How Liverpool House Creates a Workplace Culture Worth Staying For

The second restaurant in the Joe Beef group of restaurants, there’s something about Liverpool House that makes you never want to leave.  And that goes for employees, too. 

But it wasn’t always that way.  “It was a very stressful, fast-paced environment,” says Liverpool House’s General Manager Marius Savignac Hervieux. “It was very much a culture of burning the candle at both ends.” 

Today, Liverpool House has built a culture that makes people want to stay, while maintaining the “spark of magic” that defined its early days. We spent an afternoon with Marius and James Graham-Simpkins, the group’s general manager, to find out what it takes. This is their advice. 

Cultivate creativity through passion and inspiration 

Something that comes across very clearly about the gang at Liverpool House is their genuine passion for everything food, drink and hospitality—not to mention all the bounty that Quebec has to offer. Their passion and enthusiasm is contagious, and the whole team is infected. “You can’t just teach someone to be creative,” says James. “It’s cultivated from an immersive process of being around people that really love the food, the culture, eating and drinking and creating.”

Let staff flex their creative muscles

From its bright and cheery interior to its playful menu, Liverpool House is a far cry from the stiff-shirted supper clubs so often associated with fine dining. Its personality, an undeniable part of its appeal, developed organically and with the contributions of many of the staff. 

“We have an incredibly talented team of people that have been there for a very long time,” says James. “My main goal is to keep them happy, to keep them motivated and to provide them with certain freedoms and input. You want to change the cocktail list? Yeah, let’s talk about it, what do you think? Oh, that’s a great idea. Having that as opposed to people feeling afraid or uncomfortable expressing their ideas.”

 

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Make space for rest

“The first few years working at Liverpool House were especially hard,” says Marius, who started as a busser nearly a decade ago. “There was a kind of hero syndrome where everyone would really force themselves to give it their all and just power through.” But you know what they say—if you don’t pick a day to relax, your body will pick it for you. 

After six months of non-stop hustle, Liverpool House would have to shut down for weeks to give burned out staff a break. Today, with a little push from the pandemic, they’re doing things a little differently. “We’re starting to take an approach that’s a bit more friendly to work-life balance,” says Marius. “Taking vacations here and there, having a lighter schedule and just checking in to make sure everyone remains happy and healthy through it all.” 

 

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Automate the daily grind

Nobody likes working 16-hour days because reconciliation takes two hours and payroll takes all day. And today, with all the new technology available to us, it’s simply not necessary. When the group realized they’d outgrown their legacy systems, they adopted a modern point of sale system that would help them automate the more tedious elements of running the business. 

“My days off would be on Sunday and Monday,” says James. “But who works on Monday morning? It’s the bookkeepers going through all of the cashouts. And who do you think they called on Monday morning when something wasn’t balancing? I was like, ‘God, how do I get out of this and not deal with this anymore?’ And it was by modernizing our systems and plugging everything in.”

Coach and develop employees 

For better or worse, running a successful restaurant is a lot more than cooking great food and pouring great wine in a nice dining room. It’s also cleaning the grease traps and exhaust hoods and figuring out what to do when the toilet clogs on a busy Saturday night. 

“We have training modules for people so they can figure out how to troubleshoot problems, be nimble on their own and grow into more than just a chef or just a server,” explains James. “To grow into so much more than that, and just be more self-sufficient. It’s about showing them the things that they might not know, might not have asked, but at the end of the day will make them better at their jobs and better overall.” 

Liverpool House is powered by Lightspeed. Talk to one of our experts if your business needs a point of sale system that can scale with you.