Golden tickets, Wimbledon garden parties and free soft drinks are helping Steve Holland boost turnover to more than £1m at the Waterman. Robyn Lewis reports.
How I got here
I started off in Pizza Hut as a kitchen porter when I was 14 and the last job I had before I started working here was as business development and operations manager at Heston Blumenthal's Hinds Head in Bray, so I feel I've experienced a wide range of what the sector has to offer, including managing huge events at venues like the O2 Arena.
I left the Hinds Head because my wife and I started a family. I wanted to get a better work-life balance, so I moved back to Warwickshire and set up a consultancy, Just-Inspire.
The Waterman is just down the road from where I live and, although it was in a great location, it wasn't doing very well. I felt it had lost some direction and so I approached the Arkwright family which owns it — and the Hatton estate, which it's on — and simply asked if they wanted some help. Essentially I now act much like an operations manager with the general manager reporting to me.
Boosting trade
Working with Heston is something I tend to keep quiet about, as I don't want to create the impression we are doing anything like that here. This is very much a pub not a restaurant, and because of that we don't really talk about the fact our chef has a Michelin background either and we put "sauce" instead of "jus" on the menu. There's a fine line between pubs and restaurants these days, but in my view the difference is that a pub should offer great food, but in a relaxed, informal way.
The food we do here is very much based on local ingredients in home-cooked, down-to-earth dishes. Our lunch trade is better than our evening trade at the moment — we do between 60 and 100 lunches on a weekday and only about 20 to 30 evening meals on a comparable day.
This is something we are working on and have a number of ideas for boosting evening trade. Some we have already implemented, including an offer for designated drivers to get soft drinks for free all evening. I'm hoping this will make people more inclined to make the effort to come here, as the only way of getting here is by car.
We also run an early-bird promotion, offering two courses for £10 if you eat between 5.30pm and 7.30pm and a pie-and-a-pint night on Tuesdays, which has proved popular.
Our wet:dry split is about 40:60, which we have to be happy with really, as people have to drive to get here and that's always going to impact on wet sales.
Wet sales
In terms of our wet sales, we do very well with cask ales, which make up about 40% of drinks bought. We have four on at any one time, which we get from all over the country, the only criteria is that they are as interesting as possible.
Our current best seller is Betty Stogs. We sell a pint of cask ale for between £2.80 and £3.20 — people seem happy enough to pay a bit more if there's a decent story behind it, and it's good quality, of course.
It's quite expensive to buy and relatively labour intensive to do properly so there's no point selling it so cheaply you don't make a decent margin.
Wine sales aren't huge here, but hopefully these will grow as we increase our food business in the evenings. Currently it's the low to medium-priced wines that sell the best and we do Champagne by the glass, which does quite well at the weekend especially.
Booking management
We've spent the last six months developing the website and that's now fully up and running. Our current project is a new bespoke software system to help us with bookings management and it will give us an online booking facility as well.
We're spending about £2,500 on that, which is a lot more expensive than some other systems, but when it is completed it will also give us the capability to capture information about customers. So, for example, if someone calls who has been before we'll know who it is before we even pick up the phone and we will be able to see all sorts of details, whether they need a high chair, for example, or if Mr Jones likes his tap water at room temperature, and so on.
Service is the most important thing to me. The industry forgets that people put a lot of faith in you when they come to your venue, whether it's a celebration of something life-changing or catching up with friends they haven't seen for a while, they've put trust and money in you to deliver a great experience. It's vital we keep that in mind at all times.
Accommodation
Other initiatives include promoting our private dining room for parties, weddings and meetings. We are looking at adding accommodation rooms — only about five rooms at this stage — but done to a good standard, one with a four-poster bed and so on. We think this will bring in more business, particularly if we offer dinner or breakfast deals alongside.
In time I'll concentrate on making a good impression on some of the food guides — a favourable mention in some of those is a good way of driving business. I'd say we are about 40% of the way along the path in terms of what we want to achieve here, so there's plenty more to do.
Golden ticket
We've had to work to get the locals back in, as this used to be known as a bit of a bikers' pub and that put people off.
Many pubs now advertise on A-boards or do promotions such as dine for £10 offers, but I think you have to do something different from everyone else to really create an impact. So I came up with a "golden ticket" idea to encourage locals to give us a try.
It's possible to find online the database of all the houses sold in an area in the last decade, so I got those addresses and jumbled them up randomly. Then, every Monday we pick five out of a hat and the general manager goes to the houses and invites the families — up to five members of each — to a free dinner any night within the next five days. It gets people talking about us. People are always asking "when is it my turn?" and already people are making repeat visits after their initial one, so it has worked.
Sensible spending
This summer we'll be ramping up the number of events we run here. We're already promoting Wimbledon garden parties, when we'll be hiring a huge LCD screen for the garden over the finals weekend and selling lots of themed food and drink such as strawberries & cream and Pimm's.
The same weekend we're organising two evening events as well, to make the most out of the hired screen. So we're showing Grease on the Friday evening and Footloose on the Saturday with appropriate music and a hog roast.
If you are spending money on bringing in any specialist equipment, it's good business sense to try and get more than one use out of it.
Facts 'n' stats
Pub: The Waterman, Hatton, Warwickshire
Landlord: The Arkwright family
Turnover: £1m annually, aiming for £1.4m
Wet:dry split: 40:60
GP wet: 69%
GP dry: 72%
Staff: 24, 17 part-time
Staff wages as a percentage of turnover: 29%