Words from the Wise – Alex Reilley

Alex Reilley, managing director, Loungers, shares his business secrets

Understand your products
If you haven't considered what people want from your business, then it can cause a lot of distress further down the line. What tends to happen is that people get to a point where they believe they have achieved success - and that is when their business begins to falter. We spend a lot of time obsessing about what we do. It is important in the process that you never believe that you have quite got there.

Be brave…
… we certainly have, and it is paying dividends for us now. The eating and drinking business is fiercely competitive and it can be quite easy to not make decisions or fear the consequences of getting it wrong. We have always taken slightly brave decisions about site selection because we believed that our gut instinct was correct.

A lot of people disengaged from growth in the recession because they didn't know what was going to happen. That presented opportunities for those who were brave and could see the potential to grow their business. We started our ninth site in September 2008 and we will be on our 17th by February 2011.

Stay grounded Having built a company like we have done from virtually nothing, it has served us very well not to wallow in any success we have had and have a general back-slapping session. Part of the reason why we have been able to grow the business is that we have invested everything back into it. We don't have fancy cars or designer wardrobes. Our pleasure in life is an addiction to growing the business.

Continue to innovate There will always be something you can improve. We are a pretty intense management team, and if you sat in on one of our meetings you would think the whole world was falling down because we tend to focus on the things that aren't going so well.

We are constantly trying to improve everything we do. It can be very generic, or something really specific like deciding which hash brown you are going to go with. They are kind of the decisions that most people wouldn't believe you go into so much detail on.

Good decision, bad decision

Good Setting up Loungers with good friends Jake Bishop and Dave Reid in 2002. At the time we had no idea that the company would grow to the size it is today, but we did feel that we had a good concept.

Looking back, it's mad to think how far we've come in a relatively short space of time, particularly as the £30,000 we invested nine years ago remains the only equity investment made in the business.

Bad Getting talked into a restaurant manager's position in a hotel. I joined City Inn (now Mint) in 1999 as part of the opening team of their very first hotel in Bristol, despite not liking hotel work. The restaurant was sold to me as being completely stand-alone, but within weeks of the opening I was doing duty management shifts and having to break from service to take towels to room 326.

Good company but not right for me. I quit without having another job to go to, I was that unhappy.

CV highlights

1993-96 Waiter - trainee manager, the Case restaurant, Leicester

1996-99 Trainee manager - general manager, Hullaballoos (BYO Restaurants), Bristol

1999 Restaurant manager, City Café, City Inn hotel, Bristol

2000-06 Operations manager, Glass Boat Co/Byzantium Restaurants, Bristol

2002 Founder/director, Loungers, Bristol

2006 Founder/director, Goldbrick House, Bristol

2007 Founder/director, Flatcappers, Bradford-on-Avon

2007-present Managing director, Loungers