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HUDSON SCOTT
AREA MANAGER - DINE-IN

I'm the Area Manager for the Essex area so I look after nine restaurants, all within the Southern part of Essex and I'm accountable for the Restaurant General Managers and the upkeep and wellbeing of their stores and the customers that come in to them.

I've had a few different areas whilst I've been here. So I've looked after three different areas and moved up in terms of complexity and turnover as time's gone by.

Pizza Hut allows you to be really commercial, I've got one of the Pizza Hut's in Lakeside and we were able to take the opportunity to rent some space out in Lakeside, we took that space and did some sampling of our new menu to customers and it proved to be really successful. We modelled the new pizzas and allowed customers to taste them and we got some really big like for like sales growth figures. As a result of that I've been asked to sit on a project where we're now rolling that out nationally across 80 different restaurants and by the balance of the year we will get over a million people to sample our best ever pizza.

I have a small local store marketing budget that could look at kind of out of the box thinking to really drive the awareness of our restaurant and our national campaign and signature value, so the likes of new menus, kids can eat free or free salad. We've invested in some new style point of sale, so we've done some full sized window posters, which isn't part of our national point style campaign but they've really allowed us to open up and try some things that are innovative and new and some of that's really driven some really good sales. We've done it and then it's been replicated in other restaurants.

The real big difference for me with Pizza Hut over some of the other businesses that I've worked for is that they certainly take a long term approach. Some of the retail businesses that I've worked for were very much about the results today without building a foundation around people in particular. The biggest difference is that Pizza Hut very much focuses itself on its people and developing talent and therefore results are based on far more strong foundations.

I think our senior team have taken some pretty big bets over the course of the last 18 months to two years and invested heavily in our people. They've developed our Managers Area Managers and they've also invested an awful lot into our assets with some new concept stores. I don't think that we've been in a position where we've had such strong store teams or an asset that looks as good as it has done for years gone by.