Serial Griller in Ōakura has quickly become an iconic Taranaki burger joint.
Owners Dave and Keren Kurth started out with a classic American-style cheeseburger food truck in Coromandel for a few years, before making the move to Ōakura on the Taranaki coast.
They set up shop in an old train carriage, creating a quirky outdoor setting with great food - perfect for a beach-side town.
While they had the basic recipe for a successful business, Keren admits they never spent a lot of time focusing on the mechanics of how it was all run.
“We always felt like we were winging it,” she says. “We’d figured out a way of cooking that worked for us, so we just stuck to that. We didn’t really look at the finances or margins of what we were doing, it was just a case of cooking burgers we knew were good and that’s about it.”
Connecting with their mentor
Venture Taranaki linked the pair up with mentor Chris Robinson, a local hospitality veteran with experience working all over the world. He was exactly what Dave and Keren were looking for.
“Chris had worked with all sorts of restaurants and burger chains in the UK and we had a lot in common. It sat well with us and what we wanted to do,” Keren says.
“He was a good sounding board to run ideas past, and every time we’d meet we could talk about different ideas and things we could try. It kept us accountable too. When it’s just us, it’s easy to go with the flow and not get things done, but if we spoke about something, he’d come back to ask how it was going so it forced us to follow through a bit more.”
Chris gave Dave and Keren spreadsheet templates to keep track of their business finances better. He helped to build out a more sophisticated approach to managing costs, understanding margins on different products and recognising what they needed to be doing behind the scenes so things worked better in the kitchen.
A big part of that was having a better lifestyle themselves. Keren says Chris pushed them to actually take more time off, and look to delegate better.
“We were too involved in everything and working all the time - and also working in the kitchen, so we couldn’t focus on running the business as well,” Keren says. “It’s hard to pull back yourself, so it was really good to have someone else recognise that and force us to change the way we were doing it.
“We’d tried to make it so we didn’t work on Tuesdays, but it was so easy to say, ‘I just need to go and do this thing quickly and that’s all’. But you also have the guilt that you’re not spending enough time at home together with our family.
“Now, we’ve hired someone who will eventually run the kitchen. We have two nights a week at home with the kids and we value being fully away from the business on Tuesdays. We definitely do feel the difference; we’re less burnt out and more able to draw a line that separates our business lives and our personal lives.”
“I have always enjoyed helping others and passing on experiences and knowledge, especially when I have a real interest in what that person is trying to achieve,” Chris said. “Dave and Keren have become a lot more confident in what is realistic to achieve, and I have really enjoyed watching their business evolve.”
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