Nominee Lucinda Woods Strategy and Business Development Director The Restaurant Group plc Category Emerging Leaders Nominator Lucinda Woods Strategy and Business Development Director The Restaurant Group plc
Emerging Leaders Nominator Information Salutation Ms First Name Lucinda Last Name Woods Title Strategy and Business Development Director Company/Organisation The Restaurant Group plc Company/Organisation Address 5-7 Marshalsea Road, London, SE1 1EP Country United Kingdom County / Postcode SE1 1EP City London Telephone +448 45 6125001 X Email lucinda.woods@gmail.com How did you hear about the Top 100 Awards? ●
Other
Other email from WXN
Nominee Information I am nominating myself ●
I am nominating myself
Salutation Ms LUCINDA WOODS
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First Name Lucinda Last Name Woods Title Strategy and Business Development Director Company/Organisation The Restaurant Group plc Company/Organisation Address 5-7 Marshalsea Road, London, SE1 1EP Country United Kingdom County / Postcode SE1 1EP Town London Telephone +448 45 6125001 X Email lucinda.woods@gmail.com Date of Birth (YYYY/MM/DD) 1983/11/08 Company/Organisation Website The Restaurant Group plc How many direct reports does the Nominee have? 4 How many indirect reports does the Nominee have? 2 To whom does the Nominee report? (Name, Title, Company) Andy McCue, CEO, The Restaurant Group plc Please provide a brief overview of the Nominee’s organisation (maximum 2500 characters, approximately 350 words) The Restaurant Group is a FTSE 250 plc and is a major player in the UK casual dining market operating more than 30 brands with over 500 restaurants, concessions and pubs across its divisions. With over 15,000 employees and serving over 36 million meals a year, the company runs well-known brands such Frankie and Benny’s, Chiquito, Coast to Coast, Filling Station, LUCINDA WOODS
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Garfunkel’s and Joe’s Kitchen, with a new brand, Firejacks launched in 2017. It is also a scaled digital business with more than 1.2m app downloads for its largest brand, Frankie and Benny's. In 2016, the Group achieved the following financial metrics: Revenue: £710.7m, EBITDA: £121.0m, PBT: £77.1m. 2016 was a challenging year for the business with three profit warnings in H1, precipitating the appointment of a new CEO, Andy McCue, in September 2016, in order to turnaround the business. The interim results presentation in 2017 demonstrated early signs of improved volume momentum in the key turnaround division. The entry criteria states that "Nominees must have been in their profession for a minimum of 3 years". While the nominee has only been at The Restaurant Group plc for 1 year, she has: a) been working for an organisation led by Andy McCue (who was also CEO of Paddy Paddy plc where she previously worked before following him to The Restaurant Group plc) for over 4 years b) been a Chartered Accountant (her profession), for over 8 years In addition, during 2017 she has also been Interim Chief Marketing Officer for over 7 months (covering a maternity leave) where she managed a much larger team (30 employees prior to restructuring), with at one point having 7 direct reports. During this time she also carried out her permanent role of Strategy and Business Development Director which is also CEO direct report. Her appointment to this role is set out in The Restaurant Group 2016 results presentation and annual report. Industry Type (Please select all relevant) ●
Retail
Nominee’s Company/Organisation Head Office Information Please check this box if the information below is the same as previously indicated ●
Please check this box if the information below is the same as previously indicated
Company/Organisation The Restaurant Group plc Address 5-7 Marshalsea Road, London, SE1 1EP Country United Kingdom County / Postcode SE1 1EP Town London
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Previous Nomination Information Has the Nominee previously won an Award? No
Category Questions Vision and Leadership I joined The Restaurant Group to work with the new CEO to turnaround the business. Over the last year, I have operated at pace leading the strategy team to recommend solutions and the marketing team to implement that vision. This required setting up an analytics function from scratch, and enabling a fundamental cultural shift in the company to a data driven organisation. In addition, as Interim Chief Marketing Officer, I restructured the marketing function within 2 months of joining and then led the team to change the way of working, centralising local marketing decisions, implementing a new discounting strategy and overhauling the approach toward menu design. I launched a new restaurant brand, Firejacks, a steak and burger concept celebrating meat, fire and friends, and defined the digital strategy. I have also led the rebrand of the company’s largest brand Frankie and Benny’s, due to land in the restaurants in early 2017. I have also demonstrated strong leadership capability during my time at Paddy Power, developing a multi-channel proposition to link up the Retail and Online experience which resulted in new product being released and the divisions working much more collaboratively to deliver for the customer. I also played a key role in the transformative merger between Paddy Power and Betfair to create one of the largest online businesses in Europe. For me, a critical part of taking an organisation to the next level is developing talent on my teams, and providing a stimulating and inspiring working environment, and opportunities such as presenting to the Board or Executive Committee, or stretch assignments. I actively encourage people working for me to challenge and learn. I have also had success in hiring people to work again for me when moving roles, and even organisations. At Harvard Business School, I was surrounded by visionary classmates and professors, and have seen the outstanding things that organisations can achieve. