Steve Haslam: from bogs to riches

It all started when, many years ago, the gasman called and changed the course of Haslam's life. However, more recently, the pub entrepreneur has starred on Channel 5 show Rich House to Poor House, where the dad of three revealed the peaks and troughs of his life.

On Rich House to Poor House, which aired last night (26 October), Steve Haslam and his family swapped houses with Neil and Louise Brimicombe and their children from Watford.

In the show, the families swap lives and gain perspective on how the other half live.

But, it is Haslam's journey in the pub industry that is the big story here. So how did he become one of the country's most successful licensees?

Somewhere out there there's a gasman, probably putting his feet up by now, oblivious to the part he played one morning long ago in the history of one of the 21st-century pub trade's most exciting operators.

In less than five frantic years, Steve Haslam has built TLC Inns into a vastly profitable, award-winning multiple. He's done it, some would say, the hard way, with three Enterprise leaseholds. A typical tenant in one way, he doesn't want to reveal the figures. But they are big.

In August he opened his first freehold, the Henny Swan near Sudbury in Suffolk, bought from Punch and already performing better than ever before. He's got a formula alright. Nothing magical — a simple 60:40 split in favour of food, combined with pristine standards, non-scrimping investment, an eye for effective design, and great service. But what about that gasman?

Rewind back to the 1970s, and little Steve Haslam is gazing entranced as a man walks into his house, turns a key in the gas meter, allows a silvery rush of coins to pour into his bag, and walks out.

"I wanted to be the guy who emptied the gas meter," he recalls. "To me he represented another world; the real world. I wanted to get out there and make a difference. I wanted to be an entrepreneur."

Not that he'd have known the word then. Haslam grew up in Essex, in what he terms "a lower-working class family". His father was a cleaner and put all the money he earned into slots — whether they were in meters or fruit machines.

Haslam left school at 15 with no qualifications, and faced a future stacking shelves in Sainsbury's.

"Or I could break the mould." Which he had already begun to do, making a profit from a fruit machine he'd bought for his dad, and then buying more and selling them to local cafes.

Millionaire at 25​

At 16 he started his own cleaning company. Knowing he needed a niche, he turned to cleaning pubs. He'd start at midnight and work 18 hours a day. To cut a long, mad, story short, he was a millionaire at 25, bust at 28 and back in the money again at 35, this time with a building business, though still working for the pub industry he'd got to know intimately well.

He'd even married into it, after falling for pub manager Jo Drain. Running a pub together was something they'd talked about, but not seriously — until Haslam did a dilapidations job for Greene King on the Cutter in Ely, Cambridgeshire, a white elephant of a pub it leased from Enterprise.

He knew Greene King wanted rid of it, and after showing it to Drain, neither had any doubt it was the pub they wanted. But doubts crept in after they started operating, early in 2006.

"After a week I was wondering what I'd done," says Haslam. "We were seeing the same 10 people coming in every day, and that wasn't my idea of fun. So we refurbished it at a cost of £400,000. Every-body we knew said it was insanity. We winged it. We knew what we wanted, but it was the biggest risk we'd ever taken."

His model for the Cutter, and what would become the model for all his pubs, was the managed houses he'd cleaned and rebuilt in the 1980s and 1990s — the Harvesters and Vintage Inns.

"It evolved out of what I'd seen the big pubcos doing, the way they got people flocking into their pubs. They were taking £30,000 to £50,000 a week. And they weren't even that great. I felt we could do it better than anyone else. My mind went back to the man emptying the gas meter."

Morland Brewery manager​

Haslam brought in Richard Howe, a former Morland Brewery manager he'd met 20 years previously, to run the pub. Suddenly, everything clicked.

"From the moment we reopened the doors, it was full. Now we're in year five and still in growth. It makes that £400,000 we first spent look like peanuts.

"We'd never thought of getting more than one pub, but we'd found a formula that worked, so we said, let's do it again."

Their second Enterprise lease was the White Horse at Ramsden Heath, Essex. It won Family Pub of the Year at the recent Great British Pub Awards. But it very nearly didn't happen.

By October 2008, refurbishment costs for this pub were soaring out of control, from a budgeted £500,000 to £1.5m. Enterprise pulled its weight, increasing its investment from £350,000 to nearly £1m. Haslam had to find the rest.

"People said we couldn't do it again, but the business was our lives, and it would be the first time ever that we'd failed. It was a defining moment, and we forged on." But then, something even worse happened. Howe died.

"It was devastating," says Haslam, the memory clearly still sore. "It was the point when I could have left the industry. I just felt it wasn't worth it. It was a month before I'd go back in the door. But when I did, it was like a light being switched on again."

The pub Haslam calls his "baby" gave him the will to carry on. Last year, he took on another — the Windmill near Peterborough — and now the Henny Swan.

"We'll continue to grow. I'll be happy when we're running 15 of the best pubs in the country. But we'll never get so big that we start compromising on standards.

"As I see it, the industry's biggest problem is its failure to evolve. Expectations have changed; people are looking for a great experience. I've tried to piece that experience together, introducing sophistication and quality, without moving too far away from being a pub. We are working to bring people back to the pub. It's a passion. We must be at our best every single day."

Understanding the business​

So if Haslam can do it, does he have any sympathy for other Enterprise lessees, who perhaps haven't been quite as successful?

"Everyone who takes on a pub has the opportunity to decide whether that business is viable," he says. "A big part of the problem is people not understanding how to run a business.

"Failures are going to happen. I have sympathy for people who've done their utmost to make a business work, but little sympathy for people who've paid too much for their pub assignment — and no sympathy for people who just moan about it. Pubcos have a share of the blame — but there's no argument that's it's all the pubcos' fault."

Haslam himself, the boy who — perhaps not quite like the gasman — wanted to make a difference, is now committed to doing so in the pub industry.

"I'm living the dream," he says. "Every day I pinch myself as I get into my Bentley, and think 'Oh my god! I've gone from cleaning toilets to the top'."