Be Your Best – A Reason to be Optimistic in 2023

Be Your Best – A Reason to be Optimistic in 2023

by | 5 Jan, 2023 | Hospitality, Thought Leadership

As we go into 2023, it would be easy to begin the year on the back foot. There are significant head winds facing not just our industry – the whole country feels like it’s in the weeds. Next year we will go into battle with a recession, the cost of energy crisis, shortages of staff, upward pressure on the supply costs and the downward pressure on customers discretionary spend. These are just the challenges we know of, and yet, we expect more. Headline news would suggest that 2023 could be a year of inevitable, unstoppable, and relentless doom. But it won’t be. Not for everyone. There is still huge opportunity for those who rise to the top, the best in our industry will still face the challenges, but they will have the experience, tools, and tenacity to succeed.

 

As a business, we are conscientiously optimistic about what we will achieve in 2023 and while never complacent. We are optimistic about what our customers are going to achieve in 2023 too and there is good reason why.

For the past 12 months we have spent a great deal of time and energy better articulating and refiring up our “purpose”. It hasn’t just been a self-indulgent corporate retreat exercise, it has been pivotal to everything we do, and the framework for all of our plans. All businesses need to innovate, but it is useful to keep returning to those first principles that led us to transform the industry as we have. “Be Your Best”, has emerged as the philosophy that has fed the products we build and the internal culture of the whole organisation.

Be Your Best is a significant statement of intent for our customers. We know that there are going to be only two routes to operate next year. The first will be to burn through cash, taking on debt and relying on a swift return to better days. There are few who have the cash to weather this storm, fewer still who have investors patient enough to plug the red holes for too long. The second route for our customers is to be the best at what they do, consistently. We have had the privilege of working with a lot of the best operators over the last 10+ years, the likes of Oakman Inns, Brunning & Price, Liberation Group, Revs have all been entrepreneurial early adopters of S4labour and are all the best in their areas. Moving forward, our challenge and focus is to have a development roadmap that supports our current customers and as many new ones as possible to be at their best. We have found that the typical S4labour customer has also been an innovator in the industry that has made them stand out, these are the people who are already looking to be the best.

In January we will be rolling out the biggest update to the S4labour system. Having put the philosophy of supporting operators to be their best at the centre of every brain storming session, every stand-up meeting and every round table discussion, this inevitably bleeds into every line of code.

As a result, we feel we have built a system that ensures our customers are their best, in every shift. Better at driving sales, better at engaging and retaining staff, better at getting teams to the floor rather than behind the desk and ultimately, better at making the right decisions, faster. All these things are opportunities to beat the gloomy head wins facing the industry, and all are reasons to be optimistic for our customers in 2023.

Be Your Best is a mantra that is also at the heart of our people and culture plans. We know that to support our customers to be their best, it is essential to support our own teams to be their best. That goes for every single person we employ and bring on the journey with us. We know that to ensure we deliver a product that supports customers to be the best, we need to have our innovators, our developers, our customer success, and support teams all at their best too. It’s tempting to have all our people answer the phone with, “Hello, how can we help you be your best today.” Possibly a step too far into the world of cringey, but it’s the mindset we have got to.

There will be businesses that fail in 2023, and even the best will find trading hard, but those who manage to be their best, will thrive and we very much look forward to helping them get there.

Christmas Brings 17% Bounce in Hospitality Like-for-Like Sales

Christmas Brings 17% Bounce in Hospitality Like-for-Like Sales

by | 5 Jan, 2023 | Sales Figures

December Like-for-Likes were up 17% compared to the same period in 2021. While the figure represents a significant increase on the previous year, December 2021 was marred by a wave of Omicron, washing out trade for many operators.

Despite rail strikes causing disruption for much of the capital, London sales were up 32%, with the increase being driven equally by food and drink boosts.

Outside of London, like-for-likes were up 15%, with food up 13% and drink up 16%.

The research, that compares sales performance of sites that traded for over 20 days in December 2021 and 2022 also identified a large number of operators that were not included in the figures as they were unable to trade at all, or to a very limited extent in 2021, meaning that real like for likes would be higher when taking 2021 closures into account.

Richard Hartley, Chief Innovation Officer at S4labour, commented, “Double digit increases will be a cause for celebration for the industry, however, the figures also put last year’s Christmas into stark perspective.”

The Power of Integrated Hospitality Tech

The Power of Integrated Hospitality Tech

by | 8 Jun, 2022 | Hospitality

The world of hospitality tech is vast. There is a seemingly never-ending list of technologies that can fit into our businesses to help do things “better” than before. Over the last 10 years we have been spoilt for choice. There are solutions out there for recruitment, rotas, communications and team engagement. Not to mention solutions for payroll, produce orders, tracking financials, marketing and customer engagement. Our tills have all become more automated, more accurate, and more compliant. You want a robot serving your guests, juggling dishes whilst telling jokes? Not a problem. We even have excellent data guys like Tenzo and Tahola that pull all the data we have stacked into our businesses into one place, giving clarity and visibility of all the benefits gained from this technical revolution.

