Will Beckett opened the doors to the first Hawksmoor restaurant alongside childhood friend and co-founder Huw Gott in 2006. Built on a passion for showcasing the best British ingredients, the steakhouse chain has since grown into a £100m turnover business, with 1,500 employees and 12 restaurants across the UK, Ireland and the US, with a 13th soon to open in Chicago.
As CEO, Beckett no longer has to tend the bar or clean the toilets, as he did in his early days in the business. But he claims to have never lost his “obsession” for good steak and still regularly meets farmers. What does Beckett think it takes to succeed as a leader in the relentlessly challenging world of hospitality?
What do you think makes a good leader?
Good leadership comes in lots of forms but, for me, the key character traits are optimism and resilience. In my experience, people like to work for those who make them feel that tomorrow will be better than today, and who can help them get through difficult times.
Integrity and empathy are also crucial qualities. It’s about helping people understand the greater purpose of their work.
What single thing do you think would make your job easier?
There are only two things that can really make your job consistently easier: simplifying what you do or surrounding yourself with people who are excellent at what they do.
Sometimes we’re lucky enough to do business in favourable conditions, but we have come to accept that, at Hawksmoor, what we’re doing is hard. Simplifying what we do is not an option for me. We operate very busy, high-standard restaurants in multiple locations and we don’t want to sacrifice our integrity.
The best advice anyone can get in their professional lives is to surround yourself with people who are better than you. The group directors at Hawksmoor have worked together since 2012 and have a long-term commitment to what we’re trying to build. We’ve also got a fantastic senior executive team beneath the board. Those people consistently make my job easier.
What do you consider to be the biggest challenge in business right now?
Businesses have had to deal with many shifting sands, the challenges change so frequently. At Hawksmoor, we’ve had to contend with the Covid-19 pandemic, inflation and a recruitment crisis.
Despite the challenges, you need to continue to aim for excellence but the answer to how we achieve that varies by time and geography. Adapting to challenges is one part of running a business that I really enjoy.
Which book do you think every business leader should read at least once?
Over the years I’ve particularly enjoyed The Happiness Advantage, by Shawn Achor; The Score will Take Care of Itself, by Bill Walsh; Quiet Leadership, by David Rock; Rocket Fuel, by Gino Wickman and Mark Winters; and Lessons from a Warzone, by Al Roumani.
That said, I think business leaders can learn the most from literature. Nothing is more helpful for business leaders (especially in the early years) than understanding people, and no one captures people better than authors, poets and playwrights.
What was your first job?
I did some industrial temping between the ages of 15 and 16, where I would spend 10 hours a day hanging sheet metal on hooks. I weirdly enjoyed it, because I liked the two people I did it with (another 16-year-old who’d just dropped out of school, and a supervisor in his 50s). The work was incidental to the relentless chat and jokes.
My second job was in quality control in a factory, where I had to check the contents of jars on a conveyor belt. No one was allowed to talk. I quit after a day and never went back for my wages.
What was your worst job?
When I finished university, I started working in advertising sales. I was hopeless at it, and stuck it out for nine months. It made me believe that I didn’t like work, so I went back to university.
Looking back, I realise it wasn’t the right place for me, my strengths or what I care about. It was a salient lesson that has encouraged me to make Hawksmoor a place where people can really thrive while being true to themselves. It means we have to think really carefully about who we hire and promote.
What advice would you give to your 18-year-old self?
Work hard and be nice to people.
What’s the best business advice you’ve ever received?
“To succeed you need to be better or different”. At Hawksmoor, we take this as a bit of a challenge and have worked incredibly hard to try and be both.
What excites you most about your current role?
The challenge and benefits of scale. Every now and then, Huw and I have to pinch ourselves and ask, ‘when did we stop being the plucky independent?’ We’ve grown so much. The business now employs 1,500 people, serves 1.2 million guests a year, we’re a B Corp, and we’re opening our 13th restaurant soon in Chicago. The plan is to open a couple of restaurants a year in the US.
Working out how to do that and making Hawksmoor better, while fighting against what we perceive as a tendency for some restaurant groups to dilute their special-ness as they grow, is the challenge. The exciting benefit is that I’m now starting to be able to really focus on the things that I’m best at, because we’re big enough to have exceptional people doing lots of the work that you have to pick up as a founder as you grow.
What do you do to protect yourself against burnout?
It’s incredibly difficult to protect from burnout but I know I need to read more, exercise, have fun, and get off my phone. At times, I am more successful at this than others.
I’ve also found that going for long, solo walks can help me to reset. One time, I felt a need to re-energise, so I spent five days walking in Gran Canaria, which was genuinely gamechanging for me at the time.
