you're going to build it from Matic.
Not a full software product but the internal tools. And then, speaking to other operators, like this can help them. And then, speaking to operators, I have some say connections over in the UK they were. Have some say connections over in the UK. They were like it would be awesome if that could help us.
And then you're kind of going pulling out a thread to go okay, this isn't just small mom and pop shops like Mad Egg with a couple of stores, there's real big businesses here that are struggling with the same problem because, like from a first principles point of view, you need to get each venue to perform, for a restaurant business to be successful.
And surely the bigger you get, like you said there, you explained there, the bigger you get, the harder it gets.
Usually you just overlay, like more people, more functions, to kind of blow it out and control it a bit, but it doesn't work. So yeah, at the time it was like, okay, initially internal product to help us, there's something here. Tread, you speak to people, you do some discovery and then you look at like market dynamics.
You couldn't help yourself no, he's getting through the data yourself.
Yeah, you could see things like uh, technology spending for restaurants as a percentage of pnl was super low. Pre-pandemic was like two percent really. So you're going like this is not a, this is a really a under underserved market and be like the penetration is low and that can't sustain right. Businesses have to evolve and over the pandemic there was an accelerator where we saw that almost double.
So you could see businesses spending more and more and more on technology in various aspects of the business and becoming much more receptive to using technology, because there must be very few industries left that have such a low tech spend, yeah, 100. So when I was seeing those numbers and you're seeing it on the ground, you're like there's an opportunity here, like it's. Hospitality as a broader sector is like eight percent of global gdp. It's not tiny, right. So it's a big, big market.
Um, and at what?
point did you go? I'm gonna build this beyond for myself.
Some of it was a bit fumbly, right, I think I got accepted into applied to the NDRC the accelerator in 2020. And the first day was like the pandemic as well, right, so decided, like at an idea stage, to do that, and it was like, okay, maybe this will help us or help me figure out if this is something we're pursuing or if there's a bigger opportunity. You were just testing, experimenting. Yeah, a little bit, I think. If I'm being honest, I didn't go into it and go.
I want this to be the number one restaurant technology company in the world. I want to go down a VC route. I want to build a huge international business. I want to scale this into all these countries and build this huge system. It was like what is the logical next step to de-risk this or figure it out? Took the step and I came from a finance background before restaurants, but I didn't have an overexposure to like raising funding or, or, or even um.
Building a tech company is completely different than building a restaurant. Um. So I went into the accelerator, uh, did some really good discovery, got some good coaching from the people there in terms of how do you validate an idea, what kind of hypothesis testing can you do? We got good traction in there, ended up um winning the demo day or the the primary startup to come out of that. And then you start to get inbound from vcs first time you've ever spoken to them.
You're kind of going, okay, well, hold on, let me try and figure this out a little bit first and quickly realize like big opportunity there, but this is going for us to really nail. It is like you need to have a really deep and valuable product that needs to be able to service businesses that are like mad egg or businesses that are doing 100 times the revenue. So there's a lot that needs to go into that from a development point of view.
So I decided like, if we really want to have a go at this, uh, we go down the vc route, which we decided to do. And then just one thing after the other decided to. It kind of snowballed and at that point it was like you're asking yourself and you said why I was looking to go, what is the scale of my ambition? Because, um, I always wanted to build a really big global business. I always felt like I could whether that's like naivety or not and I looked at this business.
I said there's a huge problem, it's underserved. I feel like I know what the problem is and I know how to solve a lot of it. Um, conceptually, that's the easy part. The hard part is how you actually build a company and a product after that.
But that was like I think not enough irish founders have that ambition, though I think irish people in general we do struggle from a lack of confidence, a lack of calling your shot, a lack of kind of going yeah, let's, let's have a crack and see if we can build a global business. I think it's getting better. I think it's definitely getting better as we get more exposure to other markets and more media. You kind of go yeah, this is possible.
So it's interesting to hear you say that you felt you could build a global business.
Yeah, I think there's signal to that right. I think there's. As I talked about de-risking, you're looking at the market, looking at the opportunity, looking at your own knowledge. You look at like all of those things to go. Is there an opportunity? Is there even the tiniest probability you could do it? And then you need to have the conviction.
It's interesting I was at like a summit or an event last week where it was like a bunch of CEOs of similar stage companies to me from all across the world. I spoke to two guys companies to me from all across the world and spoke to two guys one from the UK and one from Germany and we were talking about like why are we, these specific countries, not competing with the US for, say, generative AI or or some of these other bits and pieces?
like I think even on an engineering front he was talking about, germany used to be really far ahead and now they're losing out to different countries and it all came down to the same thread that we all pulled to say confidence is arrogance. In a lot of these countries, to stand out and say I want to do something great can often be like seem as a little bit arrogant or seem as like hey now, like just like know your place a little bit. I think it's getting better, but for sure.
That's interesting. So confidence can be misread as arrogance.
Or conviction, right. I think like you need to have really high conviction to try and do something big, and I think then that can come across as arrogance, and I know myself early on as well. You put yourself out there. That's not a comfortable place to be and some cultures, some countries are very good at that to push that. The us is a prime example and others people are a bit more. Stay within your own lane, right? I think that's kind of weird, that chat on the couch outside.
Yeah, I chat some founders and they're not comfortable about putting themselves out there and neither won't do the podcast or, if they do, they don't feel fully comfortable doing. It is getting better. I think it's the biggest opportunity founders have is to tell their own story, because that's what people connect with. I can see it in the data you are, you're a data nerd, you love this.
I can see it in the data of when people sit down with me and and do an honest, open chat and talk about their story, that the listenership goes way up. When people come on and just tell a really dull story about their company and then we did this and then we did that and then we did the other, just doesn't resonate because people can't connect with us. They can't see themselves like you have to see it to be it and people want to understand okay, what did connor do there?
Okay, connor was like that, connor did this. That's what resonates with people. I think that's the future of marketing is founder-led companies being able to tell their story really, really well. Yeah, I agree when I look at you, and my question for you now is you said something there about how you figured this out it's just to take the next logical step Common sense ain't that common right? How did you learn that approach of just take the next logical step?
Because I think we've found ourselves a tendency to get lost in the weeds of planning and planning and planning and not actually just take the next logical step. How did you train yourself to be able to take the next logical step and just keep taking the next logical step? Because, to give context first, how much money have you raised now at Nori?
26 million.
Right, that's important for people to understand that you know you've built something very substantial in a very short space of time. How did you learn to take the next logical step?
Yeah, it's an interesting question. Some of it it's probably like if you have to look at your internal makeup a little bit or your own experiences. I think working in um I go from working on finance is typically like you're trying to be like data led first, but you're also trying to have a logical set of steps to work something out. Example being trying to value a company. Uh, you have a model, you apply the model, it's steps to understand and understand that, try to apply a little.
Uh, you have a model, you apply the model, it's steps to understand, understand that, try to apply a little bit of that kind of critical thinking.
But then when you move into restaurants, you're literally operating week to week in a lot of instances, like you have to show up every week, call your shots, be be successful every week to have a successful month, every month to have a successful year, and and it's kind of going okay, I might have this uh budget or plan for the year or a growth plan, but I need to break that down into every week. What do I need to do to be successful this week, to unlock the right to get there?
I think that was a mindset that I had at the restaurant. So, yeah, we need to like nail it every single week and I think, from an ori perspective, like it's the same thing, like we have a, a 10-year roadmap internally as a company. We have like an operating memo and it says we want to be the largest restaurant technology company in the world. What does that look like by revenue, by customers, by everything else?
and you work.
You work back 10 years and go where do you need to be of the next 10 years, incrementally? And you just go. What is our next milestone? Unlock that, focus only on that, be successful there, earn the right to even think about the next stage, because nothing else exists, it's just something that's in the ether. So you have to condense your time period to go, zoom out, then zoom in. Yeah, to go. What do we think is the path to get there critically?
And what do we think is the path to get there critically? And then how do we focus on the most narrow set of actions that we can control today to try and execute on that? And if you can do that successfully, you've earned yourself the right to think about a bigger picture, because it might not be there next year for any business.
If you think too far ahead, you can have the really great vision and then a really messy middle where you don't know how you're going to execute, and then nothing will happen, right? I?
think that's so powerful because Barry Napier was on recently. He said almost the exact same thing Roadmap up on the wall, now go work. Yeah, 100%. I think that's the beauty. I think a lot of people spend too much time developing all these plans but then don't have a plan for the first step. They can kind of oh, we're going to do this, these are projections and you're like, oh Jesus, Without like the next logical step. I love that idea of unlocking the next milestone.
It's how we think internally.
I think particularly in the world we're running planning sessions are all hands. We're talking about progress. It's like what is our next milestone? What do we need to prove to ourselves, the business, to think that we can actually earn the right to be who we want to be in the future? And as the business changes, that changes like those. I think mark does. A really cool, very interesting quote from mark andreessen. He was like andreessen horwitz, um, he was one of the founders of netscape.
He talks about like a company being like an onion of risk. So at the start it's just this giant onion full of risk. It's like can you hire a team? Will people even want to work for you? Can you build a product? Does anyone even want it? Will people use it? You peel away that piece of risk. The next one could be all right. Can you get the value? Peel away the under risk. Oh, can you now do it in a new market?
Well, new people you've never met before want to use it, and so you're slowly going like peeling it away until you get to a place where, if you can keep executing, you'll have something good, you'll have something at scale. But if you think about the, the very middle of the onion, when everything is successful. You'll never sleep because you're so far away from there.
Right, it's such a big journey and you've got to understand what it is. I think you've explained that beautifully. Now you've got to have a goal. You've got to have a lofty goal, because if you don't, and you've got kind of a low goal and that's the ultimate end goal, you'll never be motivated to go there. You have to be like if I were, like I, I want to make this number one business podcast in the world.
If you don't have that goal and you know, I want to be the number one business podcast in Ireland You're like you could probably do that in three months if you're really busted. Yeah, if you really went at it, you could probably do it. And then, what does that mean in terms of revenue? What does it mean in terms of impact? What does it mean globally? Like you have to have a very clear direction. How are you balancing your time and this is kind of a bigger thing.
We talk, obviously, about business Brody and Brain on this podcast how are you managing your time between managing two businesses simultaneously?
Yeah, good question. Early on, like back then, it was still like ideation stage. There was like internal tools, you're learning whether this can be a thing. So it's like a side project. The main business project.
The main business is, is the restaurant business, um, and then as it evolves, uh, you're looking to go okay, like how do you, as it starts to build up ahead of steam or traction over a course of whatever a year, then you need to start to put foundations in place to say how can you actually operate both of these successfully? Um, and a part of that is what we said earlier what are the pillars of the business for?
That identify what the business needs to be successful in terms of pillars, so people, ops, whatever products, uh, go to market side or these things, and then you bring in people who can run it, um, better than you can, even if you weren't doing boats, right specialists and give direction. So I think that's it in a real foundational way. But you need to have a pretty strong rigor around your operating cadence and your operating rhythm.
So talk about your personal operating rhythm. That's the thing I'm curious about, because a task will expand the time you give it. If you were, you know, ideating on Nori, that could be all day, every day, no problem. How did you actually do it, though, day to day going, I'm going to spend an hour on Nori, no more. I'm going to spend eight hours on MADEC. How did you actually do?
it? Yeah, that's a good question. If you looked at my calendar, you'll see four different colours of every day into blocks.
Now we're talking. This is the detail I like.
Yeah, it's been there been like that for years.
So four callers. Yeah, breaking down for me.