 

Is all of this technology a good thing? Is it good for the customer and, critically, is it good for our businesses? Clearly every business is different. Even though I don’t see my local traditional Italian rolling out waiter bots or my independent watering hole taking on a business analytics suite just yet, there is a different mixture of hospitality tech that is the right fit for most of us. This will depend on the scale, style and priorities of the business. However, most businesses have come to understand that doing nothing will likely result in being less efficient, less productive and being left behind our competitors.

 

When looking at what tech is right for your business, one of the key places to start is by considering what your priorities are. Maybe it’s labour cost saving, growing sales, marketing, or a smooth EPoS system. As technology has become better and more critical to our industry, so has its consolidation. There have been some excellent innovations in hospitality that tackle the unique challenges we face. Yes, there’s still a significant amount of innovation and solutions being developed. We’ve also seen some giants of the technology service sector who can offer most operators pretty much everything – all under one roof as a multi-purpose tech supplier. You can now get your schedules, payroll, tills, F&B platform, analytics and more from just one supplier. This sounds like a positive thing for the industry: everything you need in one place and on one bill. Big tech has recently been on the acquisition trail, snapping up some of the best and brightest prospects in the hospitality tech world. In the last year, we have seen hospitality’s leading providers in training, compliance and ordering brought under the same roof as event booking and labour planning platforms in one big tech.

 

The question to consider is: can innovation, value for money, customer service or user flexibility ever be improved by the consolidation of tech? Unlikely. Innovation happens when specialists in their field are given the freedom to continually perfect the areas that they excel in. Customers benefit most when they can form close relationships with their suppliers, acting as the external voice that feeds into the product development.

 

The consolidated approach works well for those who want the mediocracy of everything. The under one roof offering tends to give operators one outstanding product, but a disappointing “everything else”. An operator can get one incredible piece of kit, but they’ll miss out on the best of everything else. Take Yapster for example: it’s brilliant and integrated with everything. If you want the best for team comms and leadership, go speak to Yapster. Yapster is an independent business with the best-in-class tech. Even though you could get a product from a consolidator, who can put team comms and EPos on the same invoice, there’s a sacrifice. You’ll likely end up with a weaker team comms platform in your business and a mediocre EPoS.

 

S4labour is 100% focused on being the best people system in the market. There is no other leadership, development or account management team more ingrained and experienced in hospitality productivity than S4labour. Over half of the winners at this years Publican Awards use S4labour, showing just how the best in the industry, who value the productivity of their teams above other tech, use S4labour. S4labour is also integrated with everything else in the category of market leading products. You can have the best people system, integrated with the best till systems, integrated with the best ATS, forward pay, training platform, marketing, comms, tipping etc and seamlessly link it all with S4labour.

 

By taking a sidestep around the “under one roof” consolidations, you will find a sea of the best of the best and you won’t need to compromise on any part of your technological priorities. The wonderful thing about everything that doesn’t sit with the consolidators, is just how well it all works together and how good we have all become at making the customer experience seamless and integrated with each other. Hedging your tech suppliers really is the only way to ensure you get an uncompromised solution.

Employee Profile vs. User Profile

by | 17 Feb, 2022 | Hospitality

A User Profile grants access to the management and funtionality side of the s4labour system.

A persons user level will determine what they can see and do. A user profile will typically have a Username assigned to it, rather than an email address.

An Employee login is created when an employee is added to S4labour. This allows staff to view their rota, their own details, and submit requests for holiday or detail changes. An employee profile will typically login with an email address.

User login’s are created and managed by a level 5 user.

Users can be linked to an employee to prevent logging out and in to switch profiles.You are able to log in as a user and switch between your employee and user profile, but you are not able to log in using your employee profile and switch to your User Profile. 

While the accounts are linked they are still distinct.

System Update 17.12.21

System Update 17.12.21

by | 17 Dec, 2021 | Hospitality

Following several weeks of investigation and updates with S4labour, we have have summased the fixes that have been put in place inorder to support system stability and performance.

The Login Procedure

On Monday morning, the system was being hit with 600 – 1000 login attempts per second, over 100 times more than any typical day of the week. This led to hundreds of thousands of calls to the server every minute, resulting in slower system performance and on occasions causing the system to crash.

We are still investigating the cause for this volume of login, given the recent announcements from other SaaS businesses in recent month, it is likely to be a bot attempting to breach our security procedures. The good news is that, while the system has suffered performance and speed issues, all of the security procedures did their job and kept S4labour secure.

However, we have and are continuing to implement a number of significant architectural changes to both improve the security of S4labour and ensure that system performance is not impacted in the future.

Server Duplication

As well as increasing the server capacity by 50% for the main system, we have added an additional server, dedicated to the login process. This will mean that any impact that login demand may have on S4labour, will not impact on anyone who has already logged in. This will also mean that, if demand remains high, and the login server needs resetting, users already logged in will be unaffected.  

CAPTCHA

The introduction of the CAPTCHA on Thursday the 16th of December will significantly reduce the impact a bot could have of draining server capacity going forward.

Login Control Procedures

The login process is controlled to allow up to 30 logins per second. This combined with the CAPTCHA will mean that the login server cannot reach maximum capacity, but there is a possibility of a 3 second delay between logging in and being let into the system at peak demand times. We will be monitoring server load closely and should the system near CPU capacity, we will update this control appropriately. This may slightly increase the time it takes to get into the system by a few more seconds. However, we now have the ability to do this very quickly and with no disruption to anyone already logged into the system.