Posted: December 9th, 2014

Report for James Bance (see Case Study: Bampton Manor Hotel) on the internal business environment, the proposed strategy and its implementation

Report for James Bance (see Case Study: Bampton Manor Hotel) on the internal business environment, the proposed strategy and its implementation

Order Description

a) Introduction
This should be a brief introduction which sets the scene and purpose of the report.
b) Part 1: Internal Analysis
? Marketing Issues
? Human Resource Issues (including organisation culture and structure)
? Operations Issues
? Financial Issues
c) Part 2: Proposed Strategy
? Taking account of your Internal and External analysis, set out proposals for the strategic direction of the business. This should include your proposed “target market” and a proposed “positioning statement” that takes account of competitors in Oxfordshire.
d) Part3:Implementation
? Identify key changes that will be required within the business to enable the
proposed strategy to be successful.

Case Study: Bampton Manor Hotel
Note: “Bampton” exists – it is a real small town in Oxfordshire. However, the “Bampton Manor Hotel”, and the characters described in this case study, do not exist and are purely fictional.
Between leaving school and coming to Oxford Brookes University you got a summer job working at the Bampton Manor Hotel, a boutique hotel in West Oxfordshire with a fine dining restaurant. Your mainly served tables, but also helped in the kitchen, the bar and carrying out other tasks as required which meant that you had worked in the office on administration and on reception and room service – even carrying out simple maintenance tasks on occasion.
On your last day the owner of the hotel, James Bance, asked you to join him for a chat over a cup of coffee in his office. Mr Bance said he was extremely happy with your work, singling out the excellent relationships that you developed with customers and staff, as well as your willingness to take on a wide range of duties, and that all the managers had said what an asset you were to the hotel. You said that you enjoyed working in this family-run business and liked the variety of being able to take on different jobs. As the conversation developed you told Mr Bance that you would be studying Business at Oxford Brookes and he started asking questions about your impressions about the Bampton Manor Hotel. You said that you thought it was great that the hotel was really trying to deliver a very high quality service, especially in the restaurant. You also said how friendly everyone was, but you did say that business seemed very quiet during the week. Mr Bance encouraged you to say more, and you found yourself admitting that when it was busy on Fridays and at the weekends it was often rather chaotic as staff struggled to cope with the pressure and that the extra temporary staff brought in to work at weekends often did not know what to do or who was in charge of which aspects of the business.
Rather than being cross with you for being critical of the business, Mr Bance told you that it was helpful to have an “external perspective” from someone who was not a permanent member of staff. He said that the employed staff often seemed afraid to express their views, while discussions with the other members of the family that were involved in the business often “went round and round” without reaching a conclusion. He wanted to think about the development of the business in the long-term – while the business was “reasonably successful” at the moment he wondered whether they had the right strategy for the development of the business.
To your amazement, Mr Bance offered to pay you an additional two week’s wages if you prepared a “consultancy report” setting out options and proposals which you would produce by the end of the year. He said he would use your report as an input to help him think through options for the future which he wanted to devote time to after the Christmas rush. It was agreed that you could arrange to come back and interview members of staff and have access to financial information about the Hotel.
Over the following weeks you carried out research into the external environment and analysed the key functions of the hotel. You also took notes from your interviews with key staff (see below). Now you are about to start work finalising your report. You carefully review the notes you took from the staff interviews …
Scenario
James Bance – Managing Director and Finance Director
•    •? 58 years old. Aims to “retire gradually”. “Succession planning” is one of the things he wants to consider (no firm plans yet).
•    •? He is Founder and Managing Director of “Bampton Manor Hotel Ltd.”, the company that runs the hotel. He holds 60% of the shares of the company (his wife, Jane Bance holds 20% of the shares and his children (Fred and Jill) hold 10% each.
•    •? He takes responsibility for overall financial management of the business (he employs a local accountancy company to provide formal accounts, and financial records are kept by staff in the Administration Office).
•    •? He bought Bampton Manor in 2005 and, following conversion work to the building, it had its first customers a year later.
•    •? Before launching “Bampton Manor Hotel Ltd” he had an international career as a senior executive for a multinational oil company.
