You Matter Until the End: Paulius Kriksciunas of Bupa Care Homes on Personal Brand, Imposter Syndrome, and Why Every Chef in Care Deserves to Feel Proud
Paulius Kriksciunas started at the very bottom at St. Christopher's Hospice — the first modern hospice in the world — and was told by his head chef to go and work in a hotel if he wanted to be a real chef. He didn't listen. Sixteen years later he's National Hospitality Manager for Bupa Care Homes, and his mission is to change how the sector sees itself from the inside out. In this episode he talks about building a personal brand, a Grand Final at Edgbaston for 140 guests, and a young chef who wasn't sure he wanted to admit he worked in a care kitchen.
Paulius Kriksciunas didn't follow the advice. When he started at St. Christopher's Hospice — the South London institution established in 1967 by Dame Cicely Saunders, widely credited as the founder of the modern hospice movement — his head chef told him plainly that if he wanted to be a real chef, he needed to go and work in a hotel or a restaurant.
He stayed.
By 2015 he was head chef, aged twenty-five, and had learned something that shaped everything that came after: working in healthcare wasn't a lesser version of hospitality, it was a more complex version of it. The stakes were higher. The range was wider. The barbecues he catered for five thousand people and the oil visits and the weddings ran alongside the patient meal service, and all of it had to be right. He left hospital kitchens with a 360-degree hospitality education that most of his restaurant peers didn't have.
In this episode, host Rob Spence asks Paulius about his philosophy of developing teams — a philosophy he first articulated when he moved from head chef into a catering manager role and set himself a clear target: build a team so good they could run the service without him. He's still working to that principle. He describes his approach to professional development in terms of personal brand — treating himself as a business, being his own CEO and marketing department simultaneously — and he's trying to get the people he works with into the same mindset. Asked on a LinkedIn post what three things he'd learned since moving to London, he landed on being competitive, and doing the unseen work: volunteering, raising your hand, accepting the uncomfortable thing because that's where confidence actually grows. He forgets the third thing live on air, and is entirely unbothered about it.
It's that story of the young chef which leads to one of the episode's most direct moments. Paulius visited the same chef a few weeks earlier and discovered he was embarrassed to tell his friends where he worked. He didn't want to admit he was in a care kitchen. Paulus spent an hour talking to him about why he should be proud; then took him to the HRC show at ExCeL, introduced him to suppliers, showed him the wider world that connects to the kitchen he works in every day.
His question for the next guest: what can we do to make chefs in our industry feel proud?
Subscribe wherever you listen — and if you've ever thought the care sector was a quiet backwater, Paulius is going to change your mind.
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