Next Wednesday’s (22 November) autumn statement is potentially a make-or-break event for the UK’s hospitality sector. The prospects for thousands of businesses will be outlined and, put simply, it could be a moment that means survival or catastrophe for many in the sector. 

The Office for National Statistics has confirmed the rate of inflation has fallen to 4.6%, which is, of course, encouraging to see. Yet, it will count for little if the chancellor fails to take action to avert the looming business rates bill facing hospitality and provide the requisite level of financial support.

Last week, we submitted a letter to the chancellor – signed by more than 230 business leaders and celebrity chefs including Tom Kerridge, Monica Galetti and Tom Aikens – outlining the importance of the upcoming autumn statement and what is required from it to ensure the sector can thrive and not continue its struggle merely to survive. 

Our most pressing ask is for action on business rates and ensuring that the planned end to relief and increase in the multiplier in April next year are scrapped. As it stands, the sector faces a staggering £1bn tax hike in April 2024 – which equates to approximately £10,000 per individual venue nationwide. 

We already know from our members that the direct impact of that will be almost two-thirds putting up their prices, as they simply cannot absorb any additional costs. A recent survey of members revealed that 61% would raise prices if business rates bills rise in April. It also showed that 66% would reduce investment, 61% would reduce staffing levels, 42% would reduce opening hours and 22% would close sites.

We have urged the chancellor to freeze the business rates multiplier, extend the 75% hospitality relief and increase the cap to at least £2m. With energy prices remaining stubbornly high and an anticipated hike in the National Living Wage, including an extension to those aged 21 and above, this support is vital. Business rates support can cushion the sector from these costs while allowing us to invest – in our businesses, our people and our communities. With business rates representing the single-most immediate pressure facing the sector, it’s right that hospitality is galvanizing around support for action to avert drastic cost rises in April.

Of course, we are still calling for more structural reform that will benefit the sector in the long-term. A lower rate of VAT for hospitality and reform of both the apprenticeship levy and business rates is essential – with the latter in need of a complete overhaul – and we’re hoping that the chancellor will address these issues in his statement. 

There is still plenty of time for you to support our asks and make it clear to your MP that action is needed. By writing to your local MP, voicing your support for our campaign and showing the strength of feeling within hospitality, we can absolutely make a difference. The louder we beat the drum, the clearer the message – it’s essential that the sector is recognised and the requisite support is put in place. 

We’ve made this process as easy as possible. Simply visit this link and enter your postcode to bring up a template letter addressed to your MP. All you need to do then is fill in your details and click send, and you will have added your voice to the cause. So far, we’ve had more than 700 businesses submit letters to their MP, and we want to continue flooding inboxes in the run up to the autumn statement to make sure our message is heard. 

Without urgent government action, the hospitality sector will be unable to do what it does best – serve customers, deliver millions of jobs around the country and contribute to the UK’s economic and social fibre. Without action from the chancellor, we will see venue closures, job losses and cancelled investment that will harm our high streets and communities in every part of the country. 

It is imperative that the chancellor listens to our collective calls for support and takes clear action at the autumn statement to extend the current relief measures for a further year and protect the vital community assets that make up the UK’s vibrant hospitality sector. Hospitality is at the heart of our communities, and it’s essential we do all we can to protect businesses in the sector and the value they bring, from driving economic growth to creating jobs. Please do join us and show your support by signing and submitting our letter to your local MP today. 

When we think of the big-ticket calendar moments that yield a boom in trade, our minds, quite rightly, go straight to the festive period. Then there’s Easter, Mother’s/Father’s Day and Halloween – all mainstays when planning menus, deals and themed events. But what if I told you that the better part of the entire industry is sleeping on another significant sales opportunity? 

What if there was a way to earn more than £70,000 in untapped revenue in a single weekend? You’d think I was mad, right? Wrong. Love it or hate it, the fact of the matter is that Black Friday, typically associated with retail, represents a huge opportunity for hospitality businesses to interact with guests and tap into new revenue streams. 

Toggle, the hospitality commerce platform that generates and sells gift cards specifically for close to 4,000 hospitality businesses and venues, generated more than £3m in sales across Black Friday weekend in 2022. This year, we’ll almost double that – with sales in the region of £5m being forecast. Across November and December, we are expecting to hit £27m in gift card sales – which equates to approximately £500,000 per day, so the fact that Black Friday alone represents close to a fifth of that is just mind-blowing. 

