The Challenge
Delegating operational management to more than 150 staff while upholding their high quality standards and create a playbook for future expansion.
The Outcome
The Beefy Boys have standardised their processes according to EOS® with integrated task management, to ensure process is followed by all. Growth continues with new restaurants in 2023.
Anthony Murphy, aka Murf, is one of the co-founders of The Beefy Boys Meat Boutique, an award-winning burger, beer and cocktail restaurant chain operating in the UK.
The company also has a food truck and wedding catering company that takes their prized recipes on the road. The Beefy Boys may have started with a humble backyard barbecue but now employ more than 150 staff with more new sites opening in 2023.
Founded: 2011
Company size: 150+ staff
Website: thebeefyboys.com
Industry: Restaurants and catering
Hi Murf, can you give us some background?
The Beefy Boys started just over ten years ago. Myself and my three best friends went from cooking burgers for friends in backyards to pop-ups in different locations. Eventually we entered the Grillstock competition in Bristol, where we won the UK Best Burger award.
Through that, we entered the World Burger Championships in Las Vegas and won second place.
From there, our pop-ups took off. We went from selling twenty burgers to two hundred.
Eventually, six hundred people would show up at our pop-up on a Thursday night, and we’d have 2-mile-long queues.
We decided it was time to quit our jobs and enter the business full-time.
We opened our first 80-cover restaurant in Hereford in 2016, which has now expanded to a 200-cover restaurant, a branch in Shrewsbury, a food truck and a wedding event company. We also have plans to open a third restaurant in 2023.
Why did you need a task management system?
We started small with just the four of us, doing absolutely everything ourselves – from marketing to cooking to developing recipes and running the kitchen. Suddenly, we had to shift to managing more than 150 people.
We needed to consolidate into something more streamlined.
We had to make sure that things were done correctly and that people were following the correct processes. We also wanted to increase accountability and relay information to people about the way we wanted things done in a clear and efficient way.
We really needed clarity between ourselves and our staff.
Communication used to happen in a very organic but haphazard way. We’d send messages via email, social media, text, Whatsapp, and other channels. Things were getting missed, and it became confusing, so we wanted to consolidate and give staff one place to look for tasks instead of dozens.
Why did you choose beSlick?
We loved that it was bespoke to our needs.
Every business is different, so having the ability to build templates and structure things our way was very important to us.
It was intuitive and supported our EOS® strategy.
We use the Traction system and run to EOS®, so ensuring process is followed by all is an important part of that.
Our Level 10 meetings used to take a lot of time from Chris, another of our Directors, to manage actions using spreadsheets and email. Now we use beSlick and it is instant, your phone is buzzing during the meeting as actions are assigned to you in realtime.
Everyone got it right away and bought into it from the start.
Have you seen any measurable benefits?
We’ve seen real changes in efficiency and accountability.
We have department iPads, such as in the kitchen that we use whenever there is an event that requires special prep. All you do is select the template and the number of people you need, and you’ve got a trackable to-do list. Fewer things are missed, and you save time.
We also use it for training, for example how we’ve used beSlick as part of our kitchen induction. We’ve created training with all of the things you need to know before you can work in the kitchen, including sanitizing procedures and different forms of prep, which gets sent to staff before they begin working with us as guest users.
The Environmental Health Officer was very impressed on inspection!
It’s a real visual way to keep things documented, which is great for staff that might not speak English as a first language or have issues with reading. They can clearly see how to do things through embedded videos.
It’s great for us, too. You can literally look at a tablet and see what stage prep is at instead of looking for pieces of paper or text messages.
Things are far clearer for everyone in the entire business.
What would your advice be for other businesses?
There are aspects of beSlick that are relevant to any business, for us we’ve used it in a multifaceted way.
We use it for to-dos, opening and closing checks, training, and documenting our processes, which creates a template for everyone else. You can record the way you do things, and when someone new enters the company, you can point them straight to that template.
Even if only one of the things I’ve mentioned is relevant to your business, it can transform your day to day.
In the beginning, it felt overwhelming because there were so many applications and ways we could use it, which took a lot of work in and of itself. But we soon figured out that you need to approach it in phases.
Focus on one aspect at a time and then move on to the next.
Would you recommend beSlick?
Definitely.
While it’s a lot of work to keep recording what you do because you’re always adding and changing, and evolving your processes, it means everything is constantly improving.
It will allow us to roll out to a third, fourth or fifth site much quicker as a result, as we’ve got an operating system now and we’re not starting from scratch each time.
One central library for 'how to do things'
Use the drag & drop process flowchart builder and embed video, docs & guidance to make things clear
Ensure everything
gets done
Execute as dynamic task checklists with automated notifications, dependent dates and owners for every step
Gain clear
progress visibility
View all task progress, what is on track and what is overdue, using summary dashboards or detail reports
Collaborate on what needs doing
Communicate, @mention & resolve issues as a team (even Guests), keeping a record of everything discussed
Save time with integration
Integrate & automate with over 2,000 applications including your CRM, email & finance software
