Stephen Gould has jumped from pubco giant Punch to regional brewer Everards. By Mark Stretton.
When Stephen Gould announced he was leaving Punch to join a family brewer, colleagues said he would be gripped with boredom inside two weeks.
The reaction might have seemed arrogant but you can appreciate the sentiment - why leave a young, thrusting, newly floated pub-hungry business for a "sleepy" regional?
"This business has tradition but also a lot of ambition," said Stephen, Everards new trade director. "The growth plan is in place, there is £20m available for pub acquisitions and the company is committed to building the best tenanted estate in the business."
Stephen and his fellow board members are not the only people in the pub industry to aspire to build the best estate in the land but Everards' would seem to have fairly healthy foundations already in place.
The Leicestershire business has 132 tenancies, average barrelage per pub per year is 360 and average rent is £26,600. Stephen says the average of 360 barrels includes many food pubs, not just wet-led houses.
The desire to spend some of the £20m will be tempered by an awareness not to over-pay. "We are definitely under-pubbed and naturally very keen to grow," he said. "Clearly we will only pay sensible prices but we could easily add another 50 pubs without any changes to our structure."
In six months the company has added seven houses, most recently two pubs from Mitchells & Butlers - the Royal Blenheim in Oxford and the White Hart in Headington.
Until last year the company also had a much smaller managed business. Lacking the critical mass to make managed pubs pay it took the decision to quit and transferred most of the 36 houses to tenancy. A handful of the largest houses were sold, including a five-strong package to Noble House, which fetched £10.6m.
"Most successful businesses are focused and clear about what they want to do," said Stephen. "The decision was based on the amount of central costs needed for those houses. It doesn't pay to be spread too thinly - you become okay at a lot of things but not very good in any one area."
That said, Stephen has a broad role which stretches beyond the pubs, to oversee freetrade beer sales, national accounts, and purchasing. "Usually when you are approached, the offer doesn't quite fit with what you want from your next career move," said Stephen. "But I wanted to develop and felt it was time for a wide-ranging role."
Naturally Stephen had some reservations about leaving Punch for Everards. "The main concern was I was leaving a role that I enjoyed and in the five years we had achieved a lot," he said. During his time as head of recruitment and training at Punch, Stephen and his team were recognised several times at the National Industry Training Awards (NITAs).
"The initial perception was that the company I would move to would be just too traditional but I soon discovered that would not be the case," he said.
It will surprise many people to know that Leicester is the second most creative place in the UK, after London, measured by the number of new companies springing up.
Leicester, it would seem, is a vibrant hotbed of entrepreneurial talent and Stephen says the 154-year-old Everards business was merely among the first in a long line of enterprising businesses.
As you pull up to the brewery, preconceptions of a Victorian building in leafy settings are shattered - the site looks every bit the modern factory, set in the middle of a retail park. The company moved there about 20 years ago so CAMRA have just about got used to the idea.
Annual volumes in the beer division, led by flagship ale Tiger Best Bitter, are 60,000 and the company also uses contract brewing and kegging to soak up overheads. It wants to grow the Tiger brand in a considered way. "We don't think the answer is listings in JD Wetherspoon, although that is a form of advertising in itself," said Stephen. "There is a danger of getting carried away with distribution, which can simply erode margins.
"We have focused on good quality volume. Tiger is such a great name - there are so many things we can do with it. It's a high quality product but it's not one of the major brands and that's where we want it to be."
Stephen, 35, read Sociology at North Staffordshire Polytechnic, where he produced a dissertation on the family-run JCB business. He joined Bass in 1989 and looked after 30 managed houses in Liverpool as an area manager before moving across to Bass Lease, which was bought by Hugh Osmond's Punch Taverns. Now that Stephen has moved on from Punch surely it is time to lift the lid on the inner workings of the company licensees love to hate?
Will he confess that he could no longer live with the guilt of working for such a monstrous organisation? "Relationships are better than most people think," he said.
"What some people don't understand is that the relationship is built on both the pub company and the tenant wanting to move a pub on, improve it, get trading up.
"I think the challenge at Punch or Enterprise Inns is to manage the minority. There might be as many as 400 people in the bottom end of the estate - that many people can make a lot of noise."
Stephen says people forget it involves risk on both sides and that the wrong appointment of a licensee can imprison a pub for up to 10 years. "Putting someone in your freehold for three, five, 10 years is far more important than recruiting an internal member of staff," he said.
"As an industry we need more selection scrutiny and more training. You cannot play around the edges with training - we have to have a proper mandate."
At Everards, Stephen has already held a four-day conference for support staff, to establish the future shape of the tenanted business.
Next on the agenda is to execute the strategy and find some high quality freeholds for the right prices. "I am delighted to say I'm not bored and am extremely happy," he said. "Selling the managed estate was a major decision for Everards and there is a real desire to ensure the tenanted estate grows and performs as it should."
Growing ambition: (l-r) chairman Richard Everard, MD Nick Lloyd and Stephen Gould
Related articles:
Gould quits Punch to join Everards (22 January 2003)