Yummy Yorkshire Ice Cream Parlour - Hide and Hoof Farm Restaurant Case Study
Yummy Yorkshire is a successful family owned and run business born from a 3rd generation dairy farmer keen to make his mark as a custodian of the farm. The business comprises of an 80-seater restaurant, The Hide and Hoof, serving breakfast, lunch and Afternoon treats, an ice cream parlour serving their own artisan ice cream and weekly markets made up of local traders. They have a dedicated and hardworking team and provide employment to over 30 local people.
Project Description:
Boost Consultancy was asked to carry out an objective review of the current business context, this included a review of their leadership structure, roles and responsibilities and ways of working, assessing their current culture from both a leadership and staff perspective and completing a review of their current training approach for new starters. The aim of the review was to highlight opportunities to develop more efficient and professional ways of working and identify improvements in commercial performance.
What was delivered:
The initial phase of the project was to complete a mini strategic review to get under the skin of the business and fully understand the culture and ways of working. We interviewed the owners, managers, and key staff to build a thorough understanding of the current context and key issues and challenges from each perspective. We used this insight to highlight themes and provided an honest appraisal of the key issues and recommendations on the potential solutions to overcome these.
The second phase of the project was implementing these recommendations with a key focus on 4 key areas:
- Improving Leadership ways of working,
- Embedding a commercial mindset across the business,
- Gold Standard approach to training and induction
- Improved communication
We worked collaboratively with the managers and owners to review how they communicated and how communication flowed through the business. Boost Consultancy supported them in developing a more structured approach to how they communicated across the business to ensure more accountability and ownership was being taken for delivering actions and advised on relevant processes and documentation to support this.
We facilitated sessions with the management team to explore what currently interferes with their performance as a team and supported them in working through these blockages highlighting unhelpful behaviours and creating new and improved ways of working.
We developed a proportionate tool for measuring performance for both team and managers and provided training and guidance in how to deliver these effectively. We redefined the process for induction to ensure all key compliance areas were well trained and signed off, this included the development of a new staff handbook and the creation of relevant paperwork.
Alongside the managers we developed a customer service training guide to support the training for new starters and set the expected standard for operational processes and customer service delivery. We completed a commercial review using available data to identify opportunities to grow sales and profit, this provided a blueprint an action plan for the business to work on.
"Yummy Yorkshire Restaurant & Ice Cream Parlour is a farm diversification project that has grown dramatically over the last 10 years. With aftershocks from covid and the speed of growth we were struggling with accountability and communication within the business.
Paula Kaye at Boost Consultancy worked with our business over a 4 – 5-month period and did an amazing job of getting underneath the skin of our issues. Paula worked very hard to
gain the trust of our team and started her work with no assumptions. She went straight into working in every part of the business, getting to the know the team in their familiar environment to gain an understanding of the structure and communication from every person’s perspective.
This approach felt totally right for us as it created an openness that enabled Paula to explore the business getting a good perspective on how we could make effective decisions that would help get the changes we were craving.
Paula’s work rate is second to none and her attention to the finer detail makes all the difference. She knows when to press to get to the nitty gritty and when to take a step back all of which is done with the utmost diplomacy. Paula has left a lasting impression on our business with systems and processes that start from the minute employees join the business until the time they leave, important and relatable business information that every member of the team is now exposed to along with meaningful senior management information is shared daily to ensure the team understands the levers they need to pull to help the business thrive and flourish."