Simon Rhatigan has drawn on his own colourful background to make his hotel an award-winner. Julie Hayes went in search of his secret.
Simon Rhatigan is a positive injection of energy into the otherwise serene environment of the Feversham Arms Hotel. Travelling over hill and moor to get here, the little market town of Helmsley feels like an escape destination in itself.
Once inside the AA Hotel of the Year, even before you visit the Verbena Spa, the atmosphere is calm. It was too cold for a swim in the secluded courtyard in the centre of the complex, but respite was found in a cosy sitting room next to the bar, with bookshelves and local art adorning the walls. As Rhatigan sweeps through the place, staff are busy straightening flowers behind him. He says he drives his employees nuts.
Rhatigan’s personality is embedded in the place, a trait he has seen before while working for the celebrity chef Raymond Blanc as managing director of Le Manoir Aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire. The job influenced Rhatigan’s management style. “All organisations take on the characteristics of their principal personality in the end,” he says. “The way we presented it in PR terms you would think Raymond cut the grass, cooked the food and made the beds, and rightly so because he’s the heart and soul of the thing.”
Rhatigan got the hospitality bug from his father, who came from Ireland at the age of 14 to work at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds. Rhatigan’s first hotel job was during a gap year before university, where he had intended to study European history but went into hospitality instead.
He got his first position as a general manager when he was 26. “I was far too young and made lots of mistakes but you learn from that,” he says. “I was ambitious, but a bit arrogant in the way people who don’t realise how little they know are. The industry was expanding, with a boom in country house hotels. People were getting sucked up through the structure, and if you were able to swim you were able to get through it. I was a beneficiary.”
The boom propelled Rhatigan to his next position as general manager of the Wood Hall Hotel, nearWetherby. Then he got a call from a recruitment agency, which was interviewing for a general manager at Le Manoir. “I happened to be going to London anyway so dropped in there on the way back. They had told Le Manoir I was their wild card and they probably wouldn’t like me – I wasn’t a conventional guy and much younger than the other candidates.”
But the punt paid off. Rhatigan says Le Manoir was different to any other place he’d ever been to or seen, charging £22 for a bowl of soup even 15 years ago. Blanc did two television series during Rhatigan’s time at the hotel and the experience gave him no end of interesting encounters.
“One evening I recognised a small man who brushed past me and said: ‘Good evening. How are you?’ I thought I knew him from somewhere, but it turned out he was King Hussain of Jordan.” The business was part-owned by Richard Branson, who sometimes held meetings at his home.
Rhatigan launched the Brasserie Blanc chain, which now has a restaurant in Leeds. The opening of the first Brasserie Blanc in Oxford was “bedlam”. He says: “Branson came and we had to tie the door handles together to stop the customers getting in. People queued outside and were crushed, and the police had to push people back like at a pop concert.”
A few years after leaving Le Manoir, The Feversham Arms came up while Rhatigan was looking to buy a hotel in York. He says: “York is an easy place to run a hotel. Some quite bad hotels make a lot of money easily because they can’t expand supply to meet demand.” He thought it would be a great place to run a quality hotel, but in the property boom, assets of any size were being gobbled up by residential developers or organisations with more cash than he could put in. Then in 2003 a business associate alerted him to the quiet sale of the Feversham Arms.
Rhatigan developed the business incrementally, getting the rooms up to standard. “Anytime we were in danger of making any real money we would spend it on improving the place,” he says. “We were fortunate and organised funding at the right time.”
But the looming recession made it a scary place. “The news in the media was so bad I didn’t know which wrist to cut first. We had put everything into the business. Every time you turned on the TV you’d think world capitalism had come to an end and there would be no banks and no business left. It was going to be the deepest and worst recession anyone could remember. But we’ve done all right.”
Rhatigan has cut out any cost that isn’t absolutely necessary. “You just have to work hard. Sometimes in business you would like to work clever, but you just have to work hard because it achieves the result,” he says. “Even if the market had diminished in total value, we thought we could have a greater proportion of that market and it worked well. We’ve done better than we thought over the past year. I can barely believe it’s the same place.”
Rhatigan paid £700,000 for the business, which had 17 rooms when he bought it in 2003. It is now a 33-bedroom hotel, and he launched the “missing piece”, the Verbena Spa, in October 2008. In 2009 the business turned over £3.2m and Rhatigan expects this to grow to more than £3.5m in 2010.
He has no plans to create an army of hotels, though. “I’d never want there to be Feversham Arms Leeds or Feversham Arms Sheffield,” he says. “That’s not what it’s about. Sophisticated consumers who spend what ours spend are past brands and would rather buy individual products, so it’s not about making it physically bigger but making it a better business.”
And a better business can rake in a better profit, he says. “If you get it right, it’s great for the customers, but you can also charge £40 for a meal you would ordinarily charge £32 for. That £8 is your profit opportunity if you get the experience right. With the rooms, you can charge £500 a night, rather than £400 a night – an additional profit opportunity if you know how to run the business well enough.”
Rhatigan is confident that consumers will pay for it. He says today’s savvy consumer will choose what they spend their money on carefully. Previous models showing that customers buying high-end products will do so in all markets are out of date, he says. “They may stay in a fivestar hotel in Paris, but catch a £15 flight, while others might live in modest houses and spend their cash on designer clothes.”
It boils down to providing a quality experience that customers want to pay for, and this quest looks likely to keep Rhatigan occupied. “You’ve got to have a culture where you want to make improvements,” he adds. “If it was just about running the busines, I would get bored. It’s all about the future and growing it.”
Also in: February 2010
-
Eye on the pound
The time is now for manufacturers in the right products and markets.
-
Lose the elephant
Unprecedented corporate restructuring took place in a range of sectors in 2009, and the turnaround specialists are about to get busier as deals struck at the height of the boom come up for review.