Tap into the youth potential

The front cover of the Publican’s Morning Advertiser​ a couple of weeks ago​ (28 May 2015) was very timely. In case you missed it, a survey by Barclays Bank discovered a 25% increase in the number of pub owners aged 25-34 over the past three years.

I had already been thinking about young people and the pub trade after a conference I’d attended the previous week. I was there to sit on a Q&A panel just before lunch and, when I arrived, the previous session was just finishing.

People were coming out of the conference room in a near state of shock. The presenter had been talking about young people, what makes them tick, how they shop, and how they communicate and use their time. Evidently, he’d surprised the audience.

“Never mind how we talk to young people as a business,” said one delegate, “I’m not sure if I’ll even know how to communicate with my kids in a couple of years.”

Ever since the 1950s, young people have strived to have their own slang, dress-codes and habits. It’s part of what defines each generation against those that have gone before, giving it its own identity.

But this latest generation of under-35s has gone through a particularly profound change. These are the ‘digital natives’, who don’t remember a time when they didn’t have access to the internet at their fingertips.

Their smartphones are attached to them like extra limbs. Their formative years have been fundamentally different to those of anyone over 40 and they think about the world in a different way.

That 18 to 24-year-olds are more likely to be teetotal than any other age group shows us that young rebellion has changed its shape. This generation wants to stay healthy and fit. Having grown up in an uncertain world where anyone can be a celebrity and traditional institutions, from the police and government through to brands and media channels, have all lost credibility, today’s youth are more self-sufficient and self-starting (even if they are more likely to live with their parents through their 20s) than we ever were.

When I was 21, aspiration meant getting a good degree from a respectable university and then trying to get a toehold on a graduate trