Business Restructuring, Strategic Growth Acceleration & Profitability

A tough turn-around of a well-known, home-grown brand. The journey of many ups & downs, tough days & decisions, team mentoring, menu revamping, marketing & brand resurgence, led the brand towards an enormous revival with doubling of revenues & profitability while establishing itself as the leader in its category.

Scope of Work

  • Merging operations of the acquired entities into a unified mechanism
  • Creating & implementing SOP’s across the business
  • Manpower management, selection, training & development
  • Development of performance metrics, monitoring & enhancement
  • Revenue focus, setting targets, developing revenue enhancement methodologies
  • Marketing partnerships, campaigns planning, implementation & measurement
  • Continuous audits across the business, financial planning & supervision
  • Growth strategy, business development and expansion planning
  • Menu revamp & enhancement, recipes development, standardization procedures
  • Setting up & supervising the Central purchase & production unit
  • Establishing an in-house CRM, Call Centre & Fullfilment Unit
  • Ensuring superior customer experience & ongoing improvements with enhanced engagement

Challenges

  • Manpower mindset overhaul towards working as one
  • Cross training team members for different functions, adaptability & agility
  • Establishing a customer-centric culture
  • Inculcating innate values of strong organizational culture amongst team members
  • Retaining old & lost customers while winning new ones & converting loyalty
  • Menu revamp process implementation across all outlets & maintaining standards
  • Setting system-wide SOP’s and monitoring compliance
  • Brand re-invigoration & resurgence; Re-modeling old guard thinking

Approach

The Critical Part

  • Merging operations, companies, values & people are much more difficult than just acquiring a business
  • It was this most critical aspect of the post-acquisition process that had to be executed to seamless perfection
  • The exercise was done by bringing many outlets, their teams, recipes, processes, branding, uniforms, personality, attitudes, service levels, technology, SOP’s and culture under one brand, one company
  • The journey was a long one, which transcended over many months and rolled over into an on-going process till the borders diminished & virtually became invisible
  • The spirit achieved was neither Ours or Yours, it was all about US

The Fun Part

  • With the house coming under some sense of order, it was time to get into the best part : menu revamp or shall we say, a new menu identity
  • With such a known legacy brand and having served multiple customers over the years, it was indeed a challenging & exciting process eliminating dishes while trying to add new ones
  • Many detailed data analysis, customer reviews, personal checks later, the list of dishes making the cut was finalized
  • Detailed recipe tests & trials, formulations, ingredient selections, sauces & bases preparations were done to ensure each recipe came out sharper & richer
  • Professional photo-shoots were organized thus giving new & real images to the dishes on the menu
  • A full introduction of the menu was done with the BOH teams with rigorous training for each member to standardize the recipes across all outlets
  • The FOH teams were trained as well on all recipes, their descriptions, selling points, ingredients, up-selling tactics, customer experiences to represent the menu & the brand perfectly well
  • A full manual was prepared for all team members at all outlets including the CRM & Call Centre teams to ensure familiarity & knowledge sharing amongst everyone
  • The CPU (Central Production Unit) was developed to create & distribute the main sauces and bases to all the outlets on a daily basis to maintain consistency, freshness and standardization of all recipes
  • A fully integrated in-house CRM & Call Centre was set-up to manage customer experiences, enhance customer engagement, maintain uniformity of communication with everyone as also supervise & manage overall delivery logistics for the entire business

The Important Part

  • Operations merged, new menu done, CRM & Call Centre implemented, teams trained, branding unified, marketing partnerships & campaigns underway, it now came down to managing overall operations
  • This phase involved a huge surge in marketing, supervising each outlet’s operations, team management, delivery logistics upscaling to meet demand, FOH & BOH re-trainings & capacity building, customer handling & engagement enhancements and keeping a pulse on everything, everyday
  • New promotions, marketing ideas, technology integrations, branded online ordering website & app development, learning from customer reviews, peer benchmarking, all led the brand towards a greater earning and doubling of revenues in the months to follow
  • The brand saw a resurgence in the market & industry as a force to reckon with, winning awards along the way and new customers increasing their loyalty thereby turning the business profitable and with a clear focus on expansion via opening of new outlets

Learnings

  • A lot of financial structuring & re-structuring
  • Scaling up of business activities based on capacity & capability utilizations
  • Cost focused approach while growing revenues & profitability

Awards & Recognition

Awarded as the “Best Chinese Cuisine” by the MEA Markets UAE Business Awards for three years in a row : 2017, 2018 and 2019