20 years scaling QSRs: 3 strategies that still work in 2026 - Rob, Mission Coffee Works & Mouse Tail

Rob Hodges has spent twenty years growing other people's coffee and food brands. His Greggs sites were the first to sell a flat white. Thirty-six sites at Paul. Farmer J from two sites to nine, with a pandemic in the middle. Now he runs Mission Coffee Works and Mouse Tail, and he opened the Fenchurch Street site nine months ago surrounded by every specialty and high-street coffee brand you can name.

The whole episode comes back to the three ways to grow a cafe: get new customers through the door, get them spending more while they're there, get them back more often. Rob answers all three with what he's actually doing, and with numbers.

New customers: street sampling where the commuters leave the station, free coffee cards that annoyed the competition, pastry drops to the local offices, cupping events that fill the room with people who'd never been in.

Spend per head: a menu simplified in March, all milk drinks at one price, six sandwiches cut to three because three of them were doing 80% of the sales, and a breakfast deal he introduced to build the habit and then took away once it had. Click-and-collect orders spending 15% more than the counter. Twenty per cent growth in average transaction value, January to November.

Repeat business: over ten thousand customers on the app, visiting 2.3 times a week, and Agnes, who orders ahead at Canada Water because the queue isn't built for a wheelchair and her coffee is waiting when she gets there.

There's also a forty-eight hour pivot from four shut cafes to a meal-box delivery company in March 2020, and the picture of a coffee cup, marked up with VAT, wages and rates, that got a whole team behind the numbers.

Recorded at Mouse Tail, Fenchurch Street.

The Hospitality Builders is hosted by John Richardson of The Cafe Experts and Freddie Szydlowski of Embargo.

The Cafe Experts: thecafeexpert.com

Embargo: embargoapp.com

Mouse Tail Coffee: https://www.mousetailcoffee.com/

Six sites, a finance background, and a business that during COVID faced their biggest challenge and came back stronger. Baha of Alma on growing without losing what makes it good.

We recorded this at one of Alma's newer sites in King's Cross. Baha didn't start with six, and he didn't start here. He came into hospitality from finance, built through the 2018 dip and COVID's rock bottom, and treats the business with the numbers-first respect that background gives you.

His line lands early and stays with you: consistency matters more than creativity when you're running multiple sites. He's gone against the central-production trend and kept every site self-sufficient - harder, deliberate, and a choice he can defend with data. His latest site pushes closer to a full restaurant, the next step in a model he's still building. John and Baha get into how he tests, trials and scales back rather than betting big, why he won't grow for the sake of the numbers, and what "meaningful growth" actually means when you measure it by whether the brand's more respected, not just bigger.

Real operator, six sites, and the thinking behind them.

With John Richardson and Freddie Szydlowski.

When you're actually ready to open site two - and the two numbers that tell you, from someone who grew too fast and lost the lot.

John opened his first sites fast, because growth is exciting and the ego is loud. By twenty-nine it had cost him the business. This first episode is the argument he now makes to every owner itching to expand: most second sites shouldn't happen yet.

He and Freddie get into why your first five sites usually aren't one business at all - they're five experiments wearing the same logo - and why a buyer sees straight through that. The two numbers that actually say you're ready to grow: 15% EBITDA, and enough profit to pay yourself for three months even if you never walked through the door. And why the offer - what you're actually selling - is the first thing John changes with any client, before staff, before marketing, before a single new site.

No guest this week. Just the two of us, setting out what the show stands for.

First in a new series on building a hospitality business worth owning, with John Richardson and Freddie Szydlowski.

The Hospitality Builders - coming soon.

You can run a café for fifteen years, put every day of your life into it, and find at the end there's nothing to sell. You ran a business. You never built one. This show is about the other outcome.

John Richardson built the biggest sandwich business in Ireland by twenty-eight and lost it by twenty-nine. He did it again, and did it properly: restaurants, bars, cafés, chip shops, retail. Fifteen years as an owner-operator, close to a thousand people employed, and he sold every one of them. Twenty-one years since, advising some of the biggest names in the industry.

Freddie Szydlowski came up through operations at Joe & The Juice when it had four sites in the UK, on the floor long before he was anywhere near a laptop. He went on to run marketing for hospitality brands, then co-founded Embargo, which now sees inside three and a half thousand venues and the data behind how they operate.

Some episodes, we sit down with operators at different stages of growth. Some, it's just the two of us taking something apart. Either way it comes with a tool or a resource you can put straight into yours - and it's about how a hospitality business gets built and grown, not just run.

First episode lands soon. Follow now and you'll get it the day it drops.