VIEW FROM THE TOP
How hospitality can help address the NEETs crisis
The CEO International of Levy, Jon Davies, discusses sustainable hospitality, social mobility, and why eating Bambi is the responsible alternative to beef
By Paul van Zyl
Jon Davies knows what it’s like to be young, ambitious, and out of work.
Over lunch in the newly-opened Nettle restaurant on the top floor of The Conduit, Davies opens by telling me how he went from growing up in a seaside town in North Wales to becoming the CEO of a multinational hospitality company with over 30,000 employees.
In the mid-90s he was a cash-strapped politics student at York University in need of a part-time job. After spotting a “help wanted” sign in a local restaurant, he found himself in the basement kitchen. “It wasn’t much of an interview,” he explains. The head chef didn’t care whether he had experience, only that he was willing to show up for a 10-hour shift which could sometimes turn into a double shift. For a day of work, he’d walk away with about £40 in his pocket.
“By the end of university in 1999, I was the third chef and was running the section on quiet nights,” he says with a hint of nostalgia. “Aged 20, I was quite proud that I could do the work, and made a pretty good success of it.”
Like many young graduates, Davies contemplated a job in The City or consulting. He quickly realised that an office job wasn’t for him. Instead of pursuing a life in professional services, Davies decided to do what he had learned to love.
“Restaurants created some really good memories,” he tells me. “It gave me purpose. I made a load of good friends, and I’d seen the business side of it all.” He landed a graduate position with a company that became . It was hard work that sometimes brought him to the point of giving up. But with the help of a mentor and perseverance he began to thrive.
Davies’ story shows that starting a career is really hard for those without privilege or connections. But he is quick to acknowledge he had something that many young people today don’t: that first leg up.
Today nearly a million young people in the UK between 16 and 24 are classified as NEETs – Not in Employment, Education, or Training. I’ve heard Davies speak passionately about the lack of opportunities young people are facing. I ask him what he would want to see in the forthcoming Milburn report, which aims to offer solutions to the youth unemployment crisis.
Without missing a beat, he begins by explaining the massive impact COVID had on young people’s opportunities and confidence levels: “People couldn’t work for two years. That meant that if you were 16, 17, 18 during COVID, you lost the opportunity to do your first job.”
In past decades, many young people got their first job doing the morning newspaper round or working in pubs. Phones have long replaced physical newspapers, which leaves working behind the bar. Davies points to a web of regulation that has made it nearly impossible to hire anyone under the age of 16. By that age, Davies had two years of experience under his belt working at a greengrocer.
“This situation is not just the kids’ fault. It is the fault of legislation,” Davies insists. The real bee in his bonnet, he tells me, is the design of the Apprenticeship Levy Fund. Most businesses must pay 0.5 percent of their wage bill into a fund to support apprenticeship schemes.
The problem for Davies is that the scheme doesn’t allow businesses to employ and train the young people themselves. Instead, funding goes to training providers who offer courses or solutions that don’t always offer what businesses really need.
In May the government released the first instalment of a report by Alan Milburn evaluating the causes and possible solutions to the NEET crisis. The Milburn report underscored that youth unemployment is a growing problem that risks creating a “lost generation” in the UK. Inequality and a restricted labour market are two of the main culprits driving the crisis to a record high, as are geographical disparities across the country. The final report and recommendations for action are due later this month.
One way of fixing the crisis, according to Davies, would be to provide on-the-job training support to incentivise companies to hire young people so that they can get a crucial leg up in those early years of their career. As he speaks, I realise that Davies’ career trajectory from kitchen porter to International CEO is part of what makes him such a tremendous leader. He knows what it’s like to put in a hard double shift and he understands the dynamics of hospitality from the bottom up.
Davies is a great believer in sustainability and in paying employees a living wage. I ask him whether this has impacted profitability or growth?
The short answer is no. His business has more than doubled since 2018, and much of that success comes from staying ahead of the curve by understanding what clients want. Evidently what they want is impeccable hospitality with high-quality food that doesn’t pollute the planet delivered by staff who feel fairly paid for their work.
“It’s a very stupid move to try and cut costs on either the quality of the ingredients, the quality of the staff or the ethics that sit behind it, because it’s a fraction, really, of the overall cost of what you’re delivering,” he explains.
Through offering the London Living Wage and providing flexible shifts, Levy has been able to keep employees and watch them work their way up through the company. A generation or two ago this level of social mobility was common in many industries. Today, hospitality is one of the remaining few where a young person with few advantages can still start as a dishwasher and end up a head chef or even a CEO.
Throughout our conversation I am reminded of the many reasons The Conduit decided last year to partner with Levy to lead on our restaurants, and food and beverage offerings. Davies’ personal traits of humility and dedication to doing the right thing are reflected in his company’s success. Ultimately, businesses that are unwavering about their values and stick to their purpose attract more customers.
Take biodegradable packaging as an example. Many suppliers will say their cardboard is good for the planet, when in reality it comes covered in microplastics that will sit in landfills for years while polluting groundwater with toxic chemicals. Loopholes in the law allow for packaging companies to get away with misleading advertising about what is biodegradable.
Instead, Levy uses Notpla products which are made from 100 percent natural seaweed coating and are completely biodegradable. “We pay a higher price for it, and we’re happy to. We take our clients on that journey and we’re really proud that we do that.”
A more unconventional passion for Davies is the variety of meat served in his restaurants – in particular his focus on wild venison, “the other” red meat.
The wild deer population has surged in the UK from roughly 400,000 in the 1970s to roughly two million today. They may be cute, but they eat almost everything green in their path, including new trees and other vegetation, thereby stripping woodlands of the diversity they need to thrive.
Towards the end of our lunch I ask him, as I do all my interviewees, how he’d describe his personal style of leadership. For a man who came of age working in the heat of kitchens, his response is no surprise. In high pressure environments, like restaurants, everyone has a specific job to do. The service will only succeed if everyone is empowered to play their part to the full of their ability.
The result is that he’s become the antithesis of a micromanager. As CEO, Davies makes every effort to ensure that senior people working with him understand the company rules and ethos so they only need to come to him for approval or sign offs on the really important stuff.
He also celebrates talent: “I’ve never been afraid of having people below me who are just as good as, if not better than me. I think that’s a sign of a bad leader, if they need to employ people who are never going to be quite good enough and therefore their position will never be challenged.”
What I find most refreshing about Davies’ approach to leadership is whether he is talking about young people entering the workforce, sustainable packaging or what ends up on a hospitality menu, he keeps coming back to the same idea: Business can be a force for good when it avoids short cuts and seeks to translate its values into value.
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