Business strategy

Bringing people and communities together through great experiences

Our strategic priorities are the pillars which underpin the activity within the business to drive long-term sustainable growth and ultimately that enable us to achieve our purpose of being the host of life’s memorable moments, bringing people and communities together through great experiences.

Through building a strong and efficient business we are able to focus on providing experiences which our team and guests enjoy being a part of, including processes which are sustainable and aim to bring people together throughout our supply chain. We have maintained consistency in our three strategic priorities over recent years and believe that continued focus in these areas is key to retaining stability and growth in the business through a period of external uncertainty.

Our three strategic pillars are:

• Build a more balanced business
• Instil a more commercial culture
• Drive an innovation agenda

Focusing on these areas through our Ignite programme of work, a wide range of management improvement initiatives, delivered significant progress generating sustained like-for-like sales growth and cost efficiencies. Two waves of Ignite initiatives previously rolled out have directly led to enhanced performance over a number of areas, improving our trading levels and increasing profitability pre-Covid 19. The third wave of Ignite initiatives rolled out over the last two years have continued this progress and helped to mitigate as many of the exceptional cost headwinds across the supply chain as possible.

We continue to focus on initiatives which enhance efficiency and productivity, in areas such as automatic product ordering, enhanced labour scheduling, cost-mitigating procurement strategies and energy consumption reduction. Alongside efficiency improvements, we have a number of projects focused on sales growth and one of the most exciting new Ignite workstreams launched this year is focusing on further driving a ‘sales and volume culture’ across the organisation, including each site, district and brand targeting selected products each quarter, to maximise incremental sales. We remain confident in our ability to deliver long-term and sustained efficiencies and business improvements through the existing Ignite programme.

We believe that our three strategic pillars remain the crucial elements of the business which will drive long-term growth. Through the Ignite workstream and our capital programme, we will continue to unlock value in these areas enhancing our competitive position in the market.