You can listen to our podcast interview with Will Beckett here.

A high retention rate among staff is vital if you are to scale a business, the co-founder of Hawksmoor, the restaurant chain, says in our new podcast episode.

Will Beckett founded Hawksmoor with Huw Gott in 2006. The pair are childhood friends and lifelong foodies whose parents also worked in the food business. In their mid-20s, the co-founders ran several London bars. They didn’t take off, but this taught them valuable lessons about hiring and venue location.

Hawksmoor had humble beginnings in a former Turkish restaurant in London, but there are now 10 locations in the UK, including branches in Manchester and Edinburgh. Hawksmoor turned over £90m last year and is currently going global with new restaurants in New York and Chicago.

Beckett and Gott hit on a winning formula with Hawksmoor, realising that there was a gap in the market because steak meals were associated with French bistros or American-style diners. “In a country really famous for beef, there wasn’t a British restaurant, that idea of Britishness made a difference,” says Beckett.

In the latest episode of our Business Leader podcast, Beckett discusses how to build a restaurant chain from scratch, including the challenges of expanding beyond the first location, as well as into new countries.

By 2013 there were three Hawksmoor restaurants in London and they were making good money. At this point, Graphite Capital saw the potential and came on board, helping the co-founders with a management buyout and taking a 51 per cent majority stake in the business.

It emerged in early July this year that Hawksmoor had kicked off a process to explore its future funding options, which could involve a sale of the business. This move would raise capital to accelerate Hawksmoor’s international growth plans. The co-founders plan to retain their shareholding and stay in charge of the business.

The potential sale follows the success of Hawksmoor’s US expansion. When Business Leader caught up with Will Beckett, he had just returned from Chicago. Hawksmoor has recently opened a 400-cover restaurant there in a converted powerhouse building that used to belong to a cable car company.

Beckett has learned some important lessons operating in America, and he has some advice for British entrepreneurs: “Be able to speak confidently about running and growing a great company is something as a country we could be better at,” he says. “There’s something counter-cultural in the UK about talking about being ambitious. Then you go to New York, try to articulate who you are and play it down. New Yorkers don’t understand it all. Why would you ever do that?”

Ambition aside, Beckett thinks there is a surprise ingredient in the rise of his food empire. He considers himself to be running a “people business” as much as a “food business”.

Watch our recent video with him here to see his thoughts on being a casual professional at work and the dress codes for staff. If you listen to the podcast, you will also hear the killer question he uses when hiring hospitality staff and more on why employee retention rates are so important.

Despite the rise of eating-at-home, using services like Uber Eats and Deliveroo, Beckett is upbeat about the future of high-street restaurants. “People don’t like being miserable. One of the joys in life is spending time with people in restaurants,” he says.

You can listen to the full podcast episode here: