Nick Stone
speaker
134 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Nick Stone’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Of course, it was meant to be prudent and judicious, but the comments were build up a team and scale and try and get as big as you can. And at that point in time, maybe in the way the valuations were working, maybe that was the right idea. But ultimately... When we ran into an existential crisis like COVID, the cupboard was bare. We had no cash left.
We had blown tens of millions of dollars on the opening stores, a lot of them in office buildings. And we didn't have the buffer that we needed, not only to make sure we were stable and strong during a crisis, but also to get on the front foot and go and acquire different stores and maybe benefit from, well, not benefit, but just maybe use a crisis and turn it into an opportunity to scale faster.
So there's two examples, but it's a very, very... tough needle to thread to know what advice to take. But I think the most important thing is your gut. If you get different signals and you have an ability to process it, and I had that, and I still do, because I also had the business acumen of working and advising companies for so long, plus working in high-performance teams.
At times I should have said, I really appreciate the advice. Thank you, but I'm going to disagree and commit to this. And other times you've just got to think a little bit more objectively, like is really going international this early in our life cycle the easiest way to be successful? Because one of our board members said an amazing comment to me
probably back in 2019, he said, Nick, you don't get paid extra for degree of difficulty. So what he was saying is you don't get paid more for doing something in a more complicated way. And that's so true. And it's probably the number piece of advice that I impart to other entrepreneurs. You don't get paid extra for degree of difficulty.
One of the things about hospitality that is I think so misunderstood is the level of complexity. And the reason being is when you look at a restaurant, it appears very linear. The building blocks are quite logical. You have an idea, you sign a lease, you hire staff, you buy the equipment, you buy the inputs, you make the product, you sell it. It is linear.
And a lot of people, and I think that's why they dive into it. They go, I can do this. It just makes a lot of sense. And what's so misunderstood is the complexity because you are effectively just coaching people the whole time. You're dealing with a perishable product. You're dealing with thousands of consumers that will assess you based on that experience.
Not the experience they had two weeks ago, two months ago, a year ago. They will assess you and determine whether they repeat and come back to your business based on that experience alone. And it's very, very different from when you manufacture clothes and they sit on the shelf and you have six months to sell those jeans and you can then discount them.
And people are more interested in the product than the experience. For hospitality, the experience is everything. Particularly what we're trying to do. We are not processed food out of a drive-thru window, selling soft drink and chips and things that ultimately aren't very good for people or society. We're in healthy food. We're in clean eating. We're in real food that goes off quickly.
It's extremely hard. A lot of brands you go to, one including Starbucks, that when you order something, you'll see they'll take it out of a plastic bag. And why is that? It's because the bag is modified atmospheric packaging. It's nitro flushed. It's coming from probably a place in the middle of America, shipped in frozen.
They put it in the Mary's Chef, the microwave, heat it up, and it's good to go. And it's a very big difference from that versus someone using real bread, real ingredients, and making it to scratch. And
I hope over time there's a greater appreciation for it because one of the big challenges with the US society and me even living and bringing up three young kids here is the life expectancy in the US is materially lower than Australia. It's materially lower than probably that I know that a lot of countries in Europe And I'm sure Israel. So for us, there is a lot of complexity.
You have a lot of small moving parts. And ultimately, the biggest challenge is you're dealing with such a high turnover industry. A lot of people work in hospitality because it is out of necessity or they have an interest in another career. There's very few that set themselves on a professional hospitality job. Those are
that do rise to the top very quickly and their earning potential is actually really great. And it's a bit of a misnomer that people think that everyone in hospitality is compensated poorly. That's actually incorrect. I think it's one of the fastest way to earn a six-figure salary, in fact.
So you're dealing with the industry turnover or the industry average in New York or in the US is about 120% a year. So if you have 10 staff, you've got to hire 12 every year. Now, what happens if you have 1,000 staff? and we have 800, we're hiring 960 just to keep the status quo, to remain flat and stagnant, let alone if we're opening new stores. So there is a lot of complexity.
It's not fully appreciated. Often consumers are at times a little bit demanding. They're more accommodative of themselves and their mistakes. They make it work. I certainly think about banking and there was a lot of errors. There was typos in pitch books. There was errors in financial models.
people were late for meetings, but there's very limited quarter given to hospitality and particularly coffee. You know, if we get coffee that tastes slightly different or it's too hot or too cold or has the wrong milk or whatever, which is just a completely normal mistake, people can also go on a website and chastise you and feel that, you know,
they've got the liberation to do it in a pretty asymmetric way. Like I don't get the ability to rate consumers. Oh, my locals would say that local food or they didn't pay properly or they didn't come back enough. Who knows? But yeah, it's just it's just part and parcel. But sometimes I think you need to appreciate that people out here truly trying to do their best and just be kind, be nice.
I'm very, very fortunate to have an amazing family construct. My wife, Alexandra, and I, we've been together a long, long time. We dated for a long period of time and then we got married nine years ago. She's been such a rock. She's just an extraordinary person. She's definitely challenging, that's for sure. She's very strong, independent and driven. She's at times a little bit apathetic.
She's sort of like you, He chose his career. You could be in banking. You could be probably in something more stable, but you wanted to go this route. And I do have a responsibility to my family and to her and to, of course, my team, my investors, my locals. My friends, my friends, their care for me is unconditional.
Showing 61–80 of 134 · page 4 of 7
← Previous
Next →