Introduction
For the first In Good Hands edition, we’re sharing a conversation with Joshua Simons, an experienced operator who’s built across nightlife, events, and restaurants. He’s direct about expectations, consistency, and what it takes to earn trust over time. There’s plenty here for anyone building a hospitality brand, from the standards that hold a room together to the small details that add up over years.
What’s your name?
Joshua Simons
Where do you work?
Co-founder of Aviary Hospitality Group, owner of Chicken & Blues restaurants and Flamingo Café Bars
What’s your go-to order at Chicken & Blues?
Personal share – I’m Type 1 Diabetic, and so I see Chicken & Blues as a pretty healthy place to eat in comparison to most quick-serve restaurant brands. My usual order is BBQ Chicken, Sweet Potato Mash, Tenderstem Broccoli, and Corn on the Cob. I’ll dine at or order from C&B at least 3 times a week with no guilt, and have done since we opened our first location in 2013. Of course, we have some popular and more indulgent dishes on the menu which I wish I could order! Never mind…
What does “In Good Hands” mean to you as an operator?
I’d say it’s a nod to trust, reliability, and consistency in the minds of the customer – the holy grail in hospitality. The best ones do it more than most and it’s this operational excellence over time that leads to brands being built. You’re only as good as your last (or next) honest review.
You’ve built across nightlife, events, and restaurants. What have those worlds taught you about what guests really want?
Guests want their expectations met, or ideally, exceeded, and it doesn’t matter how much they’ve spent. I’ve had guests spend £20,000 on a party in one our nightclubs and tell me they thought it was great value – I’ve had guests spend £20 on a meal at one of our restaurants and tell me they felt let down as the portion wasn’t as big as they expected. If you make a brand promise to the public, and then you meet or beat that promise consistently, you’ll build a self-propelling fly-wheel and grow a fanbase. It’s a cliché, but there’s no better promotion for a hospitality brand than word-of-mouth from ecstatic guests.
Chicken & Blues and Flamingo are very different. How do you protect the personality of each while keeping standards high?
They may be different concepts in a functional sense, and have different marketing strategies/styles, but the end goal is the same – simply to delight guests, one at a time. Our Aviary Hospitality Group slogan is ‘Elevate Your Day’. It’s on the home page of the website as a reminder of the reason for both brands existing, and it’s front of mind for both leadership teams in all of our meetings. Whether guests are popping in for a takeaway for the family at C&B, or meeting a few friends for cocktails at Flamingo, our goal is to execute every step of the guest journey as per our Brand Experience Guide, which is documented and constantly under review. Of course, it’s a never-ending challenge and something we work hard on to improve every day.
What’s one decision you made early on that you still feel was the right call?
Choosing the right business partner and buying out the rest of the original founding team. It was a challenging time but as many guru has warned over the years, choosing a suitable business partner is in many ways one of the most important decisions you’ll make in your career. You’ll spend more time with them than your own family whilst you’re digging a business out of the ground – if you get it wrong it will most likely ruin the business and potentially many years of your life. A complementary skill-set and personality-type is vital – you’d be better off going it alone, or not at all, than with the wrong partner.
What’s a detail you care about that most guests never notice?
We have completed lots of work on what we call ‘brand codes’ over the last few years – logo formats, colours, patterns, wording, print, copy writing style, music, scents, and such like. Guests may think we’re a bit crazy if they listened in on us talking for hours about a pattern placement on a piece of packaging that they discard after use – but when you string it all together it starts to make sense, and from what I’ve researched and been taught, it’s how the best brands in the world are built. Sweat the small stuff to a degree I guess – as it adds up to the big stuff.
What’s the moment you know a service has gone well?
There are so many variables in this game, and no two services are the same. You can have a 400-cover day at Flamingo that runs like clockwork, and then a quieter service where problems arise. Often, it’s out of your control – a maintenance problem with an oven or grill, an illness in the team, a random power cut. We’ve seen it all. Usually, I know a service has gone well when I read the duty managers’ reports at the end of the night, which is the last thing I read at 11pm before I go to bed. They’re very honest about what went well, and what didn’t. We also have a very robust feedback loop with our guest review platform partners. I spend an awful lot of time on that every week monitoring guest feedback - every single review is read and replied to, which in turn guides most of our internal conversations and immediate actions.
If you had one meal tonight anywhere, where are you going?
Our own restaurants aside as I couldn’t pick a winner…. I’d probably take a trip back to 1995 and would book a table at one of my dad’s places, Pita Gora, a 100-cover Italian restaurant he created, owned and ran for years in Richmond before we moved down to Poole. Always a great buzz, tasty modern Italian fare, stylish surroundings, and with a super interesting clientele. It was where I started out as a 13-year-old, washing plates in the kitchen whilst all my mates were out enjoying themselves at the weekends. Despite that, very fond memories - it brought me out of my shell as a shy kid and made me fall in love with hospitality. Cheers, dad.
What’s a moment in your career you still think about?
I still think a lot about all the mistakes I’ve made over the years, if anything to try and make sure history doesn’t repeat itself. However, one thing I do remember vividly is the immense anger and pressure I felt when I lost the license for my nightclub in Bournemouth in 2013 - for very spurious reasons and owed to a corrupt police officer that was targeting me personally, and consistently, for a few years. It made me physically ill. I had no idea what I was going to do – the responsibility of a wife and two young kids to look after at 30 years old hit home, and with no money left after spending all I had on legal costs to fight the case, I felt, momentarily, that my career was ruined, and I had no idea what to do next. However, within a few months I had sought-out an opportunity, and realised, with new-found clarity, that I should have left the nightclub business far sooner. I went from demonising this police officer, to wanting to shake his hand for giving me no option but to change direction. Sometimes you think you’re happy on your chosen path, but actually, you’re not. Hindsight is a wonderful thing…
Links from this edition:
