Rihanna had the right idea. I’m talking about that song where she sings about shining together through the good times, and huddling under the shelter through the bad. The one that Jay Z hijacks. The catchy little number. Having researched this subject intensively recently, if I were to do a TED talk on umbrella groups, I’d just come out and stand whilst ‘Umbrella’ played for four minutes and thirty-one seconds. She’s nailed it.
You’ve probably never considered it, and that’s okay. The laws allow for multiple businesses, each with their own set of accounts and individual structure. Those businesses may look very different on paper; a different style of hospitality perhaps. Some dry-led, others primarily focused on wet sales. They might do different cuisines. Whatever the reasons for the different brands, you’ve settled on them being separate entities, regardless of how hard your accountant has to work.
And yet, when you really boil it down, having a shared identity comes with a huge amount of benefits to a business. The boring bits are obvious, being easier to control from administrative, legal, and financial aspects. But also the freedom it offers to push your hospitality portfolio into new boundaries. To define your brand architecture with new innovation. To evolve when the sun shines, but to also be able to share resources and knowledge on the rainier days. That’s the best umbrella.
Now this is the important bit: I’m not talking about registering any old name and running with it. Anyone can do that and most tend to do it badly. Faceless. Cluttered. No direction or transparency. Not the name of a fruit, an animal, or a precious stone. They offer no identity or personality. They say nothing about a business. It is literally just a name, sometimes just an acronym. Your umbrella group could be an insurance company, a solicitors, a haulage company. It could be a hospitality group that monopolises an entire city by doing every cuisine in the world, badly.
The best hospitality umbrella groups share a common denominator of being progressive, authentic businesses that inspire investor confidence with a grown-up, sophisticated approach. They ooze confidence and understand their market, like London’s Cubitt House and Public House Group, who both focus on the restoration of pubs in affluent areas of the capital, and Creative Restaurant Group whose focus on various regional cuisines of Japan and China has now diversified to include cocktail bars in the same sector.
That’s not to say that the portfolio can’t be varied. Mission Mars operates across a landscape that includes entertainment, food, and beverage focused strands, all to great success, mostly due to their strong sense of hospitality and also being able to cross pollinate each individual sector with talent from the others. It’s not rocket science (if it were I wouldn’t be writing this). The group simplifies the simple things like payroll, tax, and NI, allowing the prongs of the umbrella the additional time to refine what they do.
I am Simon Carlo, a food blogger, journalist, copywriter and bonafide mild child. The above words are mine. Mostly. The gooder ones anyway.
