The art of moaning

I was having a breakfast meeting with the chief executive of a large pub group last week and in the course of our conversation I asked him how often he got out and about and into his pubs.

"Once a month, at least," came his reply. Not a lot then, but reasonable enough considering the time of the man in question is taken up with corporate matters and that he has an operational team whose more frequent presence in the estate is doubtlessly far more useful to the group's tenants.

But what did he make of his monthly visits? The overriding impression was that the tenant moans, he said. Moans about the price of beer, the stock delivery times, the rent they have to pay, the problems they have in getting hold of an engineer if something technical goes wrong in the pub… the list of gripes was certainly a long one. But the executive didn't seem particularly phased by this. In fact he seemed to take such negativity as a positive, if you see what I mean.

"If they say they've asked the BDM to pop in about something and yet the BDM hasn't popped in then I'll ask the BDM why not," he explained.

"If they've phoned several times for a guy to come and clean the lines and still the guy hasn't come then I'll want to know why and get someone to get onto it."

Corporate types are not known for being that robust in the face of criticism but if there's a lesson to be learned here it's that if you're a tenant you should not be backwards in coming forwards, and if you're the grand fromage​ at a pub company you could do a lot worse than listening to your tenants directly.

Even if all they seem to do is moan.