New Spirit Group boss to restructure company
Mike Tye, Spirit Group's newly appointed managing director, has announced sweeping changes to the organisation in an effort to reverse its flagging fortunes.
In an internal memo to staff seen by ThePublican.com, Tye said that while Spirit had "all the ingredients to become a great business" it was not hitting its budgetary targets.
"The last financial year was a difficult trading year, and whilst the business has made considerable progress in terms of 'professional retail'… we have not achieved our sales budgets for the year and when compared against our competitors we are within the bottom quartile," he wrote.
The performance of the Spirit business was "lagging behind our major competitors and has been for a while", and overhead costs were also "too high for a business of our size and style", he went on.
In the memo Tye, a Whitbread veteran who replaced Andrew Knight as head of Spirit last month, revealed that in order to respond to the changing nature of the pub market and the UK business economy and to "unleash" the group's potential, its operations, marketing and finance departments would be overhauled.
Changes to the operations function sees teams split into five regions: North & Scotland; London; South; West, and East.
A regional, rather than purely divisional split would, among other factors, help towards a better understanding of customers' needs in their own location, Tye believed.
Each regional team will report to a new team of regional operations directors, with the existing structure of Senior BDM and operations manager roles ceasing altogether.
Spirit has also re-jigged its central operations structure. A new role, operations support director, will report into retail director Richard Carter.
On the marketing side, Spirit is creating the new position of drink category manager, plus a new senior position called head of concepts, "to drive further development of our concepts across the whole of the market", said Tye.
Offer managers will be renamed concept managers, while a range of other new roles, including marketing communications manager and a head of insight and planning were being introduced.
The changes mean Martyn Drake, director of product ranging and planning, was leaving the business, Tye said.
The group is also changing a number of reporting lines in its finance team in order to "be better equipped to meet the challenges of the business" and speed up decision making; the existing structure did not allow for this, he wrote.
Tye hinted at a headcount reduction across its finance department, but said Spirit was currently in a consultation process.
He concluded his memo by saying he believed the changes "will enable us to deliver on our business commitments over the coming year".
ThePublican.com contacted Tye, who had not returned calls as this story went live.
Meanwhile, Spirit's senior management remains in talks with its pub managers and other staff over its plans to create a single employment contract. The move is seen by a number of managers as detrimental to benefits such as sick pay and redundancy entitlement, a claim Spirit rejects.
The group also officially confirmed this week that it was transferring 50 managed pubs to leased businesses through property agents Christie + Co.