We'll have like different focus blocks. So some of it's like kind of creative, like expansionary thinking, some of it is more operational or tactical, some of it is people, so one-to-one management, and these kind of things, and then other parts might be like bd, bd, these type of things like business development, so these kind of structures and it's in blocks. Early on it was days, so it was like some days it'll have a theme, so I would do, uh, work solely on restaurants on some days.
Nor is another days, and then it was you'll split the days, okay, and kind of move over and back into structure, but also like that's the best way to to restructure your your own operating way of working. But that is like a byproduct of how the business is structured, right. So do you have an annual plan? Do you recalibrate that quarterly? How do you break up your quarters? Is it monthly? Who needs to be involved? How do you review performance?
How do you weekly then calibrate the shots you're calling? That feeds in then to the work you need to do, because at one stage you might be saying we need to open, go into a new market with Nori, and that will require more headspace than maybe something else. So that can change, but focus blocks have always been really important. I think my day is like my own personal operating system has been the same thing. Similar to you, I think you train same time every morning.
You'll work on a specific type of work. I know that I can do my best deep work really early in the morning. In the afternoon I tend to do all meetings and communication, when I'm probably most lively. Then in the evening I don't do that and I might do more tactical or administrative or like keep the lights on work, yeah, so you try to block it into your own rhythm. Like where do you feel well or where do you feel I think that's really important, great, like for me.
Um, like at this I mentioned I had this conversation last week with those founders and I talked about it. Like two years ago I think. I did an exercise like what does a great day look like for Connor? Or what does a good day look like for Connor? What do I need to do to perform?
Like I need to have time allotted to physical exercise, time allotted to thinking creatively, time allotted for connections with family, your partner relationships and some sort of progress, right, so you try to reverse, engineer that into what gives you like momentum and carve out your time, because otherwise, like you just get pulled apart. If you don't have really structured periods for when you're willing to do things, you're a busy fool, right?
so I think it's easy to do as a founder, like I love that and I do the exact same thing. I was a reverse and everything and I've done that exercise repeatedly and I do it quite frequently, going what does a great week look like? What does a great day look like? Because if you don't know what good looks like, you'll never have it. You'll just be pulled and dragged and this way and that way. So I love talking to founders about like the nitty is right, can you enjoy your average tuesday?
Like can you, can your average tuesday be a good day? Because if it is, then fridays will be brilliant, saturdays be brilliant. You know, when the sun is shining it'll be brilliant. It's those days. We just got to get it done. That's why I love the specifics of a founder's day. You briefly touched on it there. How do you plan? You said yearly, quarterly, weekly. What does that look like?
Yeah, I personally, just personal and professional and they're obviously intertwined. I personally, I would set multi-year goals similar to the business, like what is my, what I want to achieve.
When you say multi-year, what does that look like?
Where would I like to be or what would I like to achieve in the next, say, three years? I typically go much further than that, to be honest, and then you try to work that back to go what am I doing?
You have it on like a whiteboard or, if one used the American term of a vision board, right, you have it in your office and you're going these are the things I want to achieve in three years, these are the things I'd like to achieve by the, and they're just staring you in the face and you're kind of going okay, how do I bring that? What do I need to do this year to do that Huge part of that? I've been seeing it.
I think a lot of people do planning and then put it into their notion or their notebook and never see it again. I'm a big believer, I have to say. I've written up in front of me and every day.
I'll write it down on them back right to go. What do I then need to do? When do I think I'll achieve this in the year, or how will I achieve it? As a first quarter, second quarter? What do I need to do to achieve it in that quarter, that week, that day? And then you make sure it's on your, your priorities. As you said, if you've, if you have too many goals, you'll do nothing. If you, if you don't have a clear direction, you want to achieve what you want to achieve.
So, personally, that could be a bunch of different things, right. It can be like family related, it could be personal growth, learning, it could be these kind of things, right. Um, it could be fitness related, like I mentioned, the races we're talking about outside set a goal to do five this year, and these kind of things, like they're just something that you know is progress. Uh, personally, and then professionally, um, it's milestone based, right.
So I think it's what is our next milestone as a company, and that could be a revenue target. It could be, uh, an x like around if you're going to run your business like that, or it could be like a profitability target. Just could be something that is important to the business and then you're reorientating the business around. What are all the different streams? What do you have to achieve to hit that milestone? How will we know we're done? What's the definition of done or success?
Look like how long do you want to get there in? So if it's 18 months, 24 months?
So you'll set a milestone and then an actual time period that has to be achieved?
Yeah, 100%, and then you'll work back from that. Okay Because from that, okay because it's like what you mentioned, you can say I'll work on this and I'll just stretch, like it needs to be time bound, specific like the kind of smart goals and then smart goals and then you're working back and you're going what do I need to do to make this happen, or does this company need to do in the two years? and then, what do we need to do? This to make sure that we earn the right to even get there?
So you're working all the way back, like I think in the companies you plan like that. So yearly, annually, quarterly, and then we have what we call cycles. So we split the quarter into six weeks, snaps the cycle into six weeks and then weekly you call your shots. So it's like a Russian doll. You're working back from years, all the way down into every week and every day, and you're trying to calibrate the momentum. You're just looking at it across all factors of the business going.
Are we compounding at the rate that we need to be to hit that milestone? And it's not just revenue, it's like product, it's people, it's customer, it's everything Because you're juggling a lot.
I love that phrase. You're taking tiny wins and tiny losses every day. Which is it? You're taking tiny wins. They'll compound over time. As long as you're compounding towards your multi-year goal, how do you decide what's important?
Yeah, it's an interesting one Professionally.
Both, yeah, yeah, okay, we're going deep, we're going personal, because I think one, you don't have one without the other, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I think one, you don't have one without the other, right? I think I'm really focused on body, brain, business, I think without the other, you know, the founder sets the tone for business. I can definitely see it in you and your businesses, how you talk about them. You definitely set the tone.
