Roger Gillespie: Making Serious Dough.

Bakers Delight has almost 700 bakeries employing more than 15,000 people, serving 2.5 million customers per week throughout Australia, New Zealand and Canada. With those kinds of figures you'd think Roger Gillespie would be over the moon, but Roger is a perfectionist and believes if the bread isn't good enough the numbers don't rise.

Roger is familiar with the numbers. He was the man behind Brumby's, the bakery that had its modest start in 1975 under the moniker ?Old Style Bread Centre', in the Victorian suburb of Ashburton. In a ten-year period he expanded into Queensland and changed the company name to Brumby's, giving the company its unique Australian identity.

In 1980, he also set up Bakers Delight with the help of a silent partner. "We were living in Queensland at the time and I was running Brumby's from there, while my family was running Bakers Delight,' says Roger.

It was wife and business partner Lesley ("an integral part of the business and business development") who ran the show at Baker's Delight, which left Roger to concentrate on building the Brumby's brand. Both bakeries were in excellent hands ? both Roger and Lesley are fourth generation bakers. Roger had begun his career in real estate but was convinced by his father to buy a bakery and make some money.

Roger had set up Brumby's to help raise money for a school through a Trust fund. Once the task was completed to his satisfaction he became restless and sought to move on.

In 1983 the Gillespies bought their Bakers Delight partner's shareholding and decided to expand. "We started developing the business and quickly added sales in the first bakery and saw an opportunity for another one down the road," says Roger. "Then we thought we'd get another one and another one."

Expansion would free Roger up to step away from the production side of bread making. "I really didn't want to be a baker all my life and the only way to not be a baker was to own a number of stores and manage the staff."

The company grew rapidly. By 1993, they had operations in all states and had expanded without any real business plan, just a philosophy. It was then that the couple sat down and worked out a strategy. "We started planning for the following year," says Roger. We sat down and thought about how many new shops we wanted to open, how many people we wanted to employ, how big our office was going to be, how much money we needed and what sort of profits we were looking at. It all started a few years later than it should have."

In spite of their tardiness with the business plan, what drove the company was their vision and philosophy. "We always lived by the philosophy of constant improvement. What we did one month, we tried to do better the next. So the atmosphere was one of growth and constantly moving forward and we would do this through new recipe books or new methods of recruitment and because that was our culture and we were growing at 20-to 30% per annum, it was easy to implement new things."

However, not all was as rosy as it would seem. "We had to deal with failures along the way and the failures far outnumbered the successes," he says.

The failures were based around staff selection and corporate and non-corporate decision- making. They overcame these failures by learning how to plan ahead. "Make sure you've got the people ahead of time and when you need them. Also make sure the frontage is appropriate for what you need and that you are working on a win-win philosophy."

Roger and Lesley had set up a core set of values for their staff to follow. The company values were based around innovation, achievement, discipline, passion, professionalism and teamwork. (Ed note: Those values were breached recently in Adelaide when a franchisee came under fire for paying below award wages. It was a glitch to the brand name and was dealt with accordingly.)

"About 10 years ago a few of us were sitting around a table and asking ourselves what we were doing, what it was that got us out of bed in the morning and these were things like working with people, seeing those people grow and building businesses. What we came up with was building better businesses by building better people. That was one of our key mission statements that s evolved into ?real people, real bread, real delight'. That's our core and it's why Bakers Delight does not have an apostrophe. Bakers is a verb and it's our mission to delight everyone we come into contact with, whether it is customers, staff, suppliers. Through this you develop a win-win philosophy.

This philosophy allowed Bakers Delight to expand into New Zealand in 1996. However it has been a slow process breaking the market down and they are only now starting to see a profit.

"We probably didn't follow our five core values," says Roger of the slow growth. "We didn't deliver on the people promise, we didn't train them properly or get the right people and train them properly. We didn't ensure they were executing everything in the way it could or should be done."

When they broke into the Canadian market two years ago, Roger made sure they didn't make the same mistakes. The stores in Canada are already starting to see a profit.

Stores were all company owned when the Gillespies expanded into New Zealand, it wasn't until 1998 when they spent a year in the United States that they realized that franchising could provide an enormous boost. "We discovered that part of the labour is very tightly attached to the specific amount of capital invested ? that is franchising. It is a worthwhile way of doing business and raising capital."

So, in 1999 when the Gillespies arrived back in Australia they made their move into franchising Bakers Delight. They had already built up the infrastructure at home and abroad and they knew how to approach the different cultural markets. "There are subtle differences that you have to tune into," says Roger. "It's important to get local people involved and part of your management team to integrate the differences."

When the Canadian arm was integrated Roger sent 10 of his management team overseas to oversee the implementation. He and Lesley also lived there for six months. Roger still goes back to give regular support.

The lessons he learnt in New Zealand were invaluable and now Bakers Delight has over 700 franchises across Australia, New Zealand and Canada, turned over close to $450 million in the 2004/05 financial year and refuse to rest on their laurels. Roy Morgan reports that they hold a 15.5% share of a $2.5 billion Australian market.

They have also won several awards including the Victorian Employer of the Year award in 2003 and the Overall Victorian Retailer of the Year award that same year.

The awards are a reflection of business practice and of a commitment to moving forward. And although they were happily received Roger still wants to see how much better Bakers Delight can be. "I have a bakery and bread and if it's less than what it ought to be, it's a miserable day," says Roger. "That said, the next day everything may be fantastic and I'll be overjoyed. The awards are a reflection of how good the people in this company are, but let's see how much better we can get."

The quality is measured under a five star rating system, which every bakery is rated against. Measurements are set via key performance indicators including sales and profitability guidelines, and the company also conducts internal bread competitions.

The standards are high and will remain so no matter how far the global reach becomes and Roger is someone who believes there are no international boundaries. "We are going to see how far we can go. We are currently looking at that now and reviewing our key staff members who have expressed interest in going to other countries."

The world is his croissant and he is wary of having it turn into a simple bread roll. Complacency isn't an option, the only way to conquer the world is to keep moving forward, so he continues to set new goals and challenges. "One of my goals as I get older is to look after my own health and make sure I'm around to develop new goals. My single biggest goal is to be less miserable because of the poor quality bread that sometimes creeps into our bakeries."

He is a perfectionist who covets the perfect slice of bread and it is this pursuit that has created one of the most successful Australian franchising stories in history. Yet Roger will not be happy until Bakers Delight reaches a far greater market share ? greater than most people can imagine.

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