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early in the morning. I have a very indulgent husband, but he does take my phone and laptop away from me at lunchtime on Satur- days until about 5pm on Sundays. I’m working hard on getting some more bal-
ance in my life at the moment. It’s something I really wanted to share with the men and women in our business. You can climb the ladder all you like, but you mustn’t forget that family and relationships should be the most important thing, and I think we do lose sight of that in our industry.
I’m 39 years old and we have been trying for a family for many years. I didn’t think twice when I was younger about putting my career first and getting to family at a later stage, but I am now finding it’s not as easy as I thought. So I want to advise women to do it while it is still easy and they are still young enough. I don’t think anyone should feel that they have to choose a family over a career or vice versa – you can do both, just make sure you think about the timing.
Chris Corbin and Jeremy King
You held a conference for the women in your business at the end of last year. What inspired you to do that?
The proportion of women to men across the company has fluctuated, but it’s going in the wrong direction now, without a doubt. I think part of that is because of our high staff reten- tion; there’s probably an older workforce in our company than in others in the restaurant business. Consequently, many of our middle management women are going off and having children and not returning to the workforce and we need to understand why.
I was struck by the many senior male faces Brasserie Zédel
and walk their kitchens and was so blown away by the interest they took in their staff. I had only ever worked for people for whom the bottom line and the profit was the primary objective, and these two were turning it all on its head and saying “our staff and our custom- ers’ satisfaction is the most important thing to us; making money is not our starting point”. That is still the case today and it undoubt- edly accounts for the immense loyalty our people feel towards Chris and Jeremy.
What’s a typical week? I work very closely with the group ops director and all the general managers and the head chefs report into us. I try to get into each of the businesses twice a week and I have a weekly meeting with each of our GMs and head chefs to review the performance of their business and to address any issues. We cover anything, from sales, profit,
payroll, PR and marketing, health and safety, personnel, maintenance and reservations. I retain a specific interest in HR across all the businesses, and see my main focus as
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making sure Chris and Jeremy’s vision is being executed throughout the organisation. I ensure that the people who have the respon- sibility for delivering that vision on a daily basis have the support they need to get it done, whether that’s operations, personnel, market- ing and PR, or private dining and events. It can be challenging having entrepren- eurial bosses, because everything Chris and Jeremy do is intuitive – it’s by touch and taste and feel – and that’s amazing, but somebody needs to go around behind entrepreneurs, putting all the structure and the processes in place to make sure their vision is being executed correctly.
Having removed yourself operationally from the hours you were doing in hotels, what sort of hours are you doing now? I am probably doing more. I confess to work- ing too many hours at times, coupled with a lengthy commute from Surrey, and it can be quite a strain, but I tend to have quite a lot of meetings in the early evenings at the restau- rants and operational meetings often start
at Corbin & King, and I started to probe to find out why women had not been selected for management roles within the business. I was alarmed by some of the replies, which clearly indicated that many of the middle manage- ment men were uncomfortable with the different management styles and demands of female colleagues climbing the ranks. My reaction was that this was just outra- geous in this day and age, and if we don’t do something about this now, these outdated atti- tudes will keep perpetuating themselves. I wake up every day and I pinch myself at how lucky I have been that I had two gentlemen who believed in me 100% and gave me the opportunities they did, and I thought, it’s time for me to do this for other people now. And that was literally the trigger for the conference. I had been on holiday in Mexico and read Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, and I thought, there is an opportunity for me to do something here. I kept looking at our industry and I saw women on reception or in pastry, housekeeping and HR, and I realised that we needed to create more role models. For the first time in the history of the company, we have our first female GM. I anticipate that, in the next six months, 50% of our GMs will be women – not because they are women, but because they will be the best people for the jobs. I want us to achieve the same thing
20 March 2015 | The Caterer | 27
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CAT GARICA
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