Jamie Oliver Group bite-size: A second act

I don't think Jamie's ever not had a good brand.

I think the restaurant business went into administration for various reasons, but it wasn't because of his brand.

I just think there was other issues, management decisions and not having the ability to be able to then pivot and the capital required to do so being a privately owned business.

The sort of awareness of Jamie today, he's been writing for 25 years, right? He's sold well over 50 million books, the biggest cookbook author in the world, TV across 120 countries or something like that, books published in 36 languages.

Clearly like there's a huge opportunity with that.

And that gave me a huge amount of confidence and I like a challenge.

The strategy sort of post May 2019 was quite simple.

I was effectively employee number one.

So as with any team, you need a team.

That was about people and putting together a really good group of people to take on the challenge of becoming sort of the best global chef-led franchise business in the world.

Putting franchise first was a big pivot.

It was definitely more of a owned and operated model before.

And rather than having that sort of domestic estate as the center of gravity, every day the sort of mission was to wake up and think about how can we become the best possible franchisor, where we have the best possible systems, simplified operations.

and like something scalable and that was the core focus whereas before it was all about the domestic market and that's quite a change in terms of mindset we also did a whole series of innovation as well at the time the sort of brand focus was on jamie's italian and we developed some some new concepts and we've continued to develop new concepts To support partners of different growth opportunities, to capitalize on different channels, different settings, and also ensuring that each of the Formax concepts within the portfolio has a very distinct role to play.

Whereas I think before when we were growing, we were trying to solve maybe a few challenges with one concept.

And I think when you're in a crisis, pre-May 2019, when the business was in a very challenging period, I think innovation becomes tough because decision-making is difficult.