Jamie Campbell has recently launched Stoiq, a tool that aims to provide structured, anonymous information on their teams, through mobile messaging and benchmarked against hospitality-specific peer data.
He outlined how the imbalance has held the sector back to a degree: “Instinct has always played a huge role and rightly so - hospitality is full of operators who care deeply about their teams.
“But instinct doesn’t scale. You can’t benchmark a gut feeling across 20 or 50 sites.”
P&L problem
Campbell, who previously spent a decade at CGA and seven years at CPL, emphasised the importance of timing.
With the labour market becoming tougher and operators trading with less slack, benchmarking data indicates a commercial link between people performance and financial results.
“A 40% revenue growth gap between brands with stable teams and those with a high churn. That’s not a people problem - that’s a P&L problem,” he added.
The founder also pinpointed how speed is one of the biggest challenges with quarterly surveys and informal feedback often bringing issues to the fore weeks or months after they first appeared.
Commercial opportunity
Campbell said: “By the time a quarterly survey surfaces a problem, the damage is usually done - a manager’s already checked out, a team’s already fragmented, a site’s already underperforming. And instinct, even good instinct, doesn’t travel well.
“A leader who knows every GM by name when they have five sites loses that ability at 15.”
He urged operators to consider investing the same depth of understanding in their teams as in their customers in order to support staff in driving sales, conversion and growth.
“The teams that show up consistently, confident and ready are the ones capturing the upselling opportunities and converting the covers.
“That’s not soft, that’s commercial.”