•    •? Until 2011 the hotel was known as a “wedding hotel” because that was the market he had been advised by friends in the industry to target. However, he and his wife became frustrated by the nature of the business – dealing with “mass catering”, late night parties and drunken guests was not his dream when he opened the hotel. In 2011 the hotel was refurbished and a new Head Chef was appointed who had experience managing Michelin starred restaurants. Since then the hotel has been marketed as a “boutique country hotel with a fine dining restaurant”. He is much more comfortable being associated with this type of business – this was why he had given up his career in the oil industry, to have something that was his and that he could be proud of.
•    •? The restaurant has now received “three rosettes” from the AA, which demonstrated the “outstanding” quality of the restaurant, but James was clear that the “rosettes” does not give the same reputation as a Michelin “star” would.
•    •? He knows that Fred would like to build a new wing to increase the capacity of the hotel with more bedrooms, but James said he was worried that the hotel as a whole and the restaurant in particular would not be able to deliver the same level of quality if they increased numbers.
•    •? One dream for the hotel that James had not been able to develop was to use the area where Fred wanted to build the extension to develop a “kitchen garden”, or even develop a small farm with cows, pigs and chickens – he felt that this could another dimension to what makes Bampton Manor special and was something he had always wanted as part of his hotel when he left the oil industry.
Fred Bance – Operations Manager
•    •? Son of James Bance. 28 years old.
•    •? Fred had studied politics at university, but worked at Bampton Manor during holiday
periods since it first opened. After university had looked for work away from the family business. He found that his experience working at “Bampton Manor” meant that he was able to get jobs in the hotel industry (though that had not been his intention originally). He had spent five years working in the head office for a very large international hotel chain but got made redundant during the last recession, and returned to work at “Bampton Manor” believing he could help make the business more profitable – the idea was that his return would enable his parents to reduce their workload, though he was not sure that this had happened in practice.
•    •? He thought that business could make a much higher return given the assets that the company owned, but he thought that the current business model was not the best – it was difficult to compete with other high-end establishments in the area. He felt that the company could be much more profitable if it reduced prices, decreased costs
Notes from Interviews
(especially in the restaurant) and built an extension (he had been told that they could
get planning permission) for an extra wing to increase the number of guests.
•    •? Fred confirmed that the hotel currently has 10 rooms (all individually designed double rooms with en suite bathrooms, some with “four poster” beds), bar and lounge (both with open fires), a restaurant and a large “conservatory” which can be used to extend the size of the restaurant (making it possible to cater for up to 140 people) or for
meetings or other functions.
•    •? James said he was responsible for the overall functioning of the business – including
reservations, maintenance, purchasing, managing suppliers etc. He was supported by the admin team. He was also responsible for staff recruitment, but that this was difficult – he wanted to use proper recruitment processes, but he found his Father often offered jobs to friends or to people who had worked at Bampton Manor before without consulting him, and when they did interview for staff to work in the restaurant Christophe simply insisted on choosing who should be appointed based on his “instinct” rather than on any agreed selection criteria.
•    •? Since he became Operations Manager at Bampton Manor he introduced a new integrated computer system, a simpler version of the one used at his previous employer, which managed reservations and finance (including purchasing). He complained that the Head Chef would not use the systems he introduced – James was not sure whether this was because he was not good at using IT, or whether it was because he thought the system would be used to “check-up” on him.
•    •? James has also been questioning the Head Chef over rising costs in the restaurant but has been told that “good food costs money and that’s all there is to it”.
•    •? James said he hoped my report would lead to some change – “if Dad does not agree to some sensible plans for growing the business and making it more profitable I will go back to working for a big company – it is so frustrating”.
Jill Bance – Sales and Marketing Manager
•    •? Daughter of James Bance. 26 years old.
•    •? Jill had studied marketing at university and had always wanted to work at Bampton
Manor. She said “I love working in a small family business – it provides a quality of life that I know I could not get anywhere else; it’s such a reassuring environment and we all try hard to get on”. She returned to “Bampton Manor” straight after university and took responsibility for sales and marketing (she said “I love the job because I like looking after the website and designing brochures, and it suits me because I am not very good at numbers and finance.”)
•    •? She said that she did not have any set routine for her work. She tended to help out in the office or reception when they were busy and fitted in her “proper job” when she was less busy.
•    •? She likes the change to “fine dining” from being a “wedding hotel” because it meant she could develop much more “high end” promotional material and the guests were much “posher”.