So, yeah, how do you decide what's important in both?
yeah, I think you need to. You need to look at I said like early on, what is the scale of your own ambition? Like, what is your? Why? Like, what do you want to achieve in your life? Right, that's, I think, how that'll be represented in your business and how you show up and how you structure your business. You need to be really honest with yourself and really know deeply what you want.
Then you have your own set of values for how you want to operate, right, and I think that you have ambition, and then you have a way of showing up and I think that sets the tone for a business. Like how do you, what are the behaviors that you want to show or you want to see in your company? Um, and then, only then, can you really get people aligned and on what's actually important and from a direction of a business.
So I was actually at a a leadership course last summer, this this summer in the States, and it was all about it was a bunch of different ex-founders who had IPO'd companies and incredibly successful people. The whole thing was based on alignment and the whole thing was based on understanding your personal orientation for what you want to succeed, making sure you're fully honest with everyone else and if they also want to go on that journey. You have that early, early, that kernel.
And then, as a company, what is the vision for the company? Are you being true yourself? What you want to achieve? Is the work that you're doing every day actually linking to the, to the vision? Like are people all orientated and aligned on? Like who you want to be? Like everything from? Like your product strategy, your company strategy, for how you think you're going to win the why behind why you exist?
Like we talk at every all hands to be like nori exists to help an industry that's always in pain, right, it's always being reactive they have. If we can help these businesses increase their profitability uh, grow, survive we can actually change the trajectory of these people's lives. If we're successful, the industry's successful, the industry should be able to grow and we should see it being more successful. Then you work down. That's what's important.
It's clear and it's understandable. I'm not in the industry and I can get that.
That's why we exist. And then, tactically, how are we going to do company and the product and our customer to be able to achieve that and what's important for us to be able to achieve that? So, like, how do we need to show up every day? How do we need to operate? How do we need to make sure that we deeply understand our customers' problems? We're actually building solutions for them, not just things we think are cool. We're actually having the impact we think we're having.
We're taking feedback from people aligned and what's important for you and for the company. Then you can do that, like at a big macro level.
You can do that then week to week, day to day when you take on external money, does that change the dynamic a little? It puts it's two sides of a coin right, like Because you've done both now, so it's a really interesting place to be able to talk to you. It's very rare to talk to someone who's bootstrapped and then taken on significant VC money.
Yeah, it does. It's a completely different business. You run the business differently. You have to run them at different speeds, you. But you do that because what's your why? Right, like it wasn't, like, you fell into it and said, oh, now I have to now I want oh no, where do these millions come from?
so now you have to run the business that like yeah, you're doing that to put a rocket on your back, to move faster, to compete with huge incumbents, bring in some world-class people like you're trying to take a cheat code a little bit to accelerating that journey, um, because you wouldn't be able to do it otherwise. Really, right, um, but it changes like just two sides of the coin to it. Right, there is you take on capital and it's a commercial agreement, right?
Somebody is investing in your company because they believe that you can return their fund or their return an outcome. So, like a vc for a venture capitalist, say, they have 100 million fund, they need you to at least exit for 300 million at some point because they need you to return the fund after dilution.
So, like it's, you need to be cognizant in that social contract that someone's investing in you, whether it's going to be through dividends or if you IPO'd like best case scenario or if you went profitable and decided to do dividends over 10 years, or you get acquired or something happens you're committing to getting a return for that business.
You went profitable and decided to do dividends over 10 years, or you get acquired or something happens you're committing to getting a return for that business. Equally, the people who join the company. Everybody owns a piece of the company, in Norrie, for example. Everyone has equity options. So they all want an outcome and they're open about it. They're there because they believe that it can be successful, but they want to have something life-changing, or else they wouldn't be there right?
that's a big part of their motivation I like when people are honest about it. So much nonsense yeah, for sure right. Oh, we believe in the big vision and you're like it's not really changing the world here, like, let's be honest, like this is the important thing is to ever be honest. I love that alignment piece I'm thinking about that still of like, and you can see that that straight line straight through your company.
And I think too often people go oh yeah, we took on money and then it changed everything and then it all fell apart. There's a clear value exchange 100%.
Like like you go and you get, like capital, you get support, you, you get this thing to move faster to reach your ambition said at the very start the podcast. Like want to build a big global business. You're trying to build a big product. That's quite deep needs capital. If you want to compete, you want you need world-class people to come and join. You try and compete against some of the best companies in the world.
So, like, all of those things is like um, but you know you, you know that it's not like nothing is free, right, you're doing it in in return for, like, uh, to be able to, to exchange that value. So I think everyone in the company understands that and I think that's important, right, I think it's important that people understand what their, what route suits them. Um, that's why I said around the scale of your ambition Like bootstrap business is the way to do it for a lot of people.
Taking on funding is the way to do it for a lot of people. But you need to know why you're doing it and how it changes the narrative, because there's no one way to win but bootstrap business doesn't need to grow multiple hundreds percent per year in order to. Once you're on that track right, you can slowly compound and do things. But you need to be cognizant that if you go on this track, typically within a five to ten year window, the expectation is you're at a certain level.
So it changes it from the speed of execution definitely, but it changes the opportunity as well. Are you still?
involved in MADEC.
Yeah, yeah, like I think, absolutely love the business and the brand. I firmly believe we're the best at what we do in that small niche of like farmed free range fried chicken, which is quite niche, right. But yeah, business has got an awesome operating team that are there so it's day to day. Not as close to it as I was when we first met. I would have been cooking in the kitchen when we were doing those podcasts. That's not quite the same today, but, yeah, still involved.
You're still able to keep an eye. You're still able to straddle balls, you feel.
Yeah, it's challenging, right? I think you talked about how do you manage your personal time. You can definitely feel stretched, like just push and pull. It's like anything. You go through periods of calmness and it's all fine and periods where things might blow up or flux and you need to be able to manage it. But fundamentally it's been set up in such a way where it operates really well as a business that it's it's that's because of the people that are involved in the business, since day one.
