Building a strong team culture at Noxy Brothers
Starting life as a single coffee cart, Noxy Brothers has grown to four thriving coffee shops across London – with plans afoot for further expansion. We spoke to Co-Founder and Director JP Leclef about how Planday has helped them get where they are today, and the vital role the platform will play as they continue to grow.
Meet the team
- Who: JP Leclef
- Role: Director and Co-founder
- Business: Noxy Brothers
- Where: London, UK
That serves up
- A fun, supportive workplace
- A strong team culture
- Low staff turnover
- Unpretentious coffee and a warm welcome
Who are Noxy Brothers?
Founded in 2018 by two best friends who wanted to change the coffee-drinking experience, Noxy Brothers brings quality coffee, fresh food and a friendly atmosphere to coffee lovers across London.
It’s a business built on friendship, fun, and a love of great coffee – a company-wide ethos that’s clear to see in every one of their busy, bustling coffee shops.
"Me and my best friend, Hoss, started Noxy Brothers in 2018. The whole concept originally was about bringing a better experience around coffee,” JP Leclef, Co-Founder and Director of Noxy Brothers, told us.
“We started with one coffee cart, it was just me and Hoss. And then we grew the business from there. Flash forward a few years and a pandemic later, we now have four stores in London.”
It’s those humble beginnings on the streets of London that still shapes the company’s culture and attitude to this day. They describe their staff as their ‘tribe’ and have been careful to create a fun, supportive working environment for their 35-strong team of employees.
The result is a happy, engaged team which, in turn, creates a welcoming atmosphere that customers love.
"We have a strong culture in the team. It comes really from how we originated as a coffee cart, and we've managed to replicate that as we've grown and the team has grown,” JP said.
“When you come to a Noxy Brothers store, you're basically in our home with our family. And so that plays a massive part in the overall experience. You don’t want it to be snobby. You want it to be a fun place, an engaging place.”
The challenge
Going from a coffee cart to a full coffee shop isn’t without its challenges. The team gets bigger, the complexities grow and the admin gets longer. Where basic solutions like Excel were once enough, now no longer cut it.
As the team started to grow, schedules became more complex and onboarding became more important. But even more importantly, having a deep understanding and solid overview of the business’s costs and efficiencies become harder and harder to achieve.
“If I remember correctly, I think we did everything manually. So we were doing Excel sheets for the time sheets and everything else,” said JP.
“The first stepping stone into Planday was automating the onboarding process and the scheduling process. And more importantly for us, actually getting a real understanding of costs and efficiencies that we can manage through rotas.”
The solution
Even when it was just one coffee cart, JP and Hoss recognised the value that technology could bring to a business. So when they went looking for a solid, scalable tech solution that could grow with their business, there was only one choice.
“We chose Planday originally when we actually moved from carts into retail, and we were hiring bigger teams inside of all of our stores,” said JP.
Now with four locations across London, and plans for expansion in the coming year, Planday has grown with Noxy Brothers to become an integral part of the business that goes beyond just scheduling.
JP said: “Now we're in a place where we use Planday to help organise our teams across all of our locations and understand who needs training, who needs developing, who needs to focus on culture, who needs to focus on service.”
The result
As the business has gone from strength to strength, Planday has played an even more vital role as part of their overall tech stack. And in a challenging business environment that's ever more data-focused, the insights and overviews that Planday can offer have become vital.
“I've always been very data driven. So personally, I tend to look most at labour costs and managing rota efficiencies with the store managers directly and the ops team,” said JP.
“From a business owner perspective, the ease of onboarding documents, HR documents, holidays, exporting to payroll and so on makes everyone's life substantially easier. But for me personally, it's all about the financial data we get from Planday.”
While it’s all about the bigger picture for JP, for his team it’s all about making the day-to-day operations of running a multi-site business as smooth as possible. As Head of Operations Anteia says, it’s the range of Planday’s features that make it such an important tool.
“Planday is a management tool but also a communication tool which is amazing. If someone has a performance review we can just upload it there, so everything is centralised. It’s easier for us to manage it and so much easier for staff as well,” she said.
“I’ve worked in other businesses that didn’t have Planday, or some sort of tech solution, and it was really challenging. It’s easy for staff to miss their shifts, it’s easy for us to lose track of how much holiday they’ve accrued or lose track of their requests. Communication is all over the place.”
While it’s all about the bigger picture for JP, for his team it’s all about making the day-to-day operations of running a multi-site business as smooth as possible. As Head of Operations Anteia says, it’s the range of Planday’s features that make it such an important tool.
“Planday is a management tool but also a communication tool which is amazing. If someone has a performance review we can just upload it there, so everything is centralised. It’s easier for us to manage it and so much easier for staff as well,” she said.
“I’ve worked in other businesses that didn’t have Planday, or some sort of tech solution, and it was really challenging. It’s easy for staff to miss their shifts, it’s easy for us to lose track of how much holiday they’ve accrued or lose track of their requests. Communication is all over the place."
What next for Noxy Brothers?
With 35 employees and four busy locations, Noxy Brothers aren’t doing half bad. But they’re not done there. More coffee shops are planned for the near future, which means more staff, more complexities and more organisation.
“This year we're going to open at least two stores. And then next year, hopefully another four stores. Would be great. So we're not looking to expand extremely quickly – we want to maintain the quality,” said JP.
“And we're expecting the team to grow by almost double within the next 12 months, which is great. And Planday will be a big part of that.”
The added operations and workforce management required will obviously be a challenge, but JP and his team know that Planday will be there every step of the way. The simple staff onboarding, along with HR and training integrations, make it easy to scale up as the team grows.
“And Planday's ability to segment sites and allocate labour to different sites makes a huge difference. And we’ll be using Planday to integrate with our learning platform, so we’ll be able to make sure all of our staff are trained as we bring on a significant number of people,” JP added.
Ready to start building happy teams?
