When I started Baker Group my vision was quite simple. I wanted us to deliver the highest level of service to as many clients as possible in the hospitality and commercial catering industry. I figured there was no real limit to our potential expansion as long as we maintained industry-leading standards. And that’s how we’ve been growing to date. We have taken advantage of opportunities as they have arisen and proved we can maintain that same high level of service to commercial kitchens as we expand nationally.
How the Baker Group puts customers first
The feedback we’ve had from clients and technicians is that being the only service provider covering commercial catering equipment maintenance and repair with a national footprint is very attractive. This was the gap in the industry that I saw from the start: not enough in-house technicians working to the highest standards and the only contractors with a national presence had to subcontract out commercial kitchen repairs.
If I’m honest, I didn’t realise until later that there is a bloody good reason for this. Australia is a big place, and national coverage is a huge challenge. But while we might have been naïve at the start it has paid dividends, partly because the technology that has come online supports young businesses with a growth mindset. While many of our competitors would consider us disruptors, that was never our core philosophy. My view is that if you have the right people in your business, then clients will follow.
Even more than technology, our ability to disrupt has come from prioritising our people: having the right people to do the job and deliver value through our partnerships and relationships with suppliers and OEMs. As we raised industry standards, our national client base pushed us to move into new areas, where we could solve their commercial kitchen service and maintenance issues.
Having a strong presence and strong technical ability in so many areas around the country was the real key to our disruption and is what allowed us to quickly become an established provider around Australia.
National consistency with a single point of contact
The advantage for clients who have previously had to deal with state-based operators is obvious. Our national footprint means they have a genuine single point of contact for all their service needs, and it is not a point of contact that is managing lots of different companies. With Baker Group you have one admin back-office team managing the whole country via an in-house team of technicians.
This means consistency in data, reporting style and a service offering that both aligns with and is supported by OEMs. Our edge is through both national consistency with a single point of contact combined with hands-on state managers providing localised commercial kitchen solutions to ensure client peace of mind.
At Baker Group, we spread our training across all our technicians and allocate product specialists to each commercial kitchen brand or category. This ensures we aren’t spreading experience too thin and are committed to both fully understanding a product and sharing this knowledge throughout our organisation, via both training and onsite technical support as needed.
An example of these larger national clients are some of our mining contacts. They know whether they engage us in Western Australia, Queensland or elsewhere that they’re going to get the same quality of technical ability, consistent reporting and reliability even if the location is remote.
Large stadium operators that are state based see the advantage in dealing with a national company that can fly in additional resources if required. Although we deal with employee leave like everyone else, our customer’s operations aren’t affected and our employees can take leave without the pressure of “letting the team down” that they may feel in a smaller company.
In an industry that experiences ebb and flows far more than others, the additional capacity our size and the scope offers is very attractive. Baker Group can draw on experience servicing commercial kitchens in different stadium environments around Australia and that accumulated knowledge allows us to produce bespoke proposals that work for each individual operator.
Clear developmental pathways for Baker Group technicians
For technicians, the national exposure we offer is unique. It gives us the ability to move technicians between states to both manage workloads and advance their careers. And these are the people we want to attract; technicians who are ambitious and want the opportunity to develop their skill sets within a commercial kitchen setting and progress their careers.
We have found, technicians want to be able to work across multiple categories and be supported by multiple OEMs so their days are never the same and they can see a clear developmental pathway.
If we’re doing our job properly then there should always be opportunities for our technicians. And this goes beyond ensuring their technical skills keep pace with industry changes. We’ve always started with people … and we’ve found that hiring the right people attracts more of the right people.
The growth Baker Group has experienced would be impossible without our tight-knit team. I look forward to sharing some more of our ambitious plans and day-to-day operations in future articles. Because if we can make it work in Australia, we can make it work anywhere!
