Supporting staff tops the menu

By MALCOLM WITHERS
Updated:

 

THE PROUDEST accolade for Cyrus Todiwala among the many adorning the entrance to his Cafe Spice Namaste restaurant in Prescot Street, Whitechapel is the one from Investors in People.

It stands out in a series of awards for the culinary achievements of his 'nouveau cuisine' Indian restaurant. It is also significant that Todiwala describes himself as 'executive chef and co-owner' of the restaurant group that he started nine years ago. He still wears the whites of his profession.

Cafe Spice Namaste, now part of a series of similar restaurants, has a turnover of £1.6m. Todiwala has the original nine staff that began with him when turnover was £200,000, a tribute to his enthusiastic participation in Investors in People.

Staff are the big winners in the Government-backed scheme that recently received a £30m boost in Chancellor Gordon Brown's Budget.

Todiwala is a great believer in the benefits of training and his 46 staff have gained from the experience. He even took on one staff member who confessed he wanted to go into IT and was using the training opportunity of IP to do so. Todiwala took him on for two years and he is now a senior IT analyst. On some Saturdays he comes back to one of Todiwala's restaurants to wait on customers.

'I see myself as an ambassador for Investors in People. I wouldn't say what I do if I did not believe in the people in my industry of catering. I talk to both employers and employees to make them more proactive towards one another and to acquire better presentational skills in their businesses.'

Investors in People chief executive, 50-year-old Ruth Spellman, heads an organisation that has already issued 26,000 companies with the Investors in People Standard. Some 10,000 of them are small to medium-sized enterprises and she has now embarked on two pilot schemes to encourage more to participate.

One is in London, where IP has spent a six figure sum on advertising the scheme. Some 20,938 small firms in London have been targeted and Spellman says the results have been 'extremely encouraging'. Small firms appear to be convinced that such training is as good for them as for larger companies.

Todiwala now has three restaurants, a thriving sandwich business and a growing chilled food enterprise. He exports chilled food to expat bureaucrats in Brussels' EC headquarters.

Two brothers who have been through the IP scheme drive the refrigerated lorry to Brussels and are virtually running the division. This week they took a consignment of Cobra beer with them to enable Brussels diners to wash it all down. As graduates of the Investors In People scheme they can afford to celebrate with a few beers themselves.

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