If people go back and listen to the first podcast, it's striking to hear the similarities between that and this. The fundamentals are there, the strong fundamentals. You talked about your body. So you train in the morning. How do you look after then the rest elements of your body and then? So how do you look after your mental fitness, mental health?
Yeah, good question A couple of ways, I think, like what does a good day look like? So, for me personally, there's a few things. There's again if you look at it at macro and micro level. At macro level, like what's important to me as a person, so the relationships that I have with my partner, my family, like spending meaningful time there, because that gives me energy. What things take energy from me that you can maybe not be involved in so much.
Am I making progress in what's important to me in life with personal goals? All of those things are important. Then, more tactically, it's like what does a good day look like? So I think I mentioned something where you're focused. Exercising physically is obviously really meditative as well, as it is good for your body. If you can be in good shape, then you're much more likely to weather the storms.
I feel like I notice in periods where my physical health is super high and way more balanced than periods where it's not your resilience is just on the roof. You're up and down a bit more. So being able to center yourself and then that feeds into how you operate your business right Having control for me is really important in terms of time, calendar and focus. If I feel like I'm reactive when I'm running around fighting fires, that's not a good way mentally either. So that's important.
It's a routine and structure are very important for your mental health.
Huge, I think, like you look at like when you're running businesses, you're risk on right. Everything is like you look, you know, when you do your pension or you do something like that to go what risk level are you? From one to seven portal and you're kind of going. That's just like all like a roller coaster of everything. So everything around you needs to be well, for me, needs to be so structured, like whether that's same food every day, right within reason, but just simple stuff.
Or like training, like that walk to the office, like that periodical, like structure. I think for me is very calming and important.
Yeah I like structure I've built out like I went on holidays for a while there and just developed all these systems. It's like I've got them all anyway, I was like let's like this sounds so nerdy even for me, and it's like literally categorizing each one into like my fitness system, my recovery system, my nutrition system.
And then I had just it all, like laid out on a page going this is what I do, this is my nutrition system, this is my recovery system, this is my fitness system, down to everything. And it just it was so calming to do that because I'd been doing it anyway. I was such a creature of habit. I was like I'm just going to have three different systems for each area body, brain, business and then just that's, that's where I work, because that's why. I asked where does one stop and one begin?
I find I get distracted quite a lot. So like trying to narrow that focus so that I have very tight structures and then trademark that show notes body, brain. Yeah, body brain business. That's what we're all about. That's kind of like and that's how I like to like structure these chats, because I think I'm very founder led. I'm very much like if you can understand what makes a founder tick, then I'm very founder-led.
I'm very much like if you can understand what makes a founder tick, then you can help other founders. I talk about the founder formula for success. If you were to everybody right, like success is different for everyone. There's no one thing is not more successful than the other. I think it's down to what is your internal. Why keep going back to that? What is success?
that's why I ask it because so many people ask me what have they all got in common? I was like everyone is different, so that's why I started asking this question, because I want to be able, at the end of the year, go here's 52 formulas for success.
There's a lot of key things that look the same, but they're all different yeah, I think if I looked at my own personal definition of it or what I wanted to achieve in a professional sense, it's like, uh, clarity. You need to have clarity right of back end scale of your ambition, but clarity on when you know. When you know what that is, then you can start to actually visualize, like what that means and then, when you can do that, you can put it down on paper.
Right, you need a plan, so you need to know where you're going directionally. As I mentioned, you need to know, uh, that, so you need to have a view on, like directionally, where you want to go as a person or as business, and the inputs to that are, like, being able to to break that back into steps to get there right. So what do you need to do, from showing up consistency, what you need to do across the business?
If I looked at nori, like our next stage now, for example, we've really clear milestone where we need to be in the next 24 months. Like, for us, we're de-risking certain parts of the business and each one of those is a piece of success that we will earn. And you're working back from each of those and going what are the unknowns that we need to figure out? And then you're working that back to day-to-day what do we need to do to figure that out?
So I think, like I know, it's always about working back from the big, hairy, audacious goal all the way to what you need to do tomorrow to make sure you're moving in the right direction.
Overall in your life. Say what would be your founder formula. So if you were going to say clarity plus this over this, or clarity plus this equals success, what would that look like for you?
For me it's the why. First of all, say it to anyone who I meet and says I'm thinking of starting a business and I was like why? Just much easier ways to make money? It's much easier ways to I don't know achieve professional success or kudos or all these other things. Like it is really hard at any level, right? I don't think if you're going to do something that's considered a small business, it's consuming life consuming. It takes all of your time.
If you're going to do something that's considered like what you see in the newspapers and some of the guests you've had on, where it's billions, it consumes everything. Like, so, like, you really need to know why, like have really strong personal conviction, and if you have that, that will then feed into the resilience, the, the consistency, how you show up, how you weather the storms that's the most important piece.
Like the why behind, why you're doing it and why it's important to you to do that.
But that's because you're broken internally or you've chipped in a shoulder, whatever the reason is, or you just have a Do people know, though, because I often ask that people that as well, and sometimes like they don't know, but kind of pick it apart as we're chatting I'm like, ah, I see it now like they're running away from something or they're running towards something, or they're an addict. They're addicted to the game which commonly, most founders are. Do you think people know?
What do people say to you about the why?
it can depend, right, I think, like with someone, everyone has different reasons. But I think outside, outside in I'm not sure people realize how difficult it will be. Um, it's not, which is something you just jump into it at a really, really compelling way some people do.
You can meet people and you can see it in their eyes and you're like this this person has, like you know whether it's just like they really have a. They want to change it, change an industry, because something happened with their family or something close to home. It's become like they really have a. They want to change, change an industry because something happened with their family or something close to home.
