Catering for all needs
Hard work and boundless energy have given Trentham-based Delicious a great start. The company has already sealed a staggering ten-year deal to provide catering services for visitors to Trentham Gardens, the Potteries’ leading tourist attraction and a venue that is synonymous with ‘quality’. Add to this flagship operation a burgeoning location catering service, plus several Business and Industry installations and you don’t need a Harvard MBA to conclude that Dominic has his hands full. However, when success caused the Delicious headcount to multiply, Dominic recognised that he had a problem.
‘We want this company to be quality driven’, Dominic said. ‘That means we want everything we do as an organisation to be top quality. We want to be seen as a solid, reliable supplier providing exceptional service, but we’re just as keen to be seen as a good employer – that’s the only way a business like Delicious can attract the calibre of personnel we need to ensure our growth continues.’
For Dominic, it’s all about laying the right foundations and when a business associate recommended a chat with Bibby Consulting & Support, ‘it was a no-brainer’.
Dominic Bowers - Managing Director of Delicious
‘We found ourselves with a workforce almost overnight and we didn’t even have a decent Contract of Employment’, he recalls. ‘We were very impressed with Bibby Consulting & Support from the start. They knew what our business was all about and they provided the solutions we needed, fast.’
First on the checklist were issues to do with legal compliance. The young company was vulnerable if the unthinkable, such as a workplace accident or a car crash happened. ‘Bibby Consulting & Support delivered Health and Safety policy documentation, administration and risk assessment help and advice’, Dominic said. ‘Within a week they’d delivered a ‘company manual’ that would have taken us a year to put together!
‘One priceless benefit of dealing with Bibby Consulting & Support is, in my opinion, the 24/7 helpline. It really is reassuring to know that in the event of any issue, day or night, we can call in an expert we trust if we need one.’
Dominic’s aim is for Delicious to be ‘lean and mean’ in management terms and his relationship with Bibby Consulting & Support will help that vision to be fulfilled. ‘We see Bibby Consulting & as a true business partner’, he said, ‘and we can see no reason why we would ever employ our own specialist to do the work that we can procure far more cost-effectively from them. That’s why we committed to a three-year contract with them.
‘To my mind, it’s about buying time and knowledge. It’s about ‘opportunity cost’ – Without Bibby Consulting & Support I’d be virtually desk-bound and that, at a time in the company’s development when it’s imperative that I’m out and about, meeting people, winning business and signing contracts.’
Dominic describes the cost of Bibby Consulting & Support’s services as ‘very sensible’ at just £250 per month. ‘It’s rare to find a genuine bargain’, he says, ‘but when I think about the cost of employing my own HR and Health and Safety Manager, two-hundred-and-fifty a month pales into insignificance.’
