Why Quality & Control Matter More Than Growth, When Building A Sustainable Business

By Eddy Massaad, Founder, Swiss Butter

The Swiss Butter global restaurant chain was built around a very simple idea. Do fewer things, but do them properly. Honing a tight menu of three core dishes, steak, chicken, and salmon, all centred around the same proprietary sauce, such simplicity is often misunderstood as a branding decision, when in reality, it’s an operational one. According to its founder, Eddy Massaad, who strongly believes that simplicity allows consistency, and consistency allows for scale.

When people look at Swiss Butter now, they tend to see the queues, the social media following, or the simplicity of the menu and assume the journey was fast. What they are actually seeing is years of slow, deliberate building, much of it done before there was widespread belief, real momentum, or the right investment support in place.

I opened my first Swiss Butter restaurant in Beirut in 2017. It wasn’t launched with a guaranteed roadmap to global expansion or a promise of success. In the early months, funding conversations went nowhere. Refusals were constant and progress was slow. During that period, I relied heavily on personal resources, credit cards, and reinvesting everything back into the business just to keep it moving forward.

Eventually, the right investors came on board and that distinction matters. It wasn’t fast capital or speculative money chasing growth at any cost. It was patient investment aligned with building something sustainable. From the beginning, the focus was not on how quickly the business could expand, but on whether it could do so without losing control, quality, or culture.

As the business grew beyond its first location, that thinking became even more important. You quickly learn what actually makes your business work and what simply looks good on paper. You cannot rely on constant oversight or individual personalities, and you need systems and high standards. And equally as important, is the need to have people onboard who understand what they are protecting.

Today, Swiss Butter operates nineteen locations across the UK, Europe, and the Middle East, with at least ten new openings planned for 2026, including a second in London and our first restaurant in Manchester. Swiss Butter has investors, but it is wholly operated which means ownership, operations, and standards remain tightly controlled which is where our success lies.

That decision has shaped everything. While it’s meant higher upfront costs, more complex supply chains, and greater risks, particularly in markets like the UK where the hospitality sector is under a lot of pressure. On the other hand, it has also allowed for long term thinking. Our decisions are made based on durability  over speed and on whether the business can perform consistently, instead of expanding quickly.

The hospitality industry is facing real challenges. Labour shortages, rising costs, inflation, and economic uncertainty are forcing operators to rethink how they build and retain teams. In such as environment, a ‘people strategy’ in my view, is central to whether a business survives.

Training and development are often discussed in hospitality, but too rarely treated as a serious operational function. Over time, we have taken a different approach. Training is how culture is embedded, how standards are protected, and, it’s how leadership is developed internally rather than imported, when problems arise.

Looking ahead to 2026, structured employee training, and development are a central focus of Swiss Butter. Our business is about creating clear progression, building capable managers, and treating hospitality as a profession, rather than a stopgap. If the industry wants to attract and retain talent, it has to offer more than just flexible shifts and a free uniform.

The simplicity of our menu often draws attention, but it is behind the scenes where most of the hard work happens and for us comes from systems that hold under pressure which are consistent. Our training is a company-wide standard, it’s consistent and it’s respected by our teams.

For us, operating in the UK has reinforced these lessons because it’s a competitive and unforgiving market. Customers are discerning, teams are mobile and trends move quickly and it’s the businesses that scale without structure that struggle to recover once cracks start to appear.

What I have learned through this journey is that growth is not about doing necessarily more. It is about doing the same thing well, repeatedly, wherever you are operating. This requires restraint, patience, and a willingness to invest in people long before the returns are anywhere visible.

Swiss Butter’s growth is often framed around virality or simplicity however, the reality is, it’s operational. It’s about building a business that can function without constant intervention and expand without losing its identity. For founders building in hospitality today, the real question isn’t about how quickly you can grow, but whether your business is ready to grow at all. The next phase of the industry will reward those who have a clear vision, invest in their teams, and resist the temptation to outsource responsibility too soon.

 

Eddy Massaad is the founder and CEO of Swiss Butter, the globally expanding casual steak-and-sauce restaurant concept known for its focused menu and signature butter-based sauce. Since opening the first Swiss Butter in Beirut in 2017, Eddy has led the brand’s growth into multiple international markets, from the Middle East to London and Madrid, with a philosophy grounded in simplicity, operational excellence, and consistent quality.

With over two decades of experience in the hospitality and food-and-beverage industry, he built Swiss Butter around a minimalist yet highly disciplined approach, deliberately owning and operating each location to maintain control over the guest experience. Under his leadership, the brand has sparked a global revival of the steak frites category and is poised for further expansion without relying on franchising.

 

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