Henrik Mattsson's Secrets to Expanding Brödernas from 7 to 100 Outlets in Just 2.5 Years

In this episode of our podcast, we delve into the challenges and opportunities of scaling a restaurant brand. Opening and running a single restaurant is already a difficult task, but when you want to take your brand to multiple locations, it requires a whole different level of planning and coordination. The goal is to make sure that each location is consistent with the original and that your brand is protected.

Our guests, Carl Jacobs, CEO of Apicbase, and Henrik Mattsson, the mastermind behind the rapid expansion of the famous Swedish burger brand, Brödernas, bring their years of experience scaling several food service brands to the table. They share their insights on concept development, training, partnerships, standard operating procedures, and technology.

Listen to it as they discuss the importance of having a clear brand identity, how to maintain consistency across multiple locations, and the role of technology in streamlining operations and enhancing the customer experience. With their expert advice, you'll be able to navigate the complexities of scaling your restaurant brand with confidence.

Learn how our restaurant management solutions help your restaurant business keep costs under control.

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Transcript

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Hello, I'm Carl Jacobs, and in my daily life, I'm the CEO and Co-founder of Apicbase. In this podcast, I'll be looking for answers on how to grow and scale your food service business. I'm talking to numerous experts who have done the same in the past, and in this episode, I'll be talking to Henrik Mattsson. Henrik recently joined Hospitio, a company that invests in scaling restaurant businesses. But before that, Henrik was a deputy CEO for Brödernas, which is a very popular Swedish burger brand. Henrik has played a crucial part in the success of this chain. Under his supervision, the concept grew from 7 to nearly 100 locations. And if that wasn't enough, he did it all under 30 months. That's just amazing. Let's jump in and discover his recipe for success. All right, good afternoon everybody. This is a new podcast of the Food Service Growth Show and today we have Henrik Mattsson in the podcast. Henrik, very welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Happy to be part of it and happy to be to get opportunity. I'm very happy that you can join us because I have been told that you are someone who scaled a business from 1 to 100 outlets in 30 months and two and a half years, and I'm very curious to hear more about that. So maybe just to get started, can you quickly give a little bit of insights in your career in the food service industry and where you're coming from. So I'm coming from born and raised in Sweden but I'm 42 years old, living now in Stockholm with my son Wilhelm. He's 8 years old. But I spent my whole career in the restaurant, my whole adult working career in the restaurant industry. And I worked from the years of 20 to 30. I worked in many places around the globe in different positions. I just let destiny and work just take me where the opportunities were. I'll be living in Toronto, summer in Maga, lived on a sovereign season or ten months in Ireland, been in London, been in Australia on a working holiday visa. I'm not sure. I think you have the same opportunities in Belgium. Don't you go to Australia and work maybe? Yes. You do. Indeed, yes. And then I've been working on I was working on luxury cruise liners and a bit of other stuff. So that's what I did between 20 to 30. And then I decided to study hotel management, just to reach that sort of more senior level, because I was working as restaurant manager, and I was hungry for a bit of more responsibility and also curious to where the career path could take me. So after I studied hotel management, I've been working more in senior roles with hotels and restaurants, also in many parts of the world. With the focus on building, with the assignments being very commercial, operational-led organization, and a lot of red scaling businesses, hotel businesses. It's restaurant business in many different shape and forms. That's the short summary of who I am. Fantastic. So I'm curious. You mentioned specifically that you love to work for scaling businesses. What is it that attracts you into specifically scaling businesses? Now what attracts me? I love the process of starting on a blank piece of paper and in a room with the mood board. A lot of my assignments have been offered opportunity and then sat down in the room with people, with the very creative people that has an idea and has a vision and has a goal and has a budget, but they don't know how to do it. I like to be the one to come in and go for operation, go for the operation, make everything come alive. And it's a fantastic feeling to go from that first meeting and then just to see everything come alive and the energy that you have in the scaling process of those first initial stumbling step to build up to open up the first restaurant and then just go on to the next one and then see everything develops as you go along. I just love that face of a company. That's also where I choose to specialize