If this hasn’t piqued your interest, then perhaps diving into some of the nitty gritty around why Black Friday can, and should, be a core part of the hospitality calendar will. 

Black Friday, which started out as an American retail tradition, has become one of the biggest dates in the UK’s retail calendar. People see it as an opportunity to get a jump on the Christmas shopping, grab a deal on a replacement appliance that gave up the ghost months ago, or just to treat themselves. The fact of the matter is simple – people are more prepared to part with their cash, with more than half of UK adults (51%) planning on spending across the Black Friday weekend this year. 

So, going by this logic, hospitality businesses are missing a trick if they are not tapped into this steady stream of willing spenders, and whether it’s through gift cards or limited time in-venue deals, it’s a fantastic opportunity to drive revenue and get more guests through the doors.  

When a guest makes a booking, absolutely nothing is set in stone until they have paid their bill. They might cancel, they might not show up or, heaven forbid, they might do a runner. In fact, the latest data from Zonal’s #ShowUpForHospitality campaign indicates that no-shows have increased from 6% to 12% over the last 12 months, at a staggering cost of £17.5bn to the UK economy. 

Gift cards are obviously pre-paid, which means guaranteed money going into your business. When gift cards are featured and promoted in conjunction alongside an effective marketing campaign, like Black Friday, they naturally lead to increased sales and provide a boost to the bottom line. For example, last year, Giggling Squid ran a “Floral Friday” campaign as a unique response to Black Friday. This was new territory for the brand, and it featured a week-long campaign offering a £50 gift card for the discounted price of £40. The outcome was a resounding success, providing a £74,000 boost in sales from more than 1,500 gift cards sold – across a single weekend. 

This just goes to show the power of marketing and how jumping on campaigns like Black Friday in a creative and engaging way can lead to significant spikes in sales and increased engagement with consumers. 

Black Friday is a great opportunity to think outside the box. The definition of hospitality is, quite literally, “the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests”, which is what we are all naturally very good at. However, to really capitalise on revenue-generating opportunities, it is important to go above and beyond this. Many brands have released experiences, such as cookery classes and cocktail masterclasses, in recent years, which helps to further establish a relationship between your brand and the consumer. 

These entertainment experiences are especially valuable during a period such as Black Friday, as data from Toggle indicates that sales for experience packages in hospitality are expected to hit up to £350,000 this month – the second highest monthly prediction behind December. The experiential leisure sector continues to go from strength to strength, and tapping into this with a strong Black Friday offer can lead to a stream of additional revenue, aside from your more traditional hospitality offering. 

It goes without saying that Black Friday is an exciting time of year for consumers and, with an active and engaged audience ready to part with their cash, it’s time that hospitality businesses got in on the act. 

My previous visit to Leith had been, I think, in 1988. With licensing reform on the agenda, I was on a mission to experience 24-hour, drinking and Scottish licensing boards, at least in the major cities, had relaxed their rules to make it possible – theoretically. In practice, pubs and bars had to make an individual case to vary their opening hours, and you’d have to piece together a complicated itinerary.

When I arrived at Edinburgh Waverley, my guide, from what was then Scottish & Newcastle Breweries, told me it wasn’t quite possible to drink round the clock, but he’d do his best to get close. That involved an early morning trip to Leith, the city’s port, where dock workers on odd shifts were enough to enable pubs to open at dawn. It was just an orange juice for me, and I came away thinking it was quite a grim experience, a grimness that attached itself, probably unfairly, to Leith.

So, on a research trip last week for the book I’m writing, I was keen to see the town again, with the song Sunshine on Leith ringing around my head. Obviously, the Proclaimers had seen something in it that I’d missed. It was late afternoon, and the promised sun was low in the sky, casting a gentle light on The Shore, the street that lines the river known as the Water of Leith, and which is now populated by restaurants and bars of all kinds. 

Malt & Hops is an old traditional pub dating from the mid-18th century and must have seen some things. Now, it’s so welcoming, with a fire roaring in the grate it almost sucks you in. And in contrast, a few doors down, Innis & Gunn has opened a thoroughly modern bar with a choice of beer – unthinkable in 1988. Across the bridge, by an old dock, there’s another cluster of bars and restaurants surrounded by new housing. Teuchter’s Landing is an all-purpose pub, founded in 2008, with food, cask beer, screened sports and an amazing outdoor area that extends on to the lock gates and a floating pontoon.

