Acting Up and The Pig

Today is my Birthday and I have been thrown into a correspondence spin, connecting with fellow Linked-In well-wishers. I feel blessed. Thank you. I’ve been quiet on Linked-In. Here’s why.

Just over one year ago I opened Little White Pig, a Gastro Pub a few doors down from my flat in the centre of Edinburgh. I have two business partners, one of whom is my fellow director in the business, and between us we have fought tooth and nail, sometimes on the same side of the challenge in question, and sometimes at odds with each other. I have injected more cash into the business than the others, rather than borrowing from a bank, because I believed that we had something which the community wanted. We do. I have had many messages from locals saying they love what Little White Pig offers and wishing us the best in this time where hospitality, like many other industries, has been obliged to shut its doors. It’s got me thinking, as I’m sure most of the country are just now, about the future of my business.

The Edinburgh Festival and Fringe seems to be going to be shut down, tourism has gone and despite the rent-holiday and the small government grant, the no-fees for 6 months overdraft and the furlough scheme, we will be lucky to survive this peculiar time. I’m not complaining. It has been a most marvelous year, I can safely say that I have never worked as hard and no doubt the future has many surprises yet to deliver.

 I still run my small business Acting Up, generating conversations in heavy industry, using storytelling to stimulate culture-shifting, real connection, usually around HSEQ, in a world dominated by process and petty rules. I have worked a lot delivering sessions for my Acting Up clients, taking days away from Little White Pig to earn enough to pay my own personal living costs, because I didn’t want to divert vital funds away from my new-start by drawing money out of it. My business partner felt strongly that I should be drawing from The Pig and we argued tooth-and-nail about it. I felt that the universe had provided for me via Acting Up and while he needed to draw a modest salary, it went against all my instincts for me to do so. He’s a vociferous and shouty type at times and this, along with an argument about quiche, has run and run; it raises its head whenever tempers are frayed and we are in need of sleep.

One of the interesting things about this last year with Little White Pig is that it has synergistically improved everything in my Acting Up work life too. It has taught me things I did not know before. It has brought about lessons, it has made me realise that the problems I see culturally at, say, Shell, or BAE, or Bombardier or in every business, no matter how big, are the very same problems I face in my little Gastro pub. They are always about communication and feelings and how to connect well, organisationally, in the face of stress. And stress is always about numbers not adding up, about targets and expectations, about getting better profits. Numbers not adding up always point to the matrix of capitalism. And the matrix of capitalism seems to be currently up for debate in a way in which it never before has been. The old adage, Stop the world, I want to get off! has been responded to in this era of COVID 19…the capitalist world has stopped, we can momentarily breathe and we can ask What just happened? And what happens next? and we can dwell poignantly in the nowness of these strange still days with quiet acceptance.

After two weeks of what has felt like convalescence I am pondering it all. What have I learnt? Well, thinking aloud here, I have learnt about the benefits of a good argument followed by reconciliation, about profit margins, running a team, caring for my staff’s wellbeing, about the corrosive effect of bureaucracy on one’s soul, about the expectations of the general public, about being criticised, about the importance of being real and of listening in a real way to people, I’ve learnt what fatigue looks like etched onto my face on a Sunday morning as I try to get the pub open for breakfast after a 2am close and I’ve learnt that there is no room for self-pity. I also know stuff about kegs, and rats, and bins and sewage…I won’t bore on…suffice to say there has been a lot of learning and it has changed my relationship with everything.

In the Acting Up work that I have delivered alongside running the pub, I have noticed a new way of connecting in my sessions, a feeling of being more empathetic, a renewed love of all that Acting Up is because it affords me the luxury of connecting with people in other industries, who open up about what stops them bringing their best selves into work every day, people who articulate their pain and who are at loggerheads with their management systems, their colleagues or their company stakeholders and who desperately need to feel heard. 

When we set up Little White Pig, I gave myself a budget along the lines of what a two year masters would have cost me, figuring that I would expect to spend and to lose money but that, in exchange, I would emerge from this time with such a visceral and raw sense of what it means to work hard that no work would ever feel the same again. I was right to adopt this mindset.  It has helped that I am single, because relationships need attention I didn’t have time to give, though I do regret that my regularly working long hours, 7 days a week, has taken its toll on my 14 year old daughter and my 84 year old mother too.  I have had to be selfish to do this work at the same time as being altruistic. This is simply what it takes to start a business. Coronavirus has simultaneously offered me a chance for the first time since we got the keys to Little White Pig on 6th February 2019 to reflect on it all with clarity and also to ask the most challenging question of all – will the pub carry on?

It takes a year to see a business like a Gastro Pub. It is like driving down an 8 lane motorway trying to assess the fuel consumption of each car around you. I was new to it. It was painful at times. I cried a lot at the admin and the supplier bills, and those costs that seemed parasitic: the music license, the rent, the insurance, the card provider fees, the POS System costs, the VAT, the massive fuel bills, the rates for which you get nothing, the water bill, the waste management costs etc etc etc. I laughed out loud (you have to) as I cleaned the vomit up after parties in our night club (did I mention there is a huge speakeasy style venue below the pub too? To break-even we must run this space to its maximum potential…this is a WHOLE OTHER THING…!). The words, ‘Bring it on!’ or ‘Just do it!’ reverberated regularly in my head as I laboured. My body became fit. My arms toned. My hair grew darker and my skin grew pale. I broke my finger between two kegs. I wore DM boots (except of course when performing Gail!). I got so stressed that the dial returned to zero and I became immune to it all because you just have to get on with it.

In late January we employed a general manager, we got a new chef, we brought in some hospitality professionals to start at the end of February, put them on the payroll ready for the new improved Little White Pig, where my roll would be to play hostess, to greet and welcome our customers, to wear nice outfits and to make people feel good. I was excited about this. We were emerging from a quiet January and February, settling the new team in, getting our act together. At the same time I ran a massive project in the shipyards of Glasgow for BAE Systems, with their frontline operatives, 20 days of conversations about safety culture and about their culture in general and I wrote a book for them, created monologues representing the voices of the people and the things they were saying; I filmed these monologues. As the last days of the BAE project were being delivered, the reality of the need to bubble-wrap the pub became clear. In order to prevent immediate financial crisis I cancelled everything going out of the Pig bank account, except staff wages, which I supplemented from Acting Up as the events that were to have paid the wages for March had already been cancelled. Boris’ advice to stay out of the pub in the days before the order to close meant, that we were in a state of business-as-usual, but with no customers. Open, but dead. It’s a pretty quick way to kill a pub.

So. There we go. As an actress, I have found an interesting new ‘stage’ in Little White Pig. I love that I can host theatre and jazz there. I love my team. I love the customers. If I want to keep it going will I find a way? To make it work I need to be driven, and though I have a fire in my belly at the best of times, I am tired. I should add that I am also happy. But I am unsure as to what to do next or how much of it is even in my control. The world is changing, or is it? Will we just limp back into a hideous recession, where all the same bills exist and only half the customers come? That sounds pretty miserable to me. Wouldn't it be better to bail now?

I feel as if Little White Pig has a weakened immune system and needs to stay in bed for now, to socially isolate... and for me to do the same. For a business so young it would be a premature end to throw the towel in…but I am a person and I am less than young. On one hand the pub has brought me to life. On the other hand it has brought me to my knees. If we are to survive we need to begin again with a glad heart, a lot of energy, and a bit of cash in the bank. I don't know if that will be there in...June...or July...or September...or....hmmm... Quite.

There is only one thing I know right now and that is that today is my birthday. 

Thank you for the good wishes.