in. All right, let's say what you've been doing in the past two and a half years is work with Brödernas. Is that correct? Yeah, Brödernas. It wasn't 1 to 100. It was seven units when I joined them. But the vision and the mission was very clear, and the dream for the owners was very clear. So they contacted me and they set up and we set it up a plan together. And then we moved from seven units up to 96 when I left, I wish it was 100. That was the internal target. But then we opened, had a pace of maybe one unit a week. That's really at a very incredible pace. And if you look back on that period and you look in, how did you do that? Because you say, okay, I love getting into a room with a blank piece of paper and a mood board. And two and a half years later, you leave a business and you've opened up 89 or 88 different restaurants. How do you in god's name start something like that? And making sure that you can open one restaurant a week. To start with you need to find, obviously you can't do it by yourself. You need to be surrounded with very good and hard-working people, very talented people. But the first step is that you set the basic organizational structure, the meeting structure, you set your rollout plan and then you start to set your framework. When I arrived at Brödernas, the concept was already there. You have the menu was in place, the interior was in place, the machine part, everything was sort of ready. So we looked at the one thing that wasn't ready was the procurement. Clear roles, titles, organization, how to build an organization. So we made a plan. You make a three month plan and then you make a six month plan and then you make a twelve month plan. But everything's built on streamlining as much as possible. In the case of Brödernas, everything had to be a copy paste and had to also be not as copy paste as a McDonald's kitchen. But we knew that this is the machine part we want to use. This is the suppliers we want to use. These are the delivery times that we can accept. These are the days that we can get deliveries. This is the way we open, this is the way we train staff, this is the way and everything then put into we used a project planning tool called Monday, which I can recommend to or at least I can recommend to use a project management tool that everyone has access to. So you can share that platform, you can share all the documentation. So by doing it you can also take away a lot of mail and phone correspondence and you need someone to be responsible of tracking and then set the meeting structure to have the follow up on every step of the journey. That's also very important. So you have very disciplined follow up steps on what needs to be done. I've written down quite some things to take into account, but one thing that interests me in particular is the organizational structure. I hear you talking and I hear you say you need good people, good hard working people. Can you a little bit like the structure at Brödernas? Was it like an HQ structure and then different outlets or was it, let's say everything was decentralized or was there, let's say a core team at HQ? Now we started with because there wasn't any team with HQ, it was the owners when I came in. It was the owners and we had one controller, the rest we had to build from and then we had restaurant managers. So in the first units that we opened, we hired one extra. So we moved with the restaurant managers that we hired from the first. That was the whole strategy. So we hired a bit overqualified restaurant managers that had a solid restaurant management background. We trained them and we let them do their own openings. We supported them with the openings and in that opening they also had the number two with them. So when we moved on to the next five, we took the number one out of the business and then we moved the number two up and then we scaled in Stockholm to start with. So we moved from seven to I think 22-25 units in Stockholm in a very rapid like first time. So we had a smaller geographical area to scale on to start with. And then when we reached 20-25 units, we had a solid experience base. Even though we did it fast, we had, I mean, the guys that then went outside of Stockholm to open new units. They already had open two units each. So then we can just spread it across the country and then we duplicated the process again and again and again. And then once we got up to 40-50 units, we then split it into regions or areas first and then areas became regions. So now Brödernas has today they have nine regional managers. We just scaled it from those restaurant managers. Obviously it's super important that you keep these key players. So you need to make sure that the workload is that they have a healthy, balanced workload as well, and they keep constant contact with them, check in how they are if you need to rest. Because one thing you can't lose these people. All the key players at the beginning you're dependent on. So it was a very decentralized structure. Everything was bottom up to start with. All the training was done locally and not controlled on, controlled and set centrally. But then once we start rolling it out, we just gave the trust and responsibility to the people that we have chosen to give the opportunity to open up