In the last few years, the area has attracted craft breweries too. Moonwake occupies a former warehouse just off The Shore, with a taproom on the mezzanine, while the equally highly regarded Newbarns Brewery is on an industrial estate by Leith Walk, the wide road that takes you all the way to central Edinburgh. It’s not exactly well sign-posted, and the first-time visitor proceeds with trepidation up an unpromising path to a plain door at the back. It opened on to a warmth and a buzz and a diverse crowd, young and old, including families with prams – a common feature of the urban taproom.

There’s a cavernous JD Wetherspoon across the road too, but there was one more place I needed to see. The Dreadnought is some way along Commercial Street, the main road that runs through Leith, on the corner of ordinary terraced streets that must have served as homes for dockers’ families in the past. It’s run by Toby Saltonstall, the brother of Durham’s Brass Castle Brewery founder, Phil, and his partner Roisin, and it has a fabulous range of beer, some served from rather unusual fonts made from repurposed receptacles of various kinds. Yes, it’s a bit wacky, and it’s a great pub, the kind you can really relax in and call a “local”, even though you live 400-odd miles away.

Not everyone likes it though. Earlier this year, it was the target of homophobic abuse and vandalism – it hosts events in support of LGBT charities – and true to its name, it has fought back by working even more closely with the community around it. The thing about Leith is that the investment and development that has transformed the dockyards over the past three decades has not turned it into some twee tourist destination (and I say that as a tourist). The pretty stuff, the new stuff that is attracting visitors and bringing fresh life to the area, is mingled with “real” people and “real” pubs that are themselves adapting to challenging times.

Of course, it’s all real, and we must embrace change and the creativity of operators and their concepts bringing an edge of excitement to what was once a run-down post-industrial zone. It’s part of the rich tapestry. But my point is that Leith is more than a “quarter”, to use the fashionable term. It’s a whole – and the better for it. So that, for me, was the Sunshine on Leith.

It seems to me that one of the best skills to have under your belt in hospitality is the ability to recognise the need for change, and then practice and embed new habits. As an industry, we have all become accustomed to a lot of change over the last few years. Some good, some bad. But new habits reap new rewards. 

 

I was at Lisboeta last month and was very impressed when every member of staff said hello and smiled at me when I arrived. I counted seven in all. An action so simple, but it made a big difference to me. A smile tells you to come in, sit down and enjoy your time, however long. It makes you stay that bit longer and order one more drink. 

 

Compare this with staff members who avoid catching your eye when you walk in. In other words, saying we’re too busy, understaffed and trying to turn over tables as quickly as possible. I know what kind of habits I would rather embed in my business. 

 

Experts say it takes a month to embed a habit. So, imagine what you could do in a year if you knew what behavioural changes to work on within your team. How much could you increase employee engagement and productivity?

 

I want to talk about the difficulty of changing behavioural habits, compared with what I call process habits. The latter, I think, are much easier to change. Take the big move away from paper rotas to online rotas over the last 20 years. Once businesses decided to change how they were writing schedules, it only took the investment in software to change the operational habit. There is, of course, something to be said about using systems to enforce permanent habit change, but that’s another article. 

 

Behavioural habits, on the other hand, are much harder to change. There isn’t yet a piece of software that can automate a smile on your staff member’s face. That job falls to management. How? We have all heard about the many ways to grow productivity in our teams, but it stems from finding the right ways to encourage change in everyone.

 

For me, the first step for initiating any change is transparency and consistency in communication. Observe and learn the areas of your business that need improving – is there a tendency among staff to stand and talk for ten minutes around the dishwasher rather than getting on with a task that could add value? Learn behaviours and tailor training and tasks to encourage change.

 

Let staff demonstrate initiative and accountability by encouraging them to take ownership of their roles. What do they think they could do when it comes to dealing with customers or product suggestions? Every day, we need to find the right way to nudge people forward, praising them when they smile and encouraging those who don’t.

 

It will make up for a whole number of small mistakes and costs nothing. Of course, these changes in habits and education should also drive value and profits. They just need to be thought through in a way that process changes do not. The strive for productive and engaged staff is what we are all trying to achieve. So, as we start the journey for more smiles and more hellos, I had better be prepared.