The entrepreneur behind some of Liverpool's best-loved venues says she’s worried the city could see more restaurants and hospitality venues close unless the Government steps up to support the sector.
Natalie Haywood and her brother Graham o and now run a group of venues in the city region. Just this month it opened Little LEAF, a new smaller venue in Liverpool’s commercial district.
Natalie has seen the business grow through the financial crisis and battle through Covid-19 restrictions. In 2020 she represented Liverpool’s hospitality industry on a call with Prince William, talking about the impact of lockdown on small firms like hers.
LEAF survived and is hoping to grow again through its Little LEAF concept. But Natalie remains worried about what the future could hold for the bars and restaurants that are so vital to Liverpool’s economy.
Natalie said: “I think these are the hardest times that we've ever traded in, in terms of costs and lack of money for people to spend, but also with the cost of absolutely everything in your business going up, including the cost of labour.
“We started in a recession. We started in 2008. And I think we're made of quite tough stuff. We we were used to having not much resource, being creative, just getting on with it. But this feels to me like an incredibly challenging time.”
Natalie said the VAT break and business rates relief introduced to help businesses through Covid were helpful, but that those measures have been removed at the same time as businesses are dealing with inflation.
She said: “There's only so far we can put our prices up.”
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She called for the Government to help the hospitality industry with similar measures - “just something to intervene up to a time where inflation comes down and people have got a bit more money to spend.”
The cost of living crisis has taken its toll on restaurants across the country, as their costs rise while potential customers have less money to spend.
Just this week , blaming rising costs for its decision.
It follows other high-profile , based in Bold Street near Leaf, and .
Natalie said she feared more closures could follow. She said: “I think out of anywhere in the country Liverpool will fare better than most. But I do think everybody's probably living for the last quarter because we've got Christmas coming.
"And I think I wonder what will happen from January to March because all your payments are due, your VAT's due, and you've generally not got as many people coming in through the door.
“So I think we'll see a lot of closures January to March. It’s worrying, especially for a city like ours, where (hospitality) is the absolute backbone of the economy really.”
How big events can boost hospitality businesses
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Liverpool has won global renown for the large-scale events it has hosted, from Capital of Culture year through to Eurovision and to the recent Light Night. Natalie says Culture Liverpool’s ongoing success in that field can only be good for the hospitality sector.
She said: “When Culture Liverpool intervenes with these great animations in the city, like River of Light, the giants and any big event like that, it is absolutely brilliant for us. So the more that they can do on our streets, I think the more chance we have of being able to take a little bit more money.
“It's absolutely brilliant because it puts Liverpool top of mind for people coming in to visit.
“But for locals it brings locals out into the city centre who might not might not have come because I think since COVID, a lot of people do tend to socialise in the suburbs now.
She added: “To get people into the city centres again, the streets need to be animated as much as possible with as many public events put on as possible.”
And Natalie praised Liverpool’s hospitality sector, saying “I think the scene has become a real melting pot of international offerings, great creativity, lots of collaboration.”
Big hopes for Little LEAF in Old Hall Street
New venue Little LEAF is a smaller version of Leaf in Old Hall Street, at the centre of Liverpool’s business district. It will sit at the front of One Fine Day, LEAF's sister events venue that hosts everything from weddings to corporate showcases.
Natalie said: “We think we're bringing the essence of all the best bits of LEAF into a more intimate environment in a really busy bustling area of the city.
“We're hoping that we can become the hub of Old Hall Street and marry the two brands of One Fine Day, which concentrates on events, with LEAF and its food and drink offer.”
And Natalie thinks Little LEAF could be a blueprint for more growth.
She said: “Little LEAF is an interesting experiment to see if we can distil the essence of LEAF down into something smaller that could be almost a concession-type model, and that maybe doesn't rely on such big venues with such big costs.
“We'll just need to wait and see how that pans out - whether that model or brand can be taken into other areas, maybe into a daytime-focused area like a commercial district or shopping district.”
How LEAF has survived for 15 years
Natalie and Graham opened their first tea shop in 2007 but LEAF as we know it today began in 2008 when they opened in the venue in Bold Street that remains their flagship. Since then Bold Street has become a food and drink hotspot, while LEAF remains both popular and unchanged.
Natalie said: “ I think we are still here, doing more or less exactly the same thing as we were doing 15 years ago, because we've had an amazing programme of events which has kept the venue really interesting and made people continue to come back.
“But we've never followed fads and trends, and we've tried to keep the product very consistent - sticking to the values of value for money, really vibrant, colourful homemade food and drink.
“We’ve tried not to waver. I always say to the team, if you imagine a ship with a mast, the mast can wobble a tiny bit, but let's just try and keep it as still as we can.
“We can have lots of great creativity, and we've responded to different trends in terms of our events, but our food and drink offer our service style, our price point and what we really believe in have never really wavered.”
How LEAF survived lockdown and got call from Prince William
The LEAF Group opened Oh Me Oh My in the Strand, with its rooftop bar and garden, and also opened the One Fine Day venue in Old Hall Street.
Leaf also opened in Manchester and in Liverpool’s suburban Smithdown Road, before getting ready to open LEAF in West Kirby in early 2020 - days before lockdown hit.
The scale and diversity of LEAF's business made the lockdown a frightening and confusing situation for Natalie and the team.
She said: “West Kirby had only opened 10 days before the pandemic so that had a cellar full of stock, kitchens full of stock, 60 staff on the books and no real trading history to use to be able to go and get loans and things like that.
“The breadth of the different offers made navigating through it really tricky because every single venue had to be treated differently.
“We had to get through it with a bit of creativity. So West Kirby, we decided to do a Sunday market that started because people were struggling to get things like toilet rolls, fruit and vegetables, all that sort of stuff. We started to sell that just before we closed our doors and it went down really well, so we continued that and over time it grew into something that was absolutely massive - something we all looked forward to actually kept some cash ticking in.”
LEAF's other venues had trading histories so the team was able to get Government-backed loans to keep them ticking over ready for reopening. Natalie remembers that period as “shocking and frightening”.
She said: “We came out of the pandemic with about 800 grand worth of debt that we didn't have before the pandemic and that was just to keep the rent being paid, keep the cash flow moving…
“What people don't realise is that with shutting down big venues that are well oiled machines, trying to get them going again is an expensive exercise but also takes a long time because it's taken me years to get the venue to move in the way it did.
“You’ve done years and years and years of fine tuning and then all of a sudden to get it back open again, you've got different staff, lots of different rules in place, you need almost startup money again to get the wheels moving.”
Natalie broke down in tears during an appearance on Channel 4 News - and that led to her speaking to royalty about the impacts of the pandemic.
She said: “The person interviewing me (on Channel 4) said ‘how's it impacted you as a person’ - and nobody had asked me that. And she caught me a bit off guard and I got upset.
“And I think the publicity that that attracted potentially is what opened the doors because he was interested in how Liverpool was coping under tier four (restrictions). And he wanted to understand how the mentality of the people in the city was, how hospitality was doing. And it took me a real boost actually speaking to him. Because he was just there to listen.”