these restaurants. And then they also got the opportunity to make a very fast career with us. I noted down that responsibility and I guess trust is a very important element and ingredient of the organization. But is there anything because scaling often implies that you can reduce costs because of the fact that you do not need to multiplicate everything in the business. Is there any scale advantage in the beginning or when did the scaling advantage start happening for Brödernas? The scale advantage, it happened pretty much after we done Stockholm, when we had the core knowledge of I think we had six really good restaurant managers that then had the experience. But then also the other part that I forgot to mention is that we decided on an early stage to trust all the we said what we need to do, what we are experts in, that's taking care of our guests, it's opening up restaurants, it's training staff. That's what we should focus on. In a very early stage, we said in terms of the actual building of the restaurants, the project lead of building of the restaurants, the shooting of the machines and interior and so on, that should be done by external experts. So instead of having our own in house team, we choose to work with experts that their core business. They built kitchen for in 40 to 50 years, so they know how to build the kitchen. Then same thing with interior, same thing with builders, same thing with so we said the staff will have access to the restaurant and we'll see the restaurant when they walk into the restaurant the first day. Because we never involved them in drawings, we never involved because they by doing it, we also reduce meeting times. And again, all about trust. I just explained to all the you will always have a head chef. You will always have a restaurant manager that will have strong opinions on how a restaurant is built, because everyone will go to themselves and have their own everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But you can't give everyone you can't have consensus with everyone in if you're working in this rapid pace, you need to go you need to trust the expert. You need to let the expert take the decision. And if for some reason, if the decision is wrong, just everyone will just come together and then we solve it. Instead of having a lot of meetings, you could easily have 40 meetings leading up to an opening discussing how kitchen should be planned. But we choose to have none. We choose to just give it to the experts. Yeah, all right. And that's also a key part of the same thing with choosing. We relied on burger chains, we relied on our meat suppliers to choose our meat mix. We just said, look, you guys are the expert, you tell us what to do with the meat that we should use. That's the best for the market. You know the market better than us. Again, we used a lot of our suppliers. Instead of having this internal process, we had it externally, so that by doing it, you also created a very big organization without having to hire experts and having to pay for the experts. How did the suppliers react on this question because more often than not, they probably just get the order from the chef because the chef knows best and then they just have to deliver, preferably on time. So now you completely turn it around and you say, okay we have a burger, tell us what we need to serve. How did they react on that? Like you said, it might sound like the most natural working process in the world, but even though it sounds simple, it's very hard to actually be able to do it. Because you need to convince the key members of staff, which you need to do when you recruit them, and you need to explain to them that this is how we work here. This is your responsibility. This is what I expect from you. But from a supplier perspective, of course, they love to get opportunity. So my experience is that they're getting more involved. They want to grow with you as a partner. They will make sure that the business is solid for everyone. There won't be any argument about a penny here and there. It just creates a very healthy, trustworthy relationship. And you're also getting so many more experts working on the same challenge than you would ever have in trying to solve it internally. That is something that is quite new to me. I haven't often heard this relationship with suppliers. My good feeling would say that they are trying to offer you the most expensive meat or the meat where they have the highest margin. Was this something you encountered or did they really go for? I understand what you mean now. I was also very clear with my expectation. I just said, look, this is give you the opportunity you are the expert, show me that you are the expert. But I will see it quite fast. If you try to fool me, then in that case I will give you the opportunity. But you know, when you say we will open 100 restaurants, there's very few people that will actually believe you. But you have fortunately or luckily for me, I had worked with some of them before, so they knew that and we've done similar journeys together. Not similar, this is a journey that would never happen again I guess, but at least scaling journeys together. So there was a trust there and they also just said I trust you, you should trust me. And then just