Not clowning around: McDonald's FD, Brian Mullens

We never mentioned the ‘R’ word. No, not recession. Ronald. Ronald McDonald. We had intended to ask UK finance director Brian Mullens whether he thought that perhaps the McDonald’s restaurant business would perform better if it got rid of that clown, but it looks like he’s beaten us to it. The East Finchley head office in north London is almost entirely devoid of any of the garish branding you would expect the Golden Arches business to have.

In fact, apart from the sign outside and the ground floor staff restaurant – which looks just like the last McDonald’s you were in – it would be almost impossible to tell which company we were visiting. As for the restaurant, we are taken aback when one of our photographer’s ideas is knocked sideways by the total absence of Big Macs, fries, McNuggets, chocolate milkshakes – or even anyone with a McJob: it’s 4pm, the restaurant is closed and the rest of the staff are all hard at work. (We spot the “Hamburger Universities Worldwide” sign and find it disconcerting that the city clocks underneath are out of synch: Munich, for example, appears to be an hour and 20 minutes ahead of London. It’s the sort of imprecision you don’t expect to see in America’s most globally-standardised fast food joint.)

Clearly, we’re lagging far behind the “re-imaging” programme that Mullens is so involved with. It’s not just signage: a wider food offering, organic milk, a choice of different types of rainforest-friendly coffee – even free Wi-Fi. It’s bringing in “a different type of customer,” Mullens says: “I was in a restaurant in King’s Cross a couple of weeks ago and it was quite refreshing, actually. You see a lot of people on PCs, drinking coffee in McDonald’s.”

The business serves a couple of million customers every day in the UK and, of the customers who have been McDonald’s regulars the longest, Mullens says, “I don’t think their behaviour is particularly changing with how they use us.” But there has evidently been “a broadening of our customer base as we’ve broadened our menu,” he says. “When you see customers go into our re-imaged restaurants, it’s quite a change. You actually see customers double-take. I was sitting in a restaurant in High Wycombe and it’s a lovely corner plot with floor-to-ceiling glass and, literally, people stop and look in and think, ‘There used to be a McDonald’s, there.’ It was almost like a comedy moment. It reminded me of a comedy sketch with Rowan Atkinson where he bumps into a lamp post.” (This slapstick moment is the nearest we get to talking about clowns.)

Image conscious
These things matter to Mullens – who has been the FD since the beginning of 2008, crowning a 12-year career with the company which he joined shortly after qualifying with Price Waterhouse – and not just because, as he says, a re-imaging typically results in a 5% to 6% uplift in sales. Mullens himself is closely involved with the refit programme at two levels. First, he has sign-off on which 200 outlets in the 1,200-strong chain get a share of the £90m facelift spend each year (he’s about half way through a five-year programme). Second, because McDonald’s splits its UK estate roughly 40:60 between owned and franchised restaurants, he works very closely with the franchisees to help make sure they can pay for their share of that £90m.