By CAROL SAFFER,
lifestyle Editor

So how did a lawyer and a fireman become creative owners of an eating empire?

Despite having no hospitality experience, Tim McDonald and David Youl have managed to get five restaurants profitably up and running in five years, with plans for 23 more in the next five.

The two men built the Fonda restaurant business from their first store in Richmond in 2011 to their sixth about to open this month in Collingwood.

While Fonda is all about Mexican-style food, there are no mariachi bands, no sombreros, no orange terracotta tiles on the wall and definitely no cactuses. They do not celebrate the Day of the Dead or any other Mexican festival.

McDonald says Fonda’s food is “Mexican-inspired street food, not authentic Mexican”. You won’t find sour cream, tomato sauce or grated cheese on the menu. The focus, instead, is "fresh casual". 

Not having hospitality experience was an advantage, he says. “We had to listen to people, take advice ... rather than using convention, or rather than doing it how it has been done before,” he says.

They sought counsel from a myriad different people for all the different areas of the business. This included a mentor for high-level strategy; architects for design; consultant chefs for menu ideas; and IT experts for point-of-sales software advice.

In start-up mode, Fonda took note of the changes happening in the restaurant industry. McDonald and Youl listened and learned from their customers, discovering not only what they expected, but what they demanded. 

The formula for the business was a hybrid of high-end dining and fast-food service. Because McDonald and Youl did not come from either camp, they were successful in building their "fresh casual" model which, they believe, responded well to the marketplace.

Unlike the fine dining sector, whose financial focus is making high margins from customer spends, Fonda operates on volume. McDonald says: “We don’t make huge margin on everyone that comes through the door ... we need to make huge volume.”

Self-discipline is the steepest learning curve that the Fonda founders encountered in starting their business.

"You are accountable to yourself, without a framework or structure,” McDonald says. The appeal is “being in control of your working life and therefore your life”, he said in a NAB bank interview. 

McDonald says the best source of feedback is the people who come in to eat. “The biggest body of people we seek advice from are our customers.” They and staff are the ones who will tell you what works and what doesn't, he says.

In 2015, with an ever-growing business, McDonald and Youl realised their enthusiastic entrepreneurship needed a boost of business experience, knowledge and investment. With a $15 million turnover and 160 staff on the books, the pair successfully approached their mentor Geoff Harris (co-founder of Flight Centre Travel Group) to take a 25 per cent share in the business.

Senior staff are given the opportunity to share in the profits. Based on the Flight Centre’s model of "family, village, tribe", the incentive to share in the profits of the organisation has “a huge effect of ownership and engagement coming from our full-time staff ... this avoids the need to franchise at all”, says McDonald.

Hawthorn manager Samir Slimane, 31, has been employed at Fonda since 2014. He started in the kitchen and was promoted first to team captain and now to manager. Slimane says Fonda prefers staff with a great attitude and team-working capability, over high skills and experience.

“The culture is not like what you see on the TV shows, with people yelling at each other, screaming at each other ... it is a professional environment,” he says.

The career path within Fonda is strongly based on “promoting from within”. To facilitate employing part-time and casual staff (often university students), Fonda uses the Deputy app, enabling students to advise their availability around their timetable. Full-time roles are encouraged and offered in the restaurants and head office.

Ismael Theis, 33, started part-time while studying at Swinburne University. In the year and half he has worked at Fonda he has been promoted to team captain (head of the kitchen) at Hawthorn.

Theis says it is a “brilliant environment ... [we] manage the pressure well with jokes”.

His wife Andrea Arenas, 33, says: “He talks about Fonda every single day, every single party, with every single person, so maybe that means he is proud of Fonda?”

Slimane agrees, saying camaraderie within the team is vital. Friendship and feeling part of the "family" helps the staff deal with the tough nature of the industry.

Fonda deliberately kept the opening of their first store in 2011 a little under the radar, with no big launch, no social media campaign.

McDonald says they took the “underground, softlysoftly approach”. They liked the Seth Godin method of the initial target market being the gatekeepers of cool.

Five years on, with a Smith St Collingwood site about to open, McDonald says Mexican as a cuisine "is very much institutionalised into the Australian palate”. So now that Fonda is no longer the new kid on the block, McDonald says, the social media presence will ramp up with the appointment of a new head of marketing. 

Expect to see and hear more from Fonda.