Starting from scratch
A chance meeting in their local high street at Dronfield, Derbyshire, led husband-and-wife team Jayne and Dirk Spanier to take over the restaurant franchise at the town's eight-bedroom Chantry Hotel.
"I bumped into Jackie Toaduff, who owns the hotel with her husband Roy," explains Jayne. "The restaurant had been closed for three years and, as everybody knows everybody else in Dronfield, I said, ‘How about us taking over the hotel's catering?' Within 14 days we were here!"
The Spaniers were hardly franchise novices. Having met when they were both working in Bermuda (at the Southampton Princess Hotel - he as a chef, she as a hairdresser) they returned to her home country of England in 1988 and ran the catering operations successively at three golf clubs - most recently at the nearby Hallowes Golf Club in Derbyshire.
"The golf clubs were the only places that gave you the opportunity to run your own business without much financial outlay," explains German-born Dirk. "I didn't buy anything at the Chantry, I just walked in one day and started cooking.
"The main disadvantage is that when you move on you haven't anything to sell that would provide you with a financial base to start a new business. You're starting from scratch again."
From the hotelier's point of view, franchising out a restaurant operation makes good financial sense. The burden of carrying a low-profit or loss-making business is dumped on to someone else. Kitchen and front of house wages, food control and restaurant marketing are all transferred to the franchisee for an agreed fee.
"We knew Jayne and Dirk's reputation from the golf club. If they hadn't come along we wouldn't have opened the restaurant again," confirms Jackie.
The franchise agreement means the Spaniers initially pay a weekly rent of £75 to the Toaduffs, to be reviewed next year.
The Spaniers have also undertaken to provide all meals for the Toaduffs and their co-owner Colin Edwardes, which is worth about £150 per week. A breakage bond of £2,000 had to be put down by the Spaniers, but all profits stay with them.
As the Chantry's restaurant had no established customer base, the Spaniers have had to build business from scratch. They have relied mostly on word of mouth, attracting many former clients from Hallowes Golf Club.
Nevertheless, business can be patchy. "Sometimes we only have five at lunch, and at other times we do more than 40 lunch covers," says Dirk.
This disparity means money is wasted on staff cover in case the restaurant gets busy, but Dirk believes business will have evened out by the end of the year and wages will have become cost effective. From a weekly turnover of £3,000 he estimates £500 is for the two full-time members of staff (one each front and back of house) and up to four part-time waitresses.
