Kemp outlines new Punch culture

The head of Punch's tenanted division deserves credit, says The PMA Team

Deborah Kemp, boss of Punch Taverns' tenanted division, stepped into the lion's den last week - the annual business day of the Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers (ALMR).

Many of its members run Punch leased pubs and hold less than complimentary views about aspects of the pubco/tenant relationship.

It's fair to say, however, that Kemp surprised her audience with a mixture of honesty and humility. She's been in charge of Punch's tenanted division for just over a year and has set about the difficult job of re-shaping its culture - she compared the challenge to piloting a super-tanker.

The reaction of some senior pubco bosses to criticism is to attack those who point out uncomfortable truths. Punch has obligations to its shareholders, so its primary instinct is one of commercial hard-headedness.

But part of this commercial approach is an obligation, for the sake of a better future, to listen really hard. It's a winning approach to admit failings because it embodies the prospect of change and disarms those who are levelling complaints.

It suggests, in the case of the pubco/tenant relationship, where the pubco holds such enormous contractual power, that there's a human touch at play.

Kemp may have startled many in her ALMR audience by the extent to which she was prepared to admit failings on Punch's side.

She expressed sympathy with licensees who complained about the business acumen of some of her business development managers. There was also an admission that Punch staff had been using dehumanising language that inferred licensees were expendable.

For example some staff members, in referring to problem licensees, had apparently said, "I'll get rid of them, I'll churn them" and claimed they had "caught the pub [not the licensee] doing this or doing that".

Kemp said she had sought to change attitudes by starting a much more proactive engagement process and by listening to customers. She added that she had urged BDMs to learn from licensees and had begun to gauge the kind of marketing support her licensees actually wanted.

She stressed the importance of helping licensees manage their cash-flow, telling the audience: "Punch is not as big, bad and ugly as we're sometimes portrayed. We're much more responsive and flexible in responding to customers' needs."

None of this softens the truth that running a pub is, like politics, a "rough trade". Some licensees - some of them running Punch pubs - fail dramatically, and can experience devastating financial losses.

Kemp's move to change the culture at Punch will, as her super-tanker analogy suggests, take time as it runs up against entrenched mindsets among her staff. But Kemp deserves huge credit for her radical change of approach.

Interestingly, her boss, Giles Thorley, hosting a table of journalists for lunch later in the day, echoed her tone.

Reflecting on the very early days of Punch, he described its reputation as "appalling" and stressed the importance of ongoing renewal and improvement in pubco/tenant relations. "We've got to try harder to get our message across," he said. "We're not going back to the bad old days."

Some licensees and rival tenanted pub companies will dismiss all this as public relations flummery.

But I believe that a company's culture is shaped from the very top, and Kemp and Thorley are sending out a fairly powerful message.