let's make a good deal together and then don't fool us. We will see it. We have all the systems in the world to see that as well. We also made it, everything was digitalized. There's another thing, we told our system suppliers that we work with what you got instead of I'm sure you guys will meet that all the time. You have an excellent system. I will actually have an intro tomorrow of the whole Apicbase platform. So I'm looking forward to it. But I believe in using as an example I believe in using what you guys have built because there's a thought behind it. But I'm sure that there's a lot of guests or customers out there that would like to have to change some details in the system all the time, which is I can also respect it, but I personally don't see the point in questioning experts and I rather tell my staff. This is the function. This is how we use it. And the end game and the rest of it will still be the same. We just need to accept this is the way we need to do it. And then instead I prefer to have a sit down and have a longer sort of strategy discussion of what can be done long term instead of focusing on the short term. How should we change the systems that we use? How should we change the layout of a post? Or how should we have different design of an inventory system? Again, you could end up in so many discussions. That is for me, for me personally and the way I like to build companies together with my teams is, it's unnecessary if the solution is already there, just use it as it is. And then again, as a restaurant expert, focus on what we do best, meaning taking care of our guests, educating our staff, being a good manager. I mean, that's the most important thing. Making sure that your restaurant looks good and nice and focus on the core business and let the rest focus on let the experts on all the other areas do the work for you. All right, that sounds really useful. And you make me blush a little bit by saying that you will have a conversation about Apicbase in the future. But this is perfect proof that we talk to everybody in the industry, not just our customers. But now we're talking about technology and software technology. Can you from your experience tell us a little bit about how you see, let's say, an ecosystem in a restaurant and what are the key, let's say, technologies you need in a restaurant, especially in scaling businesses? The key technology I think you need is again the key decisions. And again, from my perspective, the key decisions should be as close to the guests as possible. I would like to see technology replace processes, meetings, even overhead counts. If you can give the restaurant manager or the general manager, the person responsible for the running of the day-to-day business the chance to solve recruitment themselves, contract themselves, procurement themselves, do the end of month themselves, do the analytics of the business themselves. That's what you need. I mean, there's another system similar to your system, I think you know Fourth Hospitality in UK. Absolutely, yes. I worked with that before. And I mean I know your platforms, which I will get again more familiar tomorrow. But this is what's also missing on the European market. We don't have this 360 Solution platforms on the European market at the moment. Well, you guys are building it and it's coming together nicely. You have a broad offer, but it's not on the Nordic market. I guess you're coming into the Nordic market, but on the Nordic market, the 360 Solution isn't there as it is. If you look at the Fourth Hospitality working in the London chain, for example, then you have a general manager that can control their business and run it. You don't need that big overhead, and by doing it, you can also have a manager. The challenge in the Nordics for example is that we lose a lot of people that will come into their 30s when they become parents or for some other reasons, can't work evenings or weekends. Then you lose a lot of experience. If you have the technology platform where you can actually run everything from the restaurant, then you can offer these restaurant experts the chance of working Monday to Friday. And then they could focus on ordering, scheduling, forecasting, budgeting, menu engineering, attesting invoices, end of month, all of it. And then they could hire younger sort of shift leaders that could just focus on the kitchen day to day operation, the restaurant day to day operation, without having the obstacles of thinking about, oh, did I schedule right today? Have I ordered the right amount? They could just focus on the actual product, the service, and then they could trust that the general manager or the restaurant manager have done the work for them. So I think that's the key for me is to have the platform and have the system that will put the key decisions as close to the guest as possible, and not in the head office too far away, because it's value destroying for a company if the overhead is too big. And finally, I'm talking a lot, but finally, it's also good to be able to have the general manager can also be on the floor, for example, lunch for two and a half, 3 hours, and they can also do training on site. So you can combine a day with administration, with operations, and by also doing it, you can