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn off them and I am ambitious to continue to apply these learnings to whatever organisation I am in. Authentic Leadership In both The Restaurant Group and Paddy Power I have enabled significant change through influencing peers to change their way of working, and even the decisions that they were due to make. In Paddy Power, I led the group wide budget process, interfacing between finance and the business, which required outstanding stakeholder management through all levels of the organisation to get a result, gaining buy in by offering up solutions and persuading P&L owners where to give and take. In The Restaurant Group, a key objective when I joined was to enable cultural change in terms of LUCINDA WOODS
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how decisions were made which required demonstrating the value of using data and customer insight in order to gain respect from peers. I invested heavily in building relationships, and showing peers how it would help them to be more successful. Key to this was also having conviction about the approach to generate confidence both from peers but also the wider organisation. Leading organisations through change, particularly at pace, is very challenging but I have found that critical to this and being able to demonstrate a strong sense of purpose is having good selfawareness to understand how people are adapting to change and how one’s actions can affect that. It is crucial to be decisive and demonstrate self-belief to give teams the reassurance that the plan is right. In order to do this I set out clear plans for the Marketing and Strategy teams, held regular team meetings, but then also critically listened to people to make sure they were clear on the objectives and bought into the plan. Contributing to the community is vital as organisations are not able to function without the communities in which they exist. As a result through the Marketing function in The Restaurant Group, we have supported a number of charities, launching in 2017 a partnership with “Together for Short Lives�. From a purely personal standpoint, my most significant personal contribution to the community, and probably my single greatest achievement overall, is my 21 month old son. My aim is to bring him up to make a positive difference in the world, and care for those around him. Given my travel schedule (commuting weekly to London), I believe that currently the best investment of my time outside of work to contribute to a better future for our community is to teach my son how to have this kind of impact. Innovative Thinking Continuous improvement and learning has been central to my career path to date, starting immediately after university where I joined KPMG having never previously done any business or accounting, and succeeded in ranking fourth in Ireland in my final exams. Aiming to learn from the best and the brightest, I took a risk to apply to Harvard Business School where I was fortunate to be admitted, and had my mind opened to different ways of working and thinking. I was also accepted through a competitive process to enter Michael Porter's elective class with the semester term paper published on his website. My ultimate aim is to be in a position to lead an organisation to achieve outstanding results. I have actively sought to put myself into positions to build that expertise. Firstly from understanding multiple companies through my time in audit and corporate finance. Secondly through a variety of roles in Paddy Power plc and The Restaurant Group plc. In particular I moved to the job at The Restaurant Group plc straight after maternity leave, starting as Interim CMO, having never previously worked in the food sector, in a marketing function or in a turnaround. I did, and continue to do this, commuting from Dublin to London (I currently spend 3 nights / 4 days a week in London and 4 nights / 3 days a week in Dublin) as I LUCINDA WOODS
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believe my baby and husband have a better quality of life in Dublin. I have endeavoured to combine being a mother, wife and business woman in an extremely challenging way in the pursuit of continuous learning and improvement, and also jumping out of my comfort zone, taking a risk to further my aim. While there have been successes along the way, I have also had to take risks, such as in product innovation, some of which worked and some not. However, to succeed sometimes you have to fail along the way but critical to fail fast and fail forward. I also found it invaluable participating in the WXN Wisdom Mentoring Program in 2015. The learning through the structured sessions and from peers was hugely beneficial but even more so the time with my mentor, Maria Smith, who I have an ongoing relationship with. The mission of Harvard Business School is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world - I am aiming to do just that through pushing myself to take risks and continuously improve until I do.
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