Exclusive interview – Harmandeep Khurana, CEO and founder, Barbeque Company

Exclusive interview - Harmandeep Khurana, CEO and founder, Barbeque Company

1. How you began your Entrepreneurial journey?

– My journey as entrepreneur started much before in my mind before it actually started. As a visitor to restaurants in my early days i always aspired to open my own. We all know it’s never an easy task to start your own restaurant. So i decided to give a lot of time in exploring what to start, when to start and how to start?

Before starting the barbeque company, I explored other business too. They were good and they taught me real entrepreneurial lessons, but they weren’t my final goal.

Then around 2015 I finally started The Barbecue Company and I think I am going to do it for major part of my life.

2. What were the challenges you faced while building The Barbeque Company?

– Restaurant business look very lucrative as an industry, but it has very peculiar challenges. As an owner of one of the fastest growing live grill restaurant chain I feel one of the biggest challenges is building loyal customer’s base. We are not in 90s where customer has limited option. They have 1000s of options available with a new brand coming of every day.
This hade made food industry very competitive. You are required to give as many as reasons to your customers so that they choose you. Now they just don’t want food but also want a great experience, pleasant ambience, customer service and many such new things. We are glad that we have been able crack this hard nut and take customer retention very seriously. What our customers want is the basis of all our decisions.

3. What was the impact of the pandemic on your company?

– We have never faced anything like this before. Pandemic has changed the world and the way it operates. So, it has impacted my company and the Startups of this industry. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technology we have now digital menus, digital payment, and digital invoice management. All this would have taken a lot more time to be part of our lives, but the pandemic made it all a routine for us. Also, when people are desperately coming out to have food in the pandemic sanitization, wearing masks and social distancing has been part and parcel of our lives.

4. What is the USP of your The Barbeque Company?

– The USP is the Celebration brand and Value for money. We never expected people will love it so much that we open multiple outlets. We feel that in India families and groups love to celebrate every small and big event by eating out. It’s very difficult for anyone restaurant to make everyone happy on a budget. So, when you offer people more than 50 varieties of food in a pocket-friendly budget at one place they just love it. We love our customers; we take regular feedback and get back to work and deliver what people like. So, if you listen to your customer, they will stay loyal and will become your advocates in long run. And we are thankful to them for extending patronage to us.

5. What is vision of your company behind expanding the chain?

– See when I started with the thought of making The Barbecue Company as the most delicious and affordable live grill restaurant chain for people of India. This was the only vision I had at that time. But in the last few years, I have added another dimension to my vision and that is offering franchise business to people who want to start a franchise restaurant, but the cost and technicalities aren’t allowing them to do so. My team is really working hard to make the owing The Barbecue Company franchise affordable and easy.

6. Future expansion plans?

– We know that dining out is never going out of fashion, but we have lockdown and night curfews, so it becomes difficult for people to enjoy outside food. That’s why takeaway has gained traction. Based on several inputs from stakeholders and customers we are planning to parallelly to start a takeaway outlets chain. Growth and expansion in new cities especially Punjab, Maharashtra, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and the southern region of the country are on the table for now. A lot of people have approached us to open a franchise with our brand name. We are overwhelmed with the kind of interest people are showing in our brand.