Surviving the Pandemic & Learning to Build a Resilient Organisation: Restaurateur Markus Gjelseth

As part of an ongoing series focusing on business leaders, business owners and entrepreneurs and how they face adversity and build resilience with themselves and their  organisation, Markus Gjelseth joins me this week.

He is a  restaurateur who owns and operates, alongside his brother Joppe Gjelseth, three of Oslo's most known restaurants: Louise, Lekter'n, and Pastis.

In our conversation Marcus speaks to how the pandemic and the subsequent health scare, social distancing and lockdowns affected their company Mat og Drikke Gruppen and their three restaurants.

Markus speaks candidly about the very difficult road that he, his brother and their leadership team had to walk. During the pandemic, they had to make many difficult choices that included trade-offs, and not always knowing how those decisions would play out. The lessons learned were hard earned and quickly applied.

Markus talks about how the importance of transparency, communication, support, well-being and psychological safety were some of the critical components that helped the company to buffer and survive the pandemic.

In this episode, we explore the following questions:

• How did the pandemic and lockdowns initially affect your restaurants?
• How did it affect the morale, the mindset and your employees?
• With so many things going sideways because of the pandemic, how did you prioritise the organisations focus
• What did you learn about yourself over the last two years? How would you describe your headspace when facing so many challenges?
• How did you and your organisation deal with all the uncertainty?
• How has the last two years made your organisation more resilience?
• With the advantages of hindsight, what would today's market advice yesterday is Markus?

Markus Gjelseth:

"I was born and raised in a very good and loving family with my parents being both entrepreneurs within the restaurant industry. I started working doing the dishes when I was 12  years old and have been working in and out of the company since then.

I have a bachelor degree in business management , but first really learned about teamwork and leadership while sailing the pacific ocean with four friends for one year.

After trying and failing to start and run a company that was created to change the world education system, I went back into the family business and took over the running of the company together with my brother. Now we have been running  Mat og Drikke Gruppen together for 2.5 years, with two of them being during the pandemic."

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We will be kicking off Season 8 in August 2025. In July, we will be rerunning 4 of our most listened to episodes that share skills and knowledge about building resilience, well-being and living with intention. Thanks for your to listenership.