Importance of close teamwork

Feb 8 2008 by Bill Oldfield, The Journal

IT’S all about teamwork. That’s what I was taught at school. It was then reinforced to me during my time in the Merchant Navy and again in other lines of work.

We can’t succeed without it. It’s how we run our restaurant businesses and it seems common sense to most people for most walks of life, including family, business and sport. Even the lone gladiatorial tennis player or racing driver has a team behind him or her.

Its implications are wider than is at first apparent. As we’re moving towards opening our next restaurant, we’ve been spending a lot of time working with the local authority, the planning department, environmental health officers, building control people, landlord’s agents, estate agents, builders, equipment suppliers, architects and the list goes on.

Every single person involved seems to believe that they’re part of something larger and is working towards some common goal. It’s great. Working together is what makes the world go round and is what defines a civilised world.

So why is it that our legislators can’t demonstrate the same thing when thinking up laws for those for whom they work? After all, they are our public servants, aren’t they?

Take the no smoking law. Sure, it seemed a good idea to ban smoking in restaurants and I’ve long had a sneaking wish that the Government would do something about it. And so they did, and in all public buildings, but without fully considering the implications for the pub industry.

Now if you want a drink, you have to run the fug of smokers just outside the front door of the pub. Or you do unless the landlord has had the bright idea of using patio heaters to turn his car park or back yard into a solarium.

Those that have invested in such heaters have been lucky enough to limit the damage resulting from their customers disappearing with their beer money and putting the pub at risk. Which is an important issue because apart from contributing to our local economy, pubs are social centres and an essential part of British life.

So of course there’s now a move afoot to ban the sale of patio heaters. Yes, it’s obvious that they could add to the nation’s carbon footprint, heating up the outside instead of leaving it at its ambient worst. But you can’t blame the publicans. Nobody told them not to do it and they’ve got to try to stay in business.

But then the legislators from the environmental department have suddenly seen the end of the world because of these evil landlords and another way to justify their own existence.

So they decide to react to that, ban the heaters and damn the consequences because matters of the environment are much more important than publicans and their businesses.

It’s as if the publicans should have understood that this would happen when actually they’re experts at keeping beer and keeping their customers happy while leaving affairs of the environment to other experts who, I guess, are not that good at changing a barrel.

It’s not just that the Government departments don’t talk to those for whom they’re legislating. It appears they don’t talk to each other.

Imagine if, a few years ago, we at Oldfields had decided to source as much as we could locally but not worked with the producers first. I know what would have happened because that’s what I tried when I opened my first restaurant.

At that time producers and restaurateurs weren’t working together and local sourcing was just about impossible. If you asked a chef why he didn’t buy local produce he’d tell you that the producers couldn’t sell him it and the producers would tell you that chefs were unreasonable and didn’t want what they had.

At Oldfields we began to realise that after a while and decided to start a dialogue, with fantastic results.

We now buy much of our produce from farms throughout County Durham and Northumberland that had never supplied individual businesses such as ours before. We work with them, specifying what we want and changing our menus to suit what they have. It seems simple but it’s not how the two sectors have traditionally worked. It’s also exciting and refreshing.

With teamwork we can develop the availability of local produce through- out our region. As customers, we should search for food that’s local, tell the suppliers what we’re looking for and work together to develop the market.

But if we act like our legislators, we’ll never succeed.