•    •? She said Fred kept asking her for “projections” of sales and asked her to look at different target markets and alternative business models, but she said she always refused because she was happy with the way things were – “the important thing is to keep the “Bampton Manor brand” that Dad had spent so much time developing”.
•    •? She has updated the website and produced several different brochures for the hotel and the restaurant and increased spending on adverts for the local newspapers because she enjoys experimenting. “I love designing and just trying things out. It’s expensive but I am sure it works. I know my father says revenue has started to increase, so it must be working-mustn’t it?”
•    •? She likes the printed brochures because she thinks they “create the right image” (they use a local printer who they have known for ages to produce the brochures that Jane designs) – but they are expensive to produce and they create real headaches
because it is difficult to keep the brochure up-to-date with current prices and offers
and so it often needs reprinting and short print runs.
•    •? She said that she assumed that the main marketing tool was the website, but did not
keep any data to analyse this. Over the last two years Jill has made much more use of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but she did not really know how effective these channels were in generating business, and when she is busy they tend not to update them regularly.
•    •? Sites like Trip Advisor were difficult to control. They had a 91% satisfaction level on Trip Advisor, with most people saying that the hotel was “excellent” in all categories of quality on the site. But there were some negative reviews – some of these complain about prices (it is not cheap!), but more worryingly some categorised the service as “poor” – when Jill looked at them they always related to when things had gone wrong during busy periods – customers saying they waited too long to be served, laundry not being ready when promised and even one occasion when guests were told that breakfast would be available from 7:00am but the staff had been told to open the restaurant at 7:30am (not surprisingly the guests were furious about having to wait for the restaurant to open when they had to get to the airport for their flight home). There were also some reviews which said that “problems” were compounded by staff being rude, unhelpful or seemingly unable to help because they did not seem to know what they were doing (Jill said when she investigated these cases she found that it was normally “new” or “temporary” staff that were involved). Jill said that she always checked out what was the cause of negative reviews, but there was no process for reporting “incidents” with customers so this could be quite time consuming and caused staff to get really defensive and blame “management” or the customers for being too demanding. She did try to introduce a log to report “incidents” but she found that, despite her “nagging”, incidents still went unreported.
•    •? She says the “typical” guests were middle aged professional couples who are celebrating a special event (birthdays, anniversaries etc). There were some business customers who used the hotel to accommodate and entertain VIP guests, and a few foreign tourists. This was very different from when they were a known as a “wedding hotel” when they had a great reputation which was spread by word-of-mouth (people who had been guests at one wedding would often recommend us to people they knew). Now it was much more difficult to identify who the “target market” is or how or why they chose this hotel.
•    •? On both weekend and weekday evenings the restaurant guests consisted of about 50% hotel guests (staying overnight) and 50% people who were just using the restaurant. The hotel rooms were normally fully occupied at weekends and during public holidays but the hotel would often be only 25% full during the week during the winter and 75% full during the week in the summer which she knew caused financial and other issues but thought that was probably the way it was for this type of hotel business,
•    •? “Restaurant only” only guests tend to come from the small towns and villages in the area, she guesses at around a 40 mile radius. Hotel guests tend to come from further away – some will want to combine a stay with a visit to Oxford, or visit Bampton as part of a tour around the Cotswolds or to visit “Shakespeare country”. She has even heard some guests mention that they wanted to visit Bampton as it is the location for filming the village scenes in the TV series “Downton Abbey”.
•    •? There was quite a lot of competition in Oxfordshire area with a number of other “high end” hotel/restaurants.
•    •? Jill said there was often talk about running special events and promotions. Fred wanted the hotel to be kept full during the week, but Jill was worried that if they dropped prices too much or ran things for more “down market” customers, then the high quality “brand” would be tarnished and this would impact their core business. Anyway she thought she was busy enough as it was. If anything she thinks they should increase prices to reflect the image she thinks the hotel and restaurant should
have.
•    •? Jill said she was really worried about whether the business was taking account of
issues relating to the environment. Christophe insisted in using the “best” ingredients, and often used ingredients from France or further away – when she talked about using local produce from “ethical” or “organic” suppliers he always said the kitchen is my kitchen” and would not listen – he even laughed when I said we should use ““fairtrade” coffee and chocolate. The fact that Christophe insisted on using live lobster and, even worse, foie gras, really upset her and she was convinced that adopting a more “ethical” stance would not only be the right thing to do, but also good for business as she thought there would be a market for customers.
