TLC Inns plans Grand Central expansion and ops director appointment

Steve Haslam, managing director of TLC Inns, has told the Publican's Morning Advertiser​'s sister title M&C Report​ that the lack of good quality pub sites on the market has led the company to focus on its Grand Central concept, which could double in size within the next 18 months.

Haslam said he was looking at Essex and Hertfordshire for new sites and that he was investigating crowdfunding as well as continuing conversations about private equity investment.

Operations director​

He said he expected to recruit an operations director within the next year as the company grew to take the pressure of himself and his wife Jo, who currently run the business.

He told M&C Report​: “My time is being spent more on finding the sites and the refurbs as well as the finance side. Jo is very much involved with the running of the pubs but is starting to get a bit stretched. Within the next six to 12 months an operations director will probably be the next big appointment.”

Grand Central​

On the Grand Central concept, he said: “It was something that developed quite naturally because we needed to broaden the scope of sites we were looking at. The ideal pub sites had dried up a bit and this was something that would work in lots of different locations."

He added: “We haven’t given up on pubs side but it was just about sites and locations. More and more were coming up. The latest one is a perfect example – it’s a site at Ipswich Marina – a retail type building so it was obviously going to suit Grand Central better than anything else and its ended up as our biggest Grand Central yet.

“Over the next 12 to 18 months we will hope to double the size of Grand Central but as the journey continues we won’t be turning down any good pub sites but they are getting tougher to find.

“Good ones are not on the market. All the big pubcos hold the stock so what it is left are pubs that are largely not going to make the £1m+ a year profit that we need them to. They are in too rural a demographic.”

On funding he said: “We have had conversation with private equity but have not yet managed to do a deal that suits everyone. We will continue with discussions with people who want to talk to us. But we have been watching what is going in the crowdfunding environment and it’s an area we are interested in exploring further.”