Everything’s gone Greene’s

Greene’s of Maynooth, famous for serving up fine food to both locals and visitors to the town, with its ajoining deli doing a roaring trade selling gourmet takeaway food and coffee to passers by, has gone through quite a transformation in the last three years. Set by the picturesque castle, it’s now a busy restaurant, having once been a famous diner for fries with the previous propetitors.

The man responsible for this local success story is Alan Morrissey, and we were delighted to sit down with him to find out the secrets to his success, and his ambitious plans for the future. Hailing from Waterford, Alan has been in the service industry since he was knee high. “I’ve always been around business and customers,” he explains. “My earliest memories include me sleeping under a counter in one of the family businesses!” After completing a marketing degree in the nineties, he spent a few years working for Guinesses, Proctor & Gamble and Eircom, where he was part of the senior management team up until 2006.

“I joined Eircom in 2000 when they were going through a massive period of growth and transition,” and it was, he says, a case of being in the right place at the right time. “I got in there at the early stages of business growth and had 8 sales pepole working for me. Within 4 weeks I found myself in a new job in a new business division with 45 sales people working for me. This continued to grow and I found myself at director level within a couple of years.”

The practical experiecene of managing sales and dealing with profit and loss accounts and also completing an MBA, proved to be vital experience when he switched careers. Always attracted to the restaurant industry, it was in 2007 he spotted an opportunity in Maynooth for a good value mid-market restaurant in a great location, and together with wife Julie, decided to take the plunge.

Since opening its doors in 2008, Greene’s has gone from strength to strength and they have continually reinvested profits in improving the offering. In 2010 they saw a 24% increase in sales year on year and this year another round of reinvestment paid for an expansion of the seating capacity, a new entrance and a new look and feel. So far business has been up on last year in the region of 15-18%; no mean feat in an market contending with supplier increases and rising business costs and increased price pressure. In total, Greene’s has 90 covers, and there is generally one sitting at lunchtime, rising to two and a half during weekend evenings. Such a high turnover needs a fairly structured environment, the importance of which Alan presses onto his 41- strong staff.

“We have a chef’s meeting on a Tuesday morning, a management meeting on a Thursday and the duty manager and floor manager brief the team on a daily basis. We also have a regular training programme for staff every three months, dealing with customer service and health and safety issues. It’s can sometimes be laborious but for us its one of the key ingredients to success in business.”

In addition to his father and his wife Julie, Alan cites his mother as being one of the main influencers of his career.“My mum was always a great believer in customer service. To this day she calls me to tell me if a comment about Greene’s - positive or negative - has been posted on the internet! She’s 70 and still keeps me on my toes!” And listening to Alan talk about issues in the kitchen, it’s easy to see that this attention to customer service comes naturally to him.

Recently, Greene’s recruited a team of new chefs amongst them some from a Michelin restaurant, and understandably, some teething problems arose, resulting in a couple of services with an ‘unacceptable’ wait time and a higher than normal number of returned dishes to the kitchen. “We don’t expect any to come back,” he says, “but one evening five did. After a bad service on Friday evening, the next day I had the rather disappointing task of phoning those customers to apologise for their experience, and if I hadn’t done it, one of my team would have.”This reflects what Alan says is the ethos of the business: ‘communication’. “I’m a big believer in communication and there’s no such thing as no in the business. We try and accomodate every request within reason and if we can’t do it, we explain why. Last weekend we had our busiest day of the year with no returns to the kitchen and zero customer complaints.This is the standard we strive for every night and every service.”

Looking to the future, it seems there are big plans in store for the Greene’s brand. “We have a lot more to add to The Deli, I believe that it will be an ideal brand and format to role out in multiple locations and is ripe to franchise in the future, we are also setting up a production kitchen in the Maynooth business campus where we can prep food and where we hope to produce packaged product range to sell to the retail and catering trade. Initially two more full time jobs will be created out of this.”

Alan also wants to see more Greene’s restaurants: “over the next four to five years, ideally in Kildare, Meath and Dublin.” Buidling a business is not always easy, but, “there is a massive sense of fulfilment when you see something become a success that you have conceptualised, moulded and managed, I keep pushing forward. If I have a vision or a plan, I don’t give up,” he says.

Certainly whatever happens to Greene’s Business in the future, he has come a long way since sitting under the counter in the Waterford store all those years ago!