also have a more efficient schedule and a more efficient if the general manager can spend time in training, you don't need an area manager, you don't need a regional manager. You save time on travels, you save time on hotels. You can raise the salary for the general manager. You can even add a better bonus. I believe in decentralized structures with centralized technical solutions. Yeah, with the technical platform that centralized. I heard you say a few KPIs, but if we focus on that for a moment in the end, you had 96 restaurants reporting to you or to the team at Brödernas, let's say, the three to five KPIs that they needed to report on. What are the ones that on a weekly or a monthly basis, the KPIs that you wanted to know from each of those restaurants? Well, first of all, we had a controller working full time, analyzing everything. It's the first analytic platform, so where we gave them access on a daily basis to the KPIs. But the KPIs, the most important thing is the forecast of every unit. So you do your forecast sales and then you have your targeted staff KPI percentage, and that then generates a schedule amount of hours that you had to so let's say you could only schedule 250 hours. That's something that was controlled on a daily basis, or at least before the week started. It was controlled by a controller. They could just say, look, why have you scheduled 20 hours above your forecast? Can you explain? And then once the week passed, you also said, oh, congratulations, you went 20 hours below. How did you get to those 250 hours? That's per outlet, I guess. So they were 250. We get it from the set. So we worked with Caspeco, and then Caspeco has a forecast module built into the salary system. And then you do the sales, and then you have all the contracts and the salary information of the staff. So you get an average cost per hour. So you take your forecast, you put in your KPI salary percentage, and then you get your hours. That's the way we were talking, hours instead of just hours. So they could easily understand this is the amount of hours. They could say, look, you need to save hours. You didn't take a risk on Monday, for example, and then you need to put it on Friday. Yeah. So this is a clear example of talking the language of the manager. Not so much in the language of money, but really they need to plan in hours. And that's why you talk in hours with them. Exactly. So they can easily understood. Another thing was obviously cost control in terms of the raw material, but then we looked at the top 25 freshly produced or the top 25 turnover products. That's where we did inventory weekly, and the rest we did inventory monthly. All right. And then turnover per hour. Those three basically were the key KPIs for us. The turnover per hour. That's where you can compare similar units to each other, and then you can say, look, and then you can look at ours. You can say you have the same turnover, you use 50 hours more, you have the same amount of seats. How come, if needed, you can also switch place, and they could cross train each other. So this is how we do it here. This is how we can actually manage. We can reach the same sales in a similar operation and so on. Three KPI factors, then end of month. Obviously, other costs have been a big partner with the energy and everything going up. All right, maybe a little bit out of the box question. I don't know if you want to talk about this, but I guess, you know, you opened 96 restaurants. Did you also close some of those restaurants? And if you did, what were the reasons for closing them? We closed two, and the reason was because they were in do you have paddle courts in Belgium? We do. It's a big hit today. So it was a big hit in the Nordics. It's not a hit anymore, unfortunately. So we had two restaurants in paddle court arenas, but then the people just stopped playing the sports, so that's why we had to close it. There's just no flow of guests coming into them, and then we sold two of them. Okay. If we had kept it, we would have had 100. All right, now the mystery is solved. That's really interesting actually. So it's actually a matter of wrong location, wrong sports, almost. Is there one learning that you did along the way that you want to pass along where you say, if you start scaling a business, this is what you need to get right. You definitely need to get the communication and the project management right. That's the key. And the follow up, I would say the project management tool is the key. All right. And of course, also to be in the recruited phase, to be very, very clear with expectations in terms of this is what I expect from you. The rest will be done by these people and experts. And be very clear that you have, especially from the way I'm working, everyone understands that what's their role, what's their responsibility. And there needs to be trust in every other part of the business. The most dangerous thing is when your key players or your key individuals, if they start to lose focus, if they start to think more of the design of the kitchen, more of the when will it be ready, or they start to think about all other stuff. Then train your staff, make the restaurant ready, make sure it's clean, make sure the guests are happy. So it's just very important