CHAPTER 10
Supermarkets get saucy
“Who are these bloody Greeks?”
That, says Perry Halamandaris, is what the developers asked when they had only opened five or six Steers outlets. “Nobody knew who we were.” Neither was their English of the Oxbridge variety and it was very hard to convince people that they weren’t a fly-by-night concern.
It would be a year or three before the tables would turn, but boy, how they would turn.
In the meantime, John Halamandres and the Halamandaris brothers weren’t resting on the laurels of their early successes or the nostalgia of the bygone era of George Halamandres. Apart from helping those first franchisees to settle in, they still had their own outlets to run. From time to time, they opened company-owned restaurants too.
It was becoming necessary to get extra help in those restaurants, because soon John and the brothers would be so busy that they couldn’t run around spatula in hand in the kitchens any more.
Paulos Mthethwa, a quality assurance manager at Famous Brands, was appointed as supervisor of the 16 members of staff in Sandton in 1985, and he remembers it like this: “Fanis is a good trainer, but he wants the job to be done. It wasn’t easy, because he was strict, but fair. He taught me a lot of things, such as how to make the products, how to be a manager and how to talk to people; he is a good leader.”
The new supervisor had to do a stock inspection at 11am every day, and of course he had to keep an eye on cost-effectiveness: “You have to peel a potato thinly, otherwise you waste money.” As for Fanis’s Mediterranean management style, Paulos says: “The Greeks shout, but they aren’t cross.”
Fanis says it is extremely important not to have anyone call you “sir” in the workplace. He says as you walk into a franchise, you can immediately sense what the staff’s relationship is with the owner by reading their body language. “If there are long faces, you know there is trouble.”
That is the kind of knowledge that was already coming in handy, and would become more necessary as more franchises opened. But first it was time for a little domestic reshuffling.
“When the brothers opened the Steers in Sandton it blew the lid off. That was the one,” said Joe Hamilton, their partner on the sauce manufacturing side. “We then had a bit of a name.” That was the magic he and John had been waiting for when they were contemplating a new distribution channel for the sauces. Now they were ready to climb the Mount Everest of getting their product onto supermarket shelves.
At first, they sold through the Boksburg Hyperama, and then other Hyperamas followed. “When the big outlets like Eastgate opened, the supermarkets could see we were moving money,” recalled Joe. They did their own deliveries of the 15 salad dressings and sauces, and before long they were distributing nationally.
“It was extremely difficult to get into Spar, but they managed that too,” remembers Peter.
Of course they were still manufacturing sauce and salad dressings for the franchisees too. “Volume-wise franchise-business was still the biggest, but in money terms retail was bigger,” remembered Joe.
The volumes were increasing to such an extent that the manufacturing kitchen was moved to larger premises in Main Street, Jeppe – which was still within walking distance from the property opposite the police station. A butchery was also opened at the new location.
It was now also time to say goodbye to the franchise office in the storeroom with the makeshift furniture at the Sandton Steers.
The new office was situated next to the fast-food outlet at the Market Street address, but the time for mahogany desks and bar fridges had not quite arrived. Perry had a small desk in the passage and John, Peter and Fanis were squashed into another room.
“The first people I had to interview there were the developers of the Epsom Downs Centre, Rob Selisar and Mike Crawford. They were tall guys, and couldn’t fit into the small office,” laughs Perry.
John Galatis, who became their accountant during that time, remembers it well too. “They sat in this little office, which was too small for us all, and I had to sit on the table.”
Mike Sattary, who opened the 24th Steers in 1987, recalls that he had to slip and slide his way across the wet factory floor to go and see John for the first time. “They started simply, and therein lies their greatness: to only do what is necessary.”
A penny saved is a penny gained and they had to use what money they had to conquer the world of franchising. Maybe there were no landlords insisting on making their sons franchisees this time around, but not all franchisees were taking to the new system submissively either.
“Some prospective franchisees even asked, ‘How much money will you give me if I join you?’” laughs Perry. It wasn’t easy to convince entrepreneurs to invest at first.
“Back then Peter, Fanis and I chose franchisees on gut feel rather than following a strict screening process. I was never good at that, but Fanis was an excellent judge of character and could spot a good operator from a bad one. We gave the franchises to people we liked – if we liked the person and liked the site, he was in business,” recalls John.
Fanis’s method was a rather creative, if slightly quirky, aptitude test, but he swears by it. “I was very strict. I would say, show me your car, and then, when we got to the prospective franchisee’s car, I would ask him to open the boot.” He claims that he would know about your life from the state of your boot – anyone with a messy car wouldn’t be a good operator. “I knew there and then whether I would approve the applicant.”
As Peter was always the money man, he would help a franchisee to secure finance, but he says at first it was a challenge to convince the banks of their credibility.
Part of the setting-up service was to negotiate the best rental with the landlord, and the best price for machinery. These were often ordered from BB Catering Equipment, which was owned by Stavros Bizos, who was close to George Halamandres too, and was the brother of the human-rights activist Advocate George Bizos.
“In the beginning we did local advertising for franchisees, as we didn’t have enough money for the big newspapers,” says Peter. “But we spent more than the two or three per cent marketing fee we charged franchisees, as we reinvested the profits from our own restaurants.”
The team had a particular routine. Once a franchisee was found, Perry would be the project manager who saw to it that the restaurant was designed and built according to Fanis’s specifications. The kitchen layout had to be a particular way for optimal utilisation, the counter height exactly 1.2 metres and the cutlery and serviettes had to be kept in a certain place and nowhere else.
Fanis would be in charge of implementation and rounding off the training once the keys were handed over. The staff often went to the Sandton Steers to be trained beforehand, under Babis’s watchful eye. Fanis normally spent a week with a franchisee, and then he would check on him or her every week or two weeks after that to see that the operator was coping and sticking to the rules. If not, he would speak up.
“You have to talk nicely a second and a third time too, but if they don’t listen to you, you must be a tyrant,” he says. You then confront a franchisee with the agreement he or she has signed. Fanis says there would be trouble otherwise. “If you don’t need my name, give me my name back; I don’t want you to damage it. I am responsible for making your money work – franchising is selling a system for a reason.”
Peter agrees that it’s the name that brings the customer into the restaurant regularly, “but to run a restaurant is a different matter”. He says they had big fights with some franchisees who didn’t adhere to the quality standards. “If he buys his rolls from Pick n Pay, they aren’t the same as ours, and if he uses less than 100 per cent beef, it isn’t the same as ours – we fought over quality and cleanliness because customers must get what they pay for.”
“In the early days not all franchisees