Business leaders know the importance of being earnest
Michael Bergson reveals inspirational role of three mentors in making his own story a success.
“IF I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” So said renowned polymath Sir Isaac Newton, but it’s a truth to which Scottish entrepreneur Michael Bergson readily subscribes.
Speaking on the Go Radio Business Show With Sir Tom Hunter and
Lord Willie Haughey, Mr Bergson, the managing director of Buck’s Bar Group, revealed the three mentors who inspired him to build his own business empire.
“There are three operators in the industry I really look up to and
I’ve had the privilege of working for and they’re all Glasgow-based independent operators.
“The first one I sort of worked for was Mario Gizzi, at Di Maggio’s group. He’s a trained accountant and you can tell because he has a great business. I learned so much from him. A restaurant operation can be quite overwhelming, but his way of looking at it was the same as he looked at accounts.
If you take care of all of the fine details, then the big picture comes together.
“I also worked for Stefan King. It was a privilege. He has a very different business sense. He has a huge head office infrastructure that encompasses not only the operational side of things, but also the shop fitters and the designers.
“When I went to work for him, to help launch The Corinthian, I got to work closely with those designers, including a guy called Jim Hamilton, an absolute genius.
“Then you had the big man himself, James Mortimer... the governor. He was probably, out of all of them, the most influential in my career. James is just a force of nature who will not take no for an answer.
“He has this relentlessness. I worked for him doing the One Up club in 29 in Glasgow, and I can remember a construction company saying to him, ‘You know, there’s a lift shaft you want but it’s utterly impossible. You’re never going to do it’.
“Suffice to say, the lift was fitted a month later. I could give you a million examples like that.
“He was the one mentor who really taught me to go and look at other venues, to look abroad, look at London, look at New York, go and inspect places. He just runs into restaurants with a camera, like some kind of restaurant commando, taking pictures of everything.
“All three of those guys have one thing in common: whatever their vision is, whether it’s Stefan with his big company that he wants to run with a hundred bars, or Mario with all of the fine details, or James with his venues as an extension of himself and his business, they are relentless in the pursuit of their vision.
“The message is you really need to get on board with it: when guys like these ask you for something, you deliver it. I made lots of mistakes with all of them.
“However, the advice I would say to people in business, if you have a big boss like that, if you point out that you’ve made a mistake or done something wrong once, make sure they don’t have to speak to you about it again!
“I read a book, Millionaire Upgrade. It resonated with me inside; you need to go for it. You have this fire inside you where you have to do it. And some people aren’t like that. Some people want to work for companies and they might make a lot more money than me, but I just wanted to do it for myself.
“I think one of the things my people will learn from me, which I learned from my guys, is what I would call having ‘extreme ownership’ of your business. When you’re running a business for someone else, treat it as if it’s your own. That comes across in everything I used to do when I was a manager. I always treated a business like it was mine. That’s what I expect from mine too.”