SMOOTH OPERATOR When the sweet life gets sticky Matt Mullins is a partner in Sand Hill Road hospitality group
26
A few years ago, Sophie and I were invited to a film festival in Giffoni on the Amalfi coast, in the South of Italy. I’d first been to Italy as a 12-year-old boy, and fell in love with the gelati. Then I went again as a backpacker, and fell in love with...well, every woman I saw! This time though, with Sophie in hand, we were guests of one of the country’s premier film festivals; and I fell in love with...‘La Dolce Vita’. Wherever I went in Italy I was struck by the sheer crazy beauty of La Dolce Vita, the ‘Sweet Life...’ and by the sheer crazy laziness at its core. Don’t get me wrong; I love Italy — favourite country on earth after this one. But let me paint a picture: one sweet spring evening we took a private boat from Sorrento to Amalfi, cutting a trail across the azure Mediterranean as the sun set over rocky cliffs. We sat and ate fresh crustacean in the ancient, bustling square of Amalfi. We took the midnight bus back along the narrow, precipitous coast road; our hearts skipping a few beats a minute. And everywhere we went, we saw beautiful, happy, contented Italians. Mostly sleeping. Now, I’m all for La Dolce Vita. I’m a publican for god’s sake! The relentless pursuit of the sweet life is the only reason I get up every morning...well, some mornings...when I’m not sleeping in (in Column deference to the sweet life, of course — it’s a vicious circle). But that’s just the point: maintaining the sweet life actually requires a lot of work. You can’t have your sweet life and sleep it too. But that wasn’t clear to me back in Italy. Nor was it clear to anyone else as it turns out. For this was pre-sub prime. Pre-Lehman Brothers. Pre-GFC. Pre-Greece crisis. Pre GFC II. And of course, preBerlosconi’s Bunga Bunga party!! So here we are: all that sweet life eventually caught up with the Italians, the Greeks, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Irish. And we’re all paying a massive price for their dolce vita. BRINGING IT BACK HOME And that brings me neatly to my point: the world is in transition. The way we live, think, shop, communicate and socialise is changing. And venues like yours and mine — pubs, clubs, bars, restaurants, cafes, you name it — will either change with our markets, or dwindle and die like a Greek pension fund. I can’t claim any credit for this particular insight — we sat down recently with the guys from CUB’s Insights team. But for what it’s worth, I agree with them. Anecdotally, we see signs of this flux everywhere in our businesses. The world economy is in tatters and that makes people nervous, even here in Australia where we’ve been spared the worst of it. In times of great anxiety, we humans seek out those things we find comforting, safe, secure and familiar. Adventurism is out. Risk is too risky. We are drawn back to family, to community, to neighbourhoods, to anything local. We are attracted by the simple things in life again: by old friends, by good value, by comfort foods, by human contact. That’s not to say that we devolve; that progress halts and we regress to a bygone era. We don’t go back to the past. Instead we reinvent old values to build the future. It’ll just be a different future to the one we’d have had if we were all still filthy rich and dripping in plasmas. Nor does it mean we put a dead stop to bold, innovative, groundbreaking ideas. Many people in our industry will continue their wild, inspired adventurism, and they’ll find a market only too willing to
follow, whether to escape the anxiety they’re feeling, or ’cos they’re not feeling anxiety at all. (There are 20 million people in Australia — and plenty of them haven’t stopped partying long enough to listen to the news, let alone worry about it). But plenty have. And in subtle ways, they’ll change the way we all do business. We’ve opened or reopened three venues this year: the Prahran Hotel, The Richmond Club Hotel and the Bridge Hotel — each large, iconic inner-city pubs. Each has been built with the one shared aim: to be a great local pub. They hark back to a time when the pub was a true public house, a gathering place, a living room for a local community. They don’t ‘look’ old — in design they are each bold, fresh and new. But they ‘feel’ old. They feel comfortable. They don’t narrow their appeal to hit a smaller demographic head-on, they broaden their appeal to touch a wider range more lightly. Dress codes are lax. Doormen are smiling. Locals are remembered. Inclusive is the new exclusive. Blah, blah blah.
“Either change with our markets, or dwindle and die like a Greek pension fund”
CHANGE A BREWING Amongst all this lovey-dovey bullshit, we haven’t dispensed with innovation — we’ve embraced it. But we’ve focused it in new directions. I’ll give you an example. Rather than invent a new way for people to spend money, we’ve invented a new way for them to donate it. It’s called Karma Kegs. At 5pm every Friday we tap a keg of Carlton Draught. We don’t charge for pots, we let the punter decide what it’s worth. Whatever amount they want to pay goes into the jar and the whole sum is donated to small, local causes. If it goes wrong, we’re giving away free beer. But Karma’s a powerful force, and so is the goodwill in the public bar of a great local pub full of people anxious about the state of the world, and keen to connect with each other. At normal prices a keg of Draught brings about $650. The Karma Keg often brings twice that amount. Yes, times are tough, but don’t tell me we humans are cold, heartless and selfish. Now, in case I sound overly impressed with myself, let me be clear: a) good local pubs aren’t a new idea, and b) they mightn’t work! And let’s add c) for every movement, there’s a counter movement. The enforced austerity of our time is nothing but a counter-cyclical response to the excesses of the last few decades. For all the appeal a simple local pub might offer now, it’ll fade the moment we start getting pay rises, bonuses and tax cuts again. We’ll be straight back to DJ’s, Harvey Norman and Audi, and a simple old local will be just that: simple, and old. But that’s the fun of the game isn’t it? Understand your punter. Work out what they want. Give it your all to give it to them. And don’t wait too long before working out they’ve changed their mind and it’s time to start again. Grab a drink, relax, roll with it. It worked for the Italians...sort of.