It's become like this obsession and it's like you can see it's obsessive way of thinking other people because they're really driven by a financial outcome, whatever their, their why is, or they have a chip on their shoulder because maybe they didn't achieve what they can be, and you can hear it in the way they like speak and that energy.
But you can see it in the progress you can feel it, because it's usually like you meet somebody and they'll talk about it and say you meet them two months later. The ones who are really understanding and obsessed about it will have done something, the ones that just keep talking about it, and then you're like you don't. I don't know if it's for you. You like the idea of it as opposed to like yeah the idea of it, of actually jumping into it, right, do you?
want to do it or do you have to do it? Yeah, that's kind of how I think of it. It's like if people are starting something like, is this what you really want? Are you all in on ones, you can feel that energy and we'll move on to our, our quickfire round now shortly. But talk to me then about nori, because we we've kind of like pieced together the early stages.
Give me like a whistle stop tour then on the last 18 months of what's been happening, because it's been every time I open linkedin you're there. Worse than me, yeah sure founder marketing, right?
um, yeah, it's been a bit of a wild ride. So we properly started to formulate the team like 2021, right? So it's been three years just over three and a half years to today. Last 18 months we spent probably the first year year and a half really building out the product. So, as I mentioned, we're covering a lot on the basis across the restaurant. So it was about 12 months building that part of it, getting early feedback, testing it with different cohorts of customers.
Started to commercialize last year mostly in the UK as our first market Launched with some small kind of chains or small restaurants, and then over the last 18 months really scaled that out into some real international players. Really large businesses Entered into new markets. So testing with customers in the us entered into the least um enters, obviously getting pretty good penetration into the uk.
I think on our beachhead for next year we should probably have between 12 15 to the market if we can keep growing at our rate now, so of that seriously chunky so like really getting deep there in the area that we know we want to serve, and yeah, so it's obviously then the capital rounds. I think within 12 months we raised 25 odd million, which is good injections to help us do that Especially now.
Yeah, it comes with big expectations and I think at this stage we're really in an evolutionary point this year. So from this summer, I feel like you have to. In a tech company, you have to build a product. That's your first milestone, right? Can you build something, get it to market, can people get value out of it, and you can't think about anything else?
no-transcript in the world. It likes to use small startups with all these mad things, swag for this and swag for that, and they're at every conference.
I'm like, oh no we used to be internally. We get a lot of questions last year to be like why don't we have this, this and I just every meeting was like nothing else matters than just doing the thing and making sure it works.
And then, once you've proved that, now we're going into an evolutionary stage where we're trying to build a company that can actually scale, like, so you're um building in different departments across the business, different execs run the departments with internationalizing, so all the complexity that comes with that. So we're really trying to figure out, like, how do we go from early traction, going deep in a decent sized market in the uk to a real international player?
Um, over the next 18 months? That's just a net new thing, right, you're trying to figure that out. You went from being like can we actually do this? Will people buy it? Will they get value? Can you repeat that? And now you're trying to figure out to go how you actually scale the business out into multiple markets and really get real scale, which is the billion dollar question for everyone, right. So it's been exciting.
12-18 months, particularly the last 12 months, just has been a wild ride and then, as like we've we've talked about I'm not gonna talk about it, but labor the point about how difficult it is for restaurants to the minute, and bars and cafes, but like, ironically, your solution becomes more important then as times get tougher, anything that gives you that edge, that that sharp edge, is becoming more important it's a tough one, right like I think.
um, I met someone today who was interviewing for for a role and I asked him why the hospitality industry, what's his passion for?
And he's like he'd worked in the hospitality companies and he's like I don't know if I grew up with a passion for it, but I was interested with it and then I got into the problem space so they became obsessed about it and now I love it, now I'm passionate about, about it, and he's like what is like the steps, it's like doing anything, like a fitness or looking at these kind of things.
It's levels to everything, yeah.
Like when I operated in hospitality when I was younger. And then you look at it okay, this is an opportunity for a business and you set up MADEC and then, or two ways, you become obsessed.
You're like I or I absolutely hate that business. Yeah, you're never gonna hear it again yeah, you know you go one or two ways and the people you wanted the dip sessions, all right. Yeah, the people are like taste is just, I love it, I think about it.
We're not thinking about it yeah, exactly like, and I I'm on the other side. So like, look, love the industry, obsessed with trying to help it and obsessed trying to help my own businesses in it as well, and like it's definitely been a challenging period, I think, uh like the input costs have never been higher to run these kind of businesses. Consumer preferences are changing right. People want to use delivery people use other platforms.
Everything's kind of eroding the margin an industry that has pretty low, low margins as it is. So the headwinds facing the industries are are tough. The tailwinds facing the industry is people are spending more time isolated at home, working from home, away from their peers. It's probably the last bastion of like connective tissue that we'll have. Is that sector outside of things maybe like fitness or these kind of things. So I think we'll always have a really important place in society.
But it's going through a stage now where we're trying to figure out what will it look like for the next 20 or 30 years, because what worked 20, 30 years ago doesn't work anymore. People don't operate in it, the business model doesn't work.
So it's really going through this like period where it's gonna have to reimagine itself and it will, and it will come back out um everything is cyclical right yeah, I always think this is the new thing which has never been seen before, when, in reality, when you trace things back, everything is cyclical, everything's happened before in a version of a way 100%.
If you're getting your crystal ball out now and kind of looking at the restaurant, cafe industry, where would you see it in the next 24 to 36 months? Are we having a reset and then everything will kind of come around again in a different form, or what way would you see it being?
yeah, it's interesting, right? Um, a lot of it can come down to policy as well, not to get into government talk and things like that. Um, like you, look at different markets we operate in. So look at the us market it's growing double digits 11 12 percent a year. They reckon every year is going to be a net new peak in terms of food service trade. So, while there is challenges, they have good kind of federal policy to be able to make sure these businesses can scale.
