Calling Out for help

Tammy Mariaux has spent 15 years in the hospitality trade and has just relaunched her catering consultancy firm Out-Saucing

Tammy Mariaux is back home, nursing a gammy leg following a nasty car accident over Christmas. This is not to say she is convalescing. Not if she can help it.

She is once again her own woman. After a brief stint at Springboard UK, the hospitality industry careers service, last summer, she has relaunched her catering consultancy, Out-Saucing.

Already she has a fleet of clients and is helping them pursue some interesting initiatives. The leg is very inconvenient. But you get the feeling with Tammy that a small matter of a leg is not going to hold her back for long. After all, you can always hop.

Tammy describes Out-Saucing as "the business doctor". The pack of postcards she uses to market the service - some of them pictured - promise cures to a range of ailments that most pub operators will recognise: staffing problems, a business that isn't maximising its potential, a concept that doesn't quite fit the marketplace, standards and systems that aren't adhered to.

There are plenty of consultants out there, of course, who can give you guidance on all this. But not many of them have Tammy's background. Whatever situation you find yourself in, it's likely that she's been there, done that and bought the t-shirt.

"Consultant is a bit of a dirty word," she said. "But I adore this business and everything I do is a spin-off from having done it myself. I think I am different because I believe I can understand every part of a business and find a solution for any problem. That's unusual in a consultant. They will usually specialise in training or promotions or whatever.

"When you are at the centre of a business it is often the case that you can't step back, you can't see the wood for the trees. You can be so close to a concept you think it's perfect. It takes someone from outside to tell you what's wrong, why those customers aren't flooding in."

Her career began unpromisingly 15 years ago on a scruffy parade of shops on a Slough trading estate. With her husband Claud, a chef, she opened a French bistro called Tummies. It was just what the area needed.

"I was out front and Claud was in the kitchen," said Tammy. "It was a little goldmine. Most restaurant concepts live and die in seven years, but Tummies is still going and Claud is still running it. It has had about 15 extensions over the years. We started with 28 seats and now there are 70.

"It attracts the business audience at lunchtimes and local residents in the evening. It's still unusual to find businesses that can fill both slots."

Tammy proved it was no one-off when she created Spaggo's, an award-winning pub concept featuring pizza, pasta and parties. As usual when an independent operator comes up with a good idea, it was bought by a corporate, in this case Punch, which also became Out-Saucing's biggest client the first time around.

It hired Tammy to help out with a long-term project to get more out of its business development managers, by improving their relationship with the managers, their understanding of what it's like to run a pub and their ability to extract the best from every aspect of a business.

Towards the end of the project, Tammy was head-hunted by Springboard. It looked like a good match. As sales and marketing director she would be at the forefront of the hospitality industry's greatest challenge - recruitment - taking operational experience to the job and at the same time taking the pub industry closer to the centre of Springboard's work.

Two months later, however, she quit. "It was not quite right," she said. "And I'm not one to beat around the bush and pretend that it was."

The problem was that Tammy, now with three daughters between the ages of six and 11, did not relish the nine-to-five routine, the commuting into London from her home in Buckinghamshire every day.

She needed to organise her own time, for instance setting aside an afternoon the other week to watch one of her daughters captain the school in a netball match.

"I still work very long hours. This business is never-ending. But I can plan my own time. I can still come home and be a mum."

In between being a mum, Tammy is "doing a heck of a lot of PR", chiefly for Arena, the hospitality industry's networking association. She has become a director and is taking much of the responsibility for organising events that bring all sides of the industry together as much for the sake of meeting up with each other as for the educational lectures and seminars. "It will be really big," she promises.

Other jobs include writing business solutions for Indicater, an interactive on-line manual for caterers launched last October, and providing bespoke menus for pub companies through Food Solutions. She also has a hush-hush project on the go for an unnamed pubco and she is working for a couple of independent pub operations, too.

At the end of January she was at a conference in Portugal on restaurant concepts - representing, of all things, a French catering magazine.

As Tammy recognised some years ago, outsourcing expert help is a growing part of the hospitality business. In the future she anticipates that those familiar problems that have dogged the industry will continue to do so.

"Training will always be an issue. When companies feel the bite, they drop it. But if you invest in your staff, you cannot go wrong. You have to look after them in every way. Training is vital. You should pay your people well, give them time off - and give yourself time off, too. That's an important part of success and it took us years to realise that at the restaurant.

"If your staff leave, look at the cost of recruiting and training them. It's as much as a whole year's salary. But it's easy for an operator to get into a vicious circle. If you don't pay good wages, your service declines and you pay less wages because you can't afford them, and so on.

"It's difficult to get off that wheel. I know, I've been there. But I know it can be done, it's a question of taking small steps."

Tammy hopes that her experience as an individual operator means she can appreciate all the different obstacles a licensee might see as preventing them making the necessary changes to their business and help them work through the practicalities.

They may not like being told what to do, but as she pointed out, "once people have taken the step of calling you in they are ready to listen and they see you as on their side, there to help".

It's frustrating, she added, that she does not always see the finished project, how her advice is working out in practice, but there are longer term projects, too, in which she can "see things through".

So is there anything she won't take on?

Tammy thought for a moment and pulled a face. "I'm not too good at the real ale, but even then I always 'know a man who does'. Apart from that I suppose my biggest weakness is that I can't say no."

A recent example of that merged Tammy's professional life with her family life. "I have always got involved with catering for fund-raising functions at my daughters' school," she said. "They used to have a lot of little events throughout the year, each of which would make a couple of hundred pounds.

"I got a bit fed up with that and said to them why don't you have one massive event a year, a ball? They shook their heads and said they didn't have room, so I suggested putting up a marquee in the playground. They still weren't keen but we gave it a try last summer.

"I told them we would get 250 people, really expecting more, and we actually sold 400 tickets and made £9,000! It's an annual job for me now.

"If someone tells me something can't be done, I can't resist doing it. T