Georgel: pubcos must empower BDMs

09-Nov-2011 - Last updated on 12-Mar-2017 at 04:22 GMT

BDMs: linchpin in leased and tenanted pub business

It is puzzling the industry does not spend more time focusing on the role of the Business Development Manager — that’s the view of Admiral Taverns boss Kevin Georgel.

The Admiral managing director believes the BDM is the linchpin role for the tenanted and leased-pub business and although he disagrees with some of the wider criticism of BDMs made by the recent Business, Innovation, Select, Committee, he said the industry would be “foolish” to ignore the underlying message and not commit to further evolution.

“On the issue of BDMs, and the wider point about operational support, to a degree the industry has been playing catch-up with itself, to a degree,” he said.

“The tenanted and leased model of the larger companies in the industry was principally one of buy-and- build, which until the economy turned in 2008, had been dominated by mergers and acquisitions.

“The financiers were sitting in the middle, devising strategy, while operators were kept at arm’s length, out in the shires, running the business.

“When the game changed many companies were slow to re-align their ethos and some are still stuck in the past.

“Now it is the operators, and not property and strategy folk, who are at the heart of the business. This is a fundamental change and it is increasingly clear that success is now dependent on the quality of operators — namely BDMs.

“Some companies have failed to spend the appropriate amount of time and money in recent years recruiting and coaching the main players. It would be an interesting exercise to compare the amount of money that has been committed to property and capital investment projects with the amount deployed to investing in people, particularly the BDM role.”

He added: “The big question for me when it comes to BDMs is: are we equipping them to be no more than glorified administrators for our businesses or are we empowering them to be genuine business developers?

“If we are really serious about helping licensees to develop their businesses and themselves, then we have to elevate the position of the BDM.”

Admiral has already moved to give its BDMs more autonomy and recruit a higher calibre of individuals to become “decision makers” rather than “implementers”.