•    •? She said that she was surprised that I had been asked to produce a report for her father, saying “We know our customers well – we’ve been working in the hotel business for a while now so I don’t see why we need outside input”.
Jane Bance – (does not have a named role)
•    •? Jane said she used to be responsible for running the business in partnership with her husband – they did it all together. She was really pleased that she no longer had to work full time (and more!) now that the children had returned.
•    •? She did not have a formal role, but did spend a lot of time “problem solving” – staff tended to come to her when they did not know what to do or if they got contradictory instructions from other managers. In particular, she spent more time than she would like to working with the admin staff (though this was not her job).
•    •? She said that she found the arguments between her children, and the endless discussions about the future, very frustrating. She tried not to get involved in these (although ended up talking to people in the background and picking the pieces!) but looked forward to the time when she and her husband could “retire” and they could have more time for themselves – she said it sometimes seemed that her husband was working harder than ever.
•    •? She said “I have not said this to the others, but sometimes I think the best thing would be to sell to a bigger chain and then give the children some money to set up on their own. This business does not seem to be making us happy in the way that we hoped.”
Christophe Bellerose – Head Chef
•    •? Christophe said that he did not have much time to talk to me as he was very busy.
•    •? He said that he came to the hotel to transform it to a leading Michelin starred restaurant. This he could do, if only “the family” would let him do things his way. He has significantly increased the variety on the menu and the range and level of stocks held. After much battling with family members he had got more investment in the kitchen, dining and storage facilities. He has been keen to buy the best ingredients
whatever the costs – “you cannot put a price on good food” he says.
•    •? He said he was completely in charge of all aspects of the restaurant: hiring and firing
staff, purchasing raw materials, designing the menu etc.
•    •? He said he liked James and Jane, but that they gave too much control to the children.
o He said Jill was “alright” at producing marketing materials, but really they should employ a specialist design and PR company for this work.
o Fred was always going on about “efficiency” and wanted reports and projections – he did not understand that “gastronomy is creativity” and cannot be managed by numbers and documented processes.
o While Jane was very nice, she was much too soft and ends up just trying to keep everybody happy, “she undermines my authority in the kitchen – just yesterday she was comforting a new member of my staff just because they got upset when I shouted at them”.
•?He has no idea what the overall finances of the hotel or restaurant looked like and was not interested anyway – “when we get our Michelin Star we will be both rich and famous – then I could even become a “TV Chef”, which would do more for marketing than any of this social media nonsense”.
Chloe Jones – Receptionist/Administrator
•    •? Chloe said that she worked in the Admin Office. Most of the work was finance-related – processing payments and invoices.
•    •? She had only been there for 6 months. She liked the rest of the staff – everyone was really nice, though Christophe was scary at first (now she knew him better she actually found that she liked him a lot and realised he was just very focused on his job). The problem was that she did not know who her boss was – lots of people came to her asking for information in different formats, and while the new computer system was good it was not used properly. She said that she found that most problems could be sorted by talking to Jane who was always very calm.
•    •? She felt there was a lack of organisation in the business and if anything this was getting worse. She felt he lack of clarity was only helping to increase inefficiency. Sometimes they would be overstaffed for example when different people had organised for staff to come in.
•    •? She would like to develop a proper system of financial reporting, but felt it was not really her job to suggest such a thing as she was not a manager and was not a member of the family – she knew they liked to make the big decisions themselves.
•    •? The current average charge for a room and breakfast for single person was £140 (weekdays) or £195 (weekends). For two people sharing the prices were £180 and £225 respectively.
•    •? The staff in the business are:
o the four members of the Bance family (though Jane is supposed to be part-
time, she tends to work a full week),
o Christophe and three permanent staff in the kitchen
o Chloe (full time) works with two permanent part-time receptionists/
administrators
o A part-time maintenance worker who also looks after the garden and two part-
time cleaners.
There are other part-time temporary staff who are brought in for busy periods – at times there are as many temporary staff as full time staff working at the hotel.
•?Chloe said that she thought there was not enough focus on marketing the hotel to foreign tourists – “what about all those Chinese tourists that come to Bicester Village?”. She said that before she came to Bampton Manor she had worked for a small “chain” of hotels that were each owned separately, but shared marketing and other overheads – “that seemed to be quite an efficient way of running things”.

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