Look at the UAE or the Middle East different market but it's growing like 18, 20% year over year. How come? Some of that is like a net new location influx of people, people doing like nomads, lifestyle arbitrage, moving there. There you're seeing they want to be the biggest hospitality player globally. You're seeing that with like different sporting events in the US. It's just the nature of the beast in there. Look in the UK and you look in Ireland.
It's been a bit flat, a bit more flat in terms of growth rate, almost like a net negative in some instances. Like you look in Ireland, it's like planning policy. Can you get access to units, these kind of things? Can we get enough infrastructure to get enough people into the hot spots to actually service the businesses. So potentially there was too many venues for certain areas and we might see a drop off in certain parts of it and then it'll get more competitive potentially.
But yeah, 24, 36 months it depends on the country I think that we'll see. Uh, um, we'll see a bit of a shake-up domestically in different types of businesses. You've probably seen that in the press recently things are happening and that's a pity, right, it's a lot of great businesses there, um, but it'll change. The model I think I used the example of.
Businesses will need to be like more like Henry Ford in the kitchen and the back of house, like a logistics business, and then out front they'll try to be experiential, to differentiate, like how do you give the guests what they want? But we'll see like a change in the operating model of those businesses, so like be less people heavy and a lot of instances more narrow offerings Do you think things shift out from the city centre?
Do you think people are more towards the suburbs now is the work from home thing kind of like made the city centre a very difficult place to operate in.
Maybe, but like we work with like a lot of restaurants and we can see the see the trading patterns, and the ones who are in dublin city center are the best performing across the board wow, that's interesting in the right, in the right parts of the city, right with the concepts that are maybe, as you said, cyclical, that are more in vogue. And the problem with like going out to suburbs is because our the planning policy is so tight that there's such a limited number of licensed venues.
The cost to actually operate in the suburbs is not that much lower than the city centre. With the exception of rates, you're never going to get as much footfall in a suburban town as you're going to get off Graffin Street, right, and you're not actually paying that much of a difference, which doesn't make sense right. I think that the cost will need to drop in terms of the cost of doing business there for that to make more sense. Okay, so what will change? I don't know.
Let's get on to a quick fire round. What book would you recommend every entrepreneur should read?
Good to Great is probably one that I've given to a lot of people from Jim Collins, so he's written books like Great by Choice, good to Great, built to Last, and the whole idea is like he analysed 30 of the most successful businesses in the world, or 30 businesses, and analysed why were some successful, hyper successful and some were just good businesses, and he breaks it down into five inputs, which is like the different inputs into a great business around, like the people, the leadership
style, the organisational structure, and really charts out like what you need to have to be a great business and uses data, which is like something that I'm you're a fan of yeah, exactly. So I'd recommend that for any because it's great for early stage, late stage, just super cool, I like that what's something you'd learn the hard way something I learned the hard way. Um, Something I learned the hard way.
If something from, I'd say, if something like listening to your gut a little bit, I used to. I'll give an example. When you're starting a new business, sometimes something isn't the right fit. Right, you know it's not the right fit. If it's, it could be a customer. That's not a right fit and you want to please it and you spend all your time, your team's time and the energy and the focus on the 2% versus the 98% and that's just like.
That's a specific example, but it goes for a lot of things in terms of hiring or other people. There's definitely have been instances where you make a rash decision versus a because you feel like you just you need to keep moving versus actually taking a more considered step, and I've been guilty of that for sure it's hard.
Sometimes you're like is that my gut or is that my fear? Yeah, which is I had that yesterday. I was like my wife. I was that rang her up and I was like, oh, I got this opportunity. What should, what should I do? And she goes I listened to your God. I'm like I can't hear it. But then I calmed down. I literally had to give myself an hour or two and I was like, no, that's not the right opportunity. Hopefully you're listening to the pod and you're feeling inspired.
Maybe you want to do new things in your own business, or maybe you have that brilliant idea. You've always want to bring a little bit further and see if it works. So why not right now? You listen to the majority of the guests in this show and they've been helped by the local enterprise office at some stage in the journey. They have something for everybody.
Whether you have that idea, you want to develop, you want to get your products in new markets, you want to innovate your existing products or you want to expand staff and premises, they have the supports to help. So why not today? If you want to start up or grow your business, then contact your local enterprise office today. What have you sacrificed to achieve your success?
Success in inverted commas right.
Success is open to interpretation.
That's why I ask it so openly, for sure.
And it changes. It'll change for you in two years as it does now.
I'm joking um, is there like a lot, I would say. Um, this is back to the why piece. When I speak to people like you're, it'd be if you're going to really want to build something, any business, you have to be obsessive about it, which means that it consumes a large proportion of your life. Um, you're waking hours. That means that you it will eventually, into periods, degrade other parts of your life.
So how do you balance, like, can you be the best son, partner, brother, business partner, boss, friend all at the same time? It's that's tough, right, and I think you go through periods where you feel like you're not being that best version of yourself for other people, or quality of your relationships can can decline, and other periods it gets better time for yourself, all those kind of things.
So, um, I'd say it's cyclical as well, just periods where that for sure, uh, it goes back to what you said about knowing yourself.
Yeah, you know what's important and you have to be able to maintain at a certain level I think it's the people that let everything drop completely will struggle in the long term, because then it's very hard to pick things up.
Yeah.
If you break something, it's very hard to glue it back together five years later. What would you do today if I give you 10 million euro Good?
question Probably give it to wider family um extended family, a very close net like wider family of like aunties and uncles who've supported our family and lots of ups and downs and other things like that and direct family. So probably that such a wholesome answer.
