Darran Lingley tells Robyn Black how he and his team have built business at the Five Bells in Colne Engaine, Colchester, Essex.
How I got here
This is our second pub, the first one was a Greene King tenancy, which we managed to really turn around in the time we were there. As a result when we decided to go for a freehold eight years ago our business record stood us in good stead to get funding from the banks, which of course were lending back then.
We looked at a lot of pubs before settling on this one, but the important thing about the Five Bells is that it is in an area both my wife, Caroline, who runs the business alongside me, and I know well. Caroline grew up here and the combination of having family nearby for support and our knowledge of the area was the deciding factor. Local knowledge is everything.
Our toilets and kitchen We were stretched to the limit financially to buy the pub so there wasn't very much left for capital investment, but there were two areas we knew we were going to have to tackle. The first was the toilets, on which we spent £11,000 as soon as we got in. They had to be completely ripped out and replaced, but it was worth it in the end — aside from the importance of getting facilities like loos right if you want to attract the right sort of customer, we also won a 5-star Loo of the Year Award! The second job was the kitchen, which we waited for a while to do, but four years in we ripped it out and rebuilt a new one from scratch. It's about five times bigger than the old one. We kept costs down by doing a lot of the work ourselves, I worked in construction in a previous life and my father-in-law is quite handy too, so he helped out, but we were still learning a lot of it as we went along. It took 14 weeks in total and we only closed the kitchen for one of those weeks. Obviously we didn't want to lose the food business for a whole week, so we decided to run a beer festival over that period, turning the bar and restaurant into a beer hall and serving cold food, hand held pies and hog roasts — basically anything that didn't need cooking in a kitchen. It was a huge success and we've run one every year since then. Our beer and wine In the five days of our annual beer festival we sell about 48 firkins of real ale. It's been a huge business builder for us over the years, bringing in a lot of new business and publicity, as well as making a name for ourselves as a good real-ale pub. Real-ale fans are very loyal to pubs they know serve good ales and will travel far and wide to get a good pint, so cementing our reputation for real ale was a key strategy for us from the start and we are up again 25% year-on-year in terms of real-ale sales. We now have six different ales on all the time. Only Greene King IPA is on constantly, the rest we rotate frequently — we usually have nine or 10 different beers a week. Most of the ales we sell are from local brewers who I deal with direct. I buy in bulk, and even taking into account the extra work all the negotiating involves, it still delivers better margins for both me and the brewers. Wine has also been a big growth area for us. We had this idea that we wanted to make it accessible, to take the snobbishness out of wine and we wanted people to move away from the reliance on buying by price. The result was the "Wine Jukebox". This is simply a wine list on which every wine sells for the same price — £4.05 for a 175ml glass, £5.15 for a 250ml glass and £15.25 a bottle. There are 20 wines on there in total and it has been a huge success, with wine sales up 18% to 20% year-on-year. As a result we recently introduced a "Posh List" to encourage people to trade up. It's just eight wines for now, all just by the bottle for £26.00, which is a very good deal as I work off a cash margin on those wines to make them more affordable and much better value. Food and keeping costs low We're a wet-led pub still, our split is about 55:45 in favour of our wet sales, The food offer, however, is important to us, as it drives the drink sales, but the wet side of the business helps create more of a pub atmosphere. We have about 70 covers in the restaurant, 40 in the bar and another 30 outside, but you can eat anything anywhere — I didn't want eating here to be a stuffy, formal experience. We keep costs low in the kitchen by doing a lot of the butchery ourselves. For example we could never afford to sell venison at the price we do if we bought it prepared rather than as a carcass. We also smoke a lot ourselves — meats, cheese and so on — and we make our own chutneys too, it's great for margins but it also becomes its own marketing device. Our plans for the future We do a lot here ourselves, but we've still got plenty planned for the future. We want to add a microbrewery, for which we are just awaiting planning permission and we would like to buy some more land out the front so we can grow our own produce and even put in a vineyard to make our own wine. I would look into buying another pub and rolling out the concept and brand, as it were, but not until this place is running to at least 400% capacity! Facts 'n' stats Licensees: Darran and Caroline Lingley Turnover in 2002: £180,000 per year Turnover now: £700,000 per year Wet:dry split: 55:45 Wet GP: 60.5% Dry GP: 69% Staff: 32, 14 full time Staff wages as a percentage of turnover: 28% Importance of training We'll be spending between £30,000 and £40,000 on training this year, which is significantly more than we usually do, but we had a really excellent year last year and so we are investing to try and make sure that performance is the norm rather than the exception. We get as much as we can from Government training funds, whatever they want to chuck at us we'll take! As a result we've good staff retention and highly-motivated employees. Good training is one of the fundamentals of a good pub business. One bright idea We run a few regular events, such as Sunday jazz and the beer festivals, but one of the most successful are our Buskers Nights. We hold six of them a year and they are some of our biggest nights, with a 100% uplift in sales compared to a normal evening and they don't even cost much to put on, as we already own a lot of the PA equipment. We usually ask a local band to host the night and everyone else just comes along and plugs in to play, we can have up to 20 bands in an evening and it will be packed out.