Despite having venues across Australia, the US and UK, Red Engine CEO Steve Moore is still not used to running an international business. “It’s kind of bizarre to be in a meeting in Washington and then dialling into a call in Melbourne, then Oxford. What the hell is going on?” he asks.
Since its foundation in 2013, the themed bar group (which includes the darts venue Flight Club and shuffleboard bar Electric Shuffle) has gone from strength to strength and is set to open its 31st venue in Oxford later this week.
The group’s name – Red Engine – references the 30,000-mile trip Moore completed in a fire engine in 2010 to raise money for charity. It was an experience that Moore says gave him the confidence to set up his own business.
Here, he explains where the inspiration for Flight Club came from, why it’s important for leaders to surround themselves with experts and his hatred of gastropubs.
What inspired you to start a business?
In 2010, I did a full circumnavigation of the world in a fire truck to raise money for lung cancer. My dad died from lung cancer and he was a firefighter, so I thought it was apt.
The project was two-and-a-half years in the making and it took me and the team 294 days. It’s very rare to do such a journey by road and there’s absolutely no way we could do it now, even by car or motorbike, because of the geopolitical landscape. My back still really hurts from it, I regret it every day, it was absolutely horrible.
But, what it did do was give me the skills and confidence to pull off something big. When you’ve done all the project management, diplomacy and organisation for something like that, you think: ‘Why can’t I start my own business?’ A lot of the skills that were harnessed over those three years were very applicable to starting Red Engine.
Where did the idea for Flight Club come from?
I really missed the community pub that I’d grown up going to. I might be seeing it through rose-tinted glasses, but I have fond memories of going to that pub with my mates and playing darts.
Then the concept of the gastropub took off and ruined everything. The dartboards and pool tables started disappearing from these venues. The pub scene lost its edge and became a bit mundane.
One evening, I was sitting in a pub in Devon and we saw a group of six friends playing darts. I thought, ‘we have to bring that back.’ The social entertainment sector was yet to take off when we first started and now it’s absolutely everywhere.
What skills does a good leader need?
A lot of the clichés are true. The ability to give ownership and direction to others is actually very difficult. It’s often much easier to do it yourself, but leaders need to be able to empower others and that can be hard.
The importance of active listening is another phrase that is over-said and massively misunderstood.
But the main difference between a manager and a leader is strategy. This is something that can be taught and, essentially, means making the right set of choices to maximise your chances of hitting an objective.
Making the right combination of decisions is challenging. If all we did was open venues, we would screw ourselves over by having a shitty product. If we only focused on perfecting our product, we wouldn’t have enough revenue coming in to support the team.
Good leadership is about understanding strategy, getting the right balance of decisions and communicating them effectively to others.
What is the best bit of business advice you’ve ever received?
Surround yourself with talent and keep finding people to bounce ideas off. I’m constantly talking to other entrepreneurs to understand how they’ve achieved things – whether it’s a new market we’re thinking of going into or a new technology we’re looking to develop.
The world of leadership can be lonely too, so you need thought partners, otherwise you can go a bit mad. I went to an event for entrepreneurs with my CFO and most people I spoke to commented on their level of loneliness. You’ve got so many people relying upon you as well, so it can be tough-going. Having people around who you can talk to is important.
What do you look for when you’re hiring for your leadership team?
Because we built the business from the ground up, we brought in a lot of experts. Our technical director, Jason Dale, has worked on projects for NASA, and we believed he was one of the only people in Europe who could work out the vision system we needed for our dartboards.
Initially, you don’t really need leaders, what you need is phenomenal experts who are prepared to iterate and bootstrap the business. Having all the skills in-house also allows us to be more agile and create a bespoke experience for the guests. We’re not relying on third parties to iterate.
But there is a different requirement as you scale. As the business grows, leadership skills become more important. It’s difficult to master being an expert and a leader. You can’t just take any designer or games specialist and ask them to manage 14 people, develop new processes and work to a budget, it requires different skills.
What impact did the pandemic have on your business?
Covid was actually relatively kind to us. Obviously, having zero revenue was very costly, but we used it as an opportunity to reset, pay off our technical debt and review our systems, processes and design principles.
That allowed us to come out of lockdown in pretty good shape and to scale quickly because we had the infrastructure in place. I’m not saying I want another pandemic, but you do have to slow down sometimes just to be able to catch up.
A lot of brands have good revenue but they don’t take the time to think about how to reach profitability or scale, so they go out of business. You have to find that balance.
What’s the biggest challenge facing your sector at the moment?
In every sector, the challenge always comes down to insight, understanding consumer behaviour and being able to answer the ‘why’ behind every decision you make. Very few people really understand what’s going on.
You can have a successful few months in a couple of sectors then suddenly something weird happens. In one quarter, restaurants might be doing well and spending in bars will be down but, by the next quarter, that might be reversed. People then start making assumptions about the impact of working from home or they think people will be spending more on clothes than experiences.
This makes insight and the ability to get clean, good, solid data critical, so you can understand consumer trends and act upon them. Otherwise, you’re just doing a bunch of stuff and hoping for the best.
What’s the most enjoyable part of your job?
We’re now at a place where I can spend a couple of hours on our game design, then help create a venue on the other side of the world, before focusing on business strategy and corporate finance in the afternoon.
It seems hilarious to me that I’m in a position where I get to do that every day. It’s very stressful and the days are long – I’ve been up since 4am today – but when you go into the offices and you see all these people doing all this cool shit, and you realise you helped create these jobs, it’s a good feeling.
What’s been the proudest moment in your role so far?
Nothing can beat opening the doors to the first Flight Club venue in Shoreditch. Seeing it full to the brim and all the tech working was great. Standing there and realising that this actually does work was pretty damn cool.
More recently, the opening of Electric Shuffle in New York was great. The launch party was on my birthday, we had a massive cake and people singing. Opening this venue was a risk-adjusted play and it felt like an enormous step for the brand, so to be standing there on my birthday felt pretty good.
What advice would you give to your successor?
You always need to be thinking three years ahead. That means constantly building out your infrastructure and systems. It’s not particularly sexy but it can break businesses if it’s overlooked. You can be coming up with good ideas all the time, but you can’t do anything without the right systems and processes in place.
There should always be a focus on the team, IT infrastructure, AI tools and new ways of working. You have to be open to these things because you can quickly become unstuck if you scale faster than your team or technology infrastructure allows for.