that there needs to be boundaries between the responsibilities. This is what you guys need to focus on. The rest you need to trust that it's been taken care of by your colleagues that we trust. All the best to do this. All right, in the past half an hour, we've had a lot of conversation about Brödernas and about your role, about scaling from 6-7 to 96 businesses or outlets. But you're not working there anymore. What are you doing today? I'm at a company called Hospitio or Hospitio Group. It's a group, it's initiated by a group of investors where they want to build a restaurant group or have given me the responsibility as a CEO to build a restaurant group on the Northern European markets. If you look at the northern European market in restaurants, it's basically only one segment that has some big players in it, and that's the burger segment. All right? If you're looking at kebab chains or pizza or Asian or Mexican or healthy food, you will find that it's very fragmented. You don't have any big players on those markets. So what we see, we see a big, big gap in the market to consolidate, to build new brands that can then same like brödernas, but then to have four to five portfolio companies that we can scale. Mexican, you can go vegan. There's plenty of opportunities on vegan, sort of coffee food cafes. Well, you have vegan junk food in Amsterdam, but I think that's the only one in the Northern Europe. You have Pizza Hut, but there's no massive pizza concept in Northern Europe. There's no text max I can go on into. We see a very big opportunity, especially on the sector where you can offer products where you can be relevant and offer product to a wide range of people. Monday to Sunday, large dinner and takeaway. There's also a bit of a paradigm shift, the prices in the supermarkets compared to buying food on the lower segment, on the food that's available, as I mentioned, Monday to Sunday, lunch, dinner, and evening. The price gap isn't that big. And there's a lot of people that the knowledge of cooking food is somewhat disappearing with the generations, and also the knowledge of a lot of people living by themselves. And there's a lot of people working a lot. Five years ago, the restaurant industry passed the supermarket industry in US. It's only a matter of time before it will also happen in Europe. So that's where our aim is going to be. And is this eat-in or take away or is it a combination? It's a combination. So you want to be relevant. Use the retail word in all omnichannels, in all sales channels of the Horeca market. So eating, takeaway, catering events, festivals, Everything needs to be covered. Curbside, pickup, but then also work you have work on the market with the products that we're already eating today, but just make a brand out of it. That's the whole idea. And then you can also do it with a low COPEX cost and the same strategy. And as we've done with The Brödernas, yes, we just want to burgers. And do you already have a concept which is like or are you working on the first one at the moment? We're working on the first ones, but we will actually look at buying companies, we look at creating one ourselves. But instead of creating, we rather go in and buy companies that has maybe three to five units. They have a proof of concept that has a potential that can show that they have a profitability. And where you have we want to keep the entrepreneurs in the company. All right. We want to be a reinforcer, we want to be a facilitator. We want to be that part that can help them with the finances, with the whole system, the whole platform that they don't know, scaling companies and knowledge. And we have the network, we have all the systems in place. Let's see, hopefully we can find a way to work together and then you could cover the technical part, but then we have connection with wholesalers, staff, builders, architects and all every single supplier, IT, social media, marketing that you need on the Northern European market from within my own network and my shared network. And together with we have a great advisory board that we're now building with senior, now working operational profiles in our industry. So we want to be that partner to good entrepreneurs that wants to scale their companies but they don't have the opportunities. And then obviously we'll we will benefit from their ideas and we will make money on it. But so we'll make. So for all the entrepreneurs out there that are listening I'm open for discussions. Fantastic. That's a fantastic thing to end on. I just conclude by saying that you're building actually with Hospitio Group, a network of specialists that you can offer to businesses in order for them to scale. Thank you very much, Henrik. This was a very interesting conversation and thank you for being with us on this show. Thank you. Have a great day. Thank you, Henrik. What an amazing story the Brödernas business is, especially on how a decentralized approach can work if you're trust your managers and provide them with the right tools to excel. And for the audience thank you for joining me on this podcast. We will be releasing plenty of more interesting interviews. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on any episode. And for now, thanks for listening and see you next time.