I was hoping you said buy a lamborghini. No, I don't think so it wouldn't suit me. I'm going to give you one million euro, yeah, and you have to invest in one person or one company. It wouldn't suit me. I'm going to give you one million euro and you have to invest in one person or one company. It can't be yourself. Who is it? Good question?
probably a friend of mine because I get good value out of his business. No, I'm joking. So, raoul Irma. So he has a company called Cambridge Spark which is training people how to learn machine learning skills, data science, generative AI, how to actually skill up, irrespective of your background. So if you came from a trade, if you came from a service industry. If you come as a trader from a hedge fund, he helps train people to get them ready for the next evolution of the workforce.
I think like that's a really cool idea, just because it's making sure that you can bring people along for the next journey and they can really be at the front of the value capture that will come with this next round of technology and you can see that, like his business is growing super fast.
Cambridge spark Definitely must look that up. If you're starting from zero again in 2024, what business would you start?
nori, if I couldn't choose nori, can't choose nori, can't choose nori. Um, I'd do something in the longevity space. I think I, as I'm getting older, start to like do more periodic, like health checks or scans or things like that, to see, like oil changes, as I call them, to see how you're actually getting on, and I think it's very hard to even get the data from them and see how you're progressing. Everything is like conversational and piecemeal and you don't really know.
I find that for people you don't know until too late, like if you're actually operating in one way or the other. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there, in so many different avenues, to be something that that I would look at. I'll be your first investor in that.
I am so bullish in that space. I'm a longevity nut, get my bloods done every six months.
Nad infusion really yeah, telomere testing in Ireland the whole shebang.
Yeah, but again it's hard to do. I've got in with a guy very early five years ago, but now it's so hard to do, it's so hard to get in with him, it's so hard to get these services and again it's quite piecemeal. When you go beyond that, people are like oh, how do you do that? And people are afraid. So I think that that is probably the biggest area I'm most bullish on. So, yeah, I'm in that people would find strange or strongly disagree with interesting one.
Um, this is going to sound so cheesy. I was like first thing that came to my head there is like hard things are hard, right, which is more like if you want to do something really difficult, it's actually going to be really difficult and what you break that back when I often find when you meet people and you're like you want to build the biggest technology company in our space, that can, it's just words, right, but to actually do the thing is so hard, or else other people, a lot of other people
would be there and I mean you get into the day-to-day and the brass nuts of what you need to do and sacrifice and commit to be able to do that, even for myself, like, is so much that goes into that? I just don't think. I think people understand running a business is difficult, but I don't think they understand that it's not even running it. But it's like being part of that journey of how difficult it is, how hard it is and how much it actually requires and will take from you.
Um, it's easy to say the words.
It's very hard to actually do it and we live in a soft world that's dominated by social media, where everyone just throws out things and then it's like oh yeah, great slogans and stuff actually, yeah and they don't actually explain it. That's why I love doing long form and I'll always do long form, because get into the weeds, get into the nuts of what does your day look like like. People can understand that better than I got up early and exercise.
Okay, that's giving me one percent, it's the other stuff that goes into it. Um, yeah, I agree. What has been your worst investment?
worst investment, um, probably goes back to what things you learn the hard way. I think um, um, early on when you're you're trying to start things up in any business, you can go down a rabbit hole because it's a shining light.
I'll use the example of like time spent with like customers that weren't the right fit, or something trying to change someone else's business in there, and you can burn a lot of time other people's time so I'd say something like that right, I think anything that you're going to commit a lot of your emotional focus and time to when it's better spent elsewhere, at real critical points in business, is probably the worst time.
So the worst spending wasting time with the wrong kind of customers.
That instance early on because, like I've actually seen and we were lucky that, like early on, we had a couple and we moved away from them thankfully. But I've met other founders who've built their entire business around difficult customers roadmaps. They're completely locked in.
That's what they assumed the customer was.
Yeah and they'll have someone that's the loudest voice in the room and you'll follow that thing and that can actually destroy a business or take them off track 100%. And I remember going into the business saying I would never do that. And you get into this. Seeing the traction and momentum, it's easy to fall in.
You don't know what you don't know. You don't know that's bad. You don't know that that's not the norm. That's only through experience and through being honest what's been your best investment?
Best investment. I have to say Mad Egg right, because if I didn't take the jump out of the job to do that, nothing would have happened. Propelled. Everything Taught me. Do that, nothing would have happened. Propelled everything taught me what it was like to run a, build a business. Yeah, definitely.
It's funny I think it was Steve Jobs that the dots connect in a reverse. Now you're looking back on what Mad Egg led me to here and led me to building this massive company. What's your final piece of advice?
founders, listening I don't know if I can give a uh advice, right everyone.
But um, give me a quippy, a quippy thing that'll go well on tiktok what will go well and follow your dreams, son.
I said this phrase like five times today, I think, in this podcast. What is the scale of your ambition? And I feel like I'm a parrot repeating it, because I went to a talk with Roloff Botha, the head of Sequoia, the managing partner. He was the CFO of PayPal, helped IPO it, and the whole thing was about what do you want to achieve? What is your ambition? Everything else in your life will come down from that.
Really, honestly, understand that, because once you know that, that will determine how you build your business, how you run it, how you show up. Everything else backs in from that. So I think like even if you're at the very start or you're halfway through the journey or you don't know where you are in your journey, answering that question will point you in some direction. That would be a good direction.
That is the title for today's podcast. You saved me a job in a few months time, all right. Where can people learn more about yourself and then about Nori and Mad Egg?
yeah, for sure for the restaurants, madeggie and we're around Dublin city centre where are the outlets?
someone's listening?
Camden street, jervis street, jervis street shopping centre, dundrum shopping centre, liffey Valley. So if you're around those areas, drop in. Hopefully you enjoy it because the drum one. It's excellent. Very good for Nori N-O-R-Y not the Nori with the seaweed wrap dot A-I. You can find out about it or on LinkedIn that business is yeah, most updates are on LinkedIn. If you're a restaurant business or you want to shoot the shit, feel free to reach out.
Perfect, Conor. Thank you so much for joining us again.
Cheers for having me, gary, appreciate it.