Paul Sullivan: man of the (pub) people

Things are on the move at Wadworth, and Paul Sullivan is the man in the driving seat. He talks to Phil Mellows about the art of understanding pubs — and why free beer is no joke.

First time he came to Devizes, as a young salesman for the drinks wholesaler Matthew Clark, Paul Sullivan interrupted a publican in the middle of his morning clean.

"'Can I talk to you about our range of spirits?', I said. 'I'll listen if you Hoover,' he said. So that's what I did. I Hoovered the pub for him."

It was an experience that might have put off many an ambitious executive but, looking back, Sullivan's early encounter with the eccentricities of the pub trade convinces him that he ended up in the right job. As he puts it, "this business is about people, not numbers".

When he joined Wadworth four years ago and made his base in the Wiltshire town where the family brewer, which last year celebrated its 125th birthday, still delivers beer by horse-drawn dray, Sullivan was facing a very different prospect. The wine house he worked for was being taken over by international drinks giant Constellation.

"I didn't want to go with Constellation, I wasn't that keen to work for a US business, so I took redundancy. I saw the ad for the Wadworth job in The Times of all places. My first sales job was selling spirits to Wadworth pubs. I remember coming to Devizes and seeing the shire horses and thinking 'how mad is that!'

"What swung me was the beer. I like ale, it's fascinating. But if I'd have known the full job description I wouldn't have touched it with a bargepole," he admits.

"There was so much I didn't know. I'd never really dealt with publicans. They were just people I gave money to across the bar. Understanding the pub trade has been fascinating. Every day is a school day for me.

"It was a shock, too, coming here from selling fast-moving consumer goods to supermarkets. It's much more real. You're dealing with real people, whereas before I felt I was part of a machine."

Wadworth has changed a lot since Sullivan arrived, and change has accelerated in the few months since his role expanded to sales and marketing director following the departure of the long-serving Fred West.

"We've taken the first steps of a significant culture shift," he says. "We've started seeing the organisation as a proper business. The way we do things is changing. Where we used to take a lot for granted, now people are starting to realise that while we have a stable business we're in a declining market so we've got to be better than the competition. We can't sit back.

"We're picking up new tools and techniques. In the past we've not allowed technology to do the job for us. Now we have fantastic technology that enables us to see the business better.

"'We've always done it that way' is a dirty phrase here now. Evolution is happening. Everything is up for debate. Everyone is encouraged to question everyone else.

"And I believe the solutions we need are here in the business — we don't need consultants."

The gains are already starting to show. Beer sales are in single-digit growth and flagship ale 6X is recovering from a misjudged spell as a national brand.

"The problem was that when it was distributed by Whitbread it was everywhere and people got bored with it," he says. "We're still getting over the sexy years," alluding to the ads that once tried in vain to sex up a resolutely unsexy, traditional ale.

Swordfish, a beer laced with Pusser's rum, was a surprise hit on draught over the winter, and Wadworth's golden ale, Horizon, is being redesigned in readiness for a big push over the summer.

"The supermarket business is improving, we're dabbling in ex-ports and the freetrade is thriving," adds Sullivan. "So we're going in the right direction."

On the 250-pub Wadworth tied estate, tenant churn has been brought down to 10% a year. "That's good, and it's improving," says Sullivan. "Eighteen months ago it was pretty awful, but we're recruiting better business people now."

It sounds like those pubs are coming in for some hard-nosed scrutiny under the new regime, though.

"We've been a hostage to history," he says. "We have all these lovely pubs, but are they making money? We need a return for shareholders.

"So we've started looking at every single pub and asking whether we should invest or divest. There are nice pubs that are in villages that have — literally — been bypassed. Nobody wants to close the last pub in the village but the village has to use it, and even out this far there are so many people commuting to London. The market has changed.

"It's back to reality — the profitability of our customers. Some pubs

will go. We'd like a more compact estate with more big pubs."

Investment​

On the investment side of the equation, Sullivan looks forward to focusing the brewer's efforts, making best use of the land and space the Wadworth estate has going spare, adding letting rooms and expanding kitchens where appropriate. The underlying challenge for Sullivan, though, is to get his pubs selling more beer.

"We can't tell people to drink more these days so we need to get more people drinking the same amount.

"And if we can increase footfall at our pubs over the next 18 months, if we can sell more beer, it's a virtuous circle that benefits both parties in the tie. Cask ale is a great USP for pubs, yet only 35% of adults drink it, compared to the 72% who'll have a glass of wine.

"There's a whole gamut of flavours and styles in beer, more than in wine. The microbrewers have been amazing for the category. BrewDog is fascinating. What it does isn't to everyone's taste, it's a bit extreme, but it gets beer noticed and brings people into the category.

"You can compare beer with wine 15 years ago. Wine was intimidating then. Now it's democratised.

"I don't know why we don't give beer away as samples, like they do wine, so we can get people to understand the flavours, the colours and styles. But free beer is a joke. We must keep breaking down those taboos.

"Pubs have to engage with people. There are so many other things licensees have to do, we've lost the art of selling beer and we have to get that back, to create conversation around beer. It's going to take time. The difficulty is the churn of pub staff."

New products are promised.

"We're looking at how we can learn from the wine market — and I'm not talking about Beer to Dine For," Sullivan smiles, thinking of the Greene King experiment of a few years back that didn't quite hit the mark.

"We need to access other areas of the drinks market, to get other people into beer. We're working on recipes now. It will initially be small scale, on-trade focused. We ought to do something exclusive to pubs. But there are more questions than answers about it at the moment.

"Pubs have to constantly generate reasons to visit," he goes on. "And we have so many ideas there aren't enough hours in the day to implement them all.

"There are lots of opportunities. The issue is identifying the right opportunity at the right pub at the right time. Understanding the challenges of each pub is an art. But that's by no means an insurmount-able challenge."

My kind of pub​

"It's got to have a good choice of ale and be quite traditional. Ideally it should be by the water, if it's summer.

"Among our own pubs it would be the Bush Inn at Ovington, Hampshire, but if I'm choosing any pub it would be the Still & West in Portsmouth.

"It's a Fuller's pub on the harbourside and you can watch the ships coming and going."

Key dates​

• 1992 — Paul Sullivan joins wholesaler Matthew Clark and Sons as a graduate trainee, gaining experience in wines, spirits and soft drinks

• 1996 — Moves to pet healthcare as senior brand manager for the Bob Martin company

• 1997 — Switches back to drinks as marketing manager for Southcorp Wines Europe

• 2001 — Opens the UK office of Kendall-Jackson Wine Estates

• 2002 — Joins Kumala Wines as marketing manager and global brand manager |||