A rocketing good idea
From restaurants to barbers to record labels and TV, this former accountant is not short of ideas. Just add feng shui. By
When restaurant-owner Sean Barber asks me to guess what he did in his previous career, I don’t hesitate: cage fighter, I reckon, given his wiry, muscled frame, tattoos and general streetwise demeanour.
“No!” he exclaims, looking both aghast and flattered simultaneously. “But if I can save the cost of a bouncer because I look like one, that’s good economies of scale,” he jokes.
The truth is less interesting but more obvious. He was a chartered accountant, so his chain of Rockets restaurants, salad bars and grooming salons are built on sound financial plans rather than his own ability to grill a decent steak.
He pays people to do that for him, but as you look around his cavernous new venue above Time Square Casino in Menlyn, Pretoria, it’s obvious that business acumen tops the menu.
“I get asked to mentor all the time, and if someone wants to open a restaurant and their first words are ‘I’m a foodie, I love to cook,’ I’ll say good luck. If they say ‘I’ve got a fascination with attention to detail — I like to count and I like to clean,’ then they’re in the right business,” he says.
“Passion for cooking for a table of six isn’t the same as sending meals out en masse … You have to make sure that a plate of ribs is cooked the same every single time and your margins are reached every single time.”
His auditing background taught him about controls and procedures, the cogs that keep big businesses turning. “We count every single thing in this massive venue every single day because we’re fanatical about our margins and our cost of sales,” he says.
Barber boldly opened on the roof of Time Square in October during level 1 lockdown, at a time when many people don’t have much cash to flash. But he isn’t aiming at “many people”. His ideal niche is the black aspirational class: those who want to go clubbing, but start with aperitifs in the champagne bar, move through to dinner, then slide over to the bar where a DJ is playing if it’s still too early to hit the clubs.
People who just want a good meal are also welcome, with quieter tables where cherry blossom trees and murals soften the striking industrial décor of a triple-story ceiling.
Barber’s ideas have developed considerably since his first foray with Rockets in Parkhurst, Johannesburg, in 2007. His core model now is to offer something that carries a decent margin, and sell a lot of it. Knowing how to fill distinct spaces offering pre-dinner, dinner, bar and VIP sections is his competitive advantage. “If you did just one of those elements here the business model won’t work,” he says.
The strategy has already succeeded at Rockets Bryanston, a multi-storey venue topped by Lolita’s — a bar named for his Spanish wife and their daughter, not for Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, he clarifies.
He’s quite a character himself, hospitable and brimming with pithy comments, outspoken views and a sleep deprivation habit that lets him pull 18-hour working days then call his colleagues at 2 am to mull new ideas.
Opening the Menlyn venue was a R36-million investment. That included throwing a hammer through its low ceilings to discover what lay above, and cleaning up the metal ducts and air-conditioning paraphernalia to form part of the décor. The bar of raw steel, wood and burnished copper mimics that of Rockets Bryanston, which was named the best bar in the Middle East & Africa in the 2018 International Restaurant & Bar Design Awards.
The design was guided by an expert in feng shui, something Barber is serious about. He believes some businesses are doomed to fail if the space they occupy isn’t well aligned. “Feng shui for a business is the generation and harnessing of energy to maximise the revenue potential of the space,” he explains. “In any place, you have dead spaces, so you have to be very clever in doing things to entice people to sit there. We try to make sure every square metre makes money.”
A once-shunned alcove became a secluded, inviting corner by adding a pergola roof, dropping the lighting, and decorating it in a different colour.
The VIP area features tactile velvet under low ceilings for quiet intimacy, although that doesn’t suit all the high rollers, Barber says. “The big-pocket guys like to be seen to be spending, so this is a little too intimate. This is where the more discerning, older guy will come and spend, or the guy who’s trying to hide his girlfriend.”
The VIP alcoves apply a “bottle spend” model where clients buy at least three bottles, and with entry-level gin costing R780, it’s a R2,000 commitment. “Or we have bottles that go for R22,000 so you can sit there for R66,000. It’s up to you,” he says.
His next plan is to use the music generated in his bars to create streaming content for Rockets TV and a record label. There’s enough space for a recording studio, and DJ Black Coffee and his record label Soulistic are considering getting involved. When I ask who’s funding all this, he grins: “The minimum bottle spend!”
With dozens of DJs playing every week, plus live music and comedy, not harnessing that content would be a massive waste. Many DJs and musicians are at their most inspired late at night after a couple of drinks, he says, so a recording studio on-site will capture that creativity.
The lockdown sparked the idea of Rockets TV to keep the brand alive by broadcasting replays of previous sessions on Facebook and YouTube. Other initiatives have included four Rockets Express outlets based in areas with high corporate foot traffic, like the JSE. Then came three Rockets Man salons, with a name that plants an Elton John earworm while you’re getting a haircut, manicure, massage and a drink.
This notion of having Rockets wheedle its way into people’s daily lives first began with theft. “Our beautiful black teaspoons were disappearing, so I put our star on them and added ‘Stolen from Rockets’ and 200 teaspoons literally disappeared. That’s when I thought let’s get the brand into people’s homes and lifestyles,” Barber says.
He plans to open a large venue in Durban, where he grew up. “I’ll do one more big story in Durban and then I’m done,” he says.
Until the next big idea, perhaps.
The big-pocket guys like to be seen to be spending, so this is a little too intimate. This is where the more discerning, older guy will come and spend, or the guy who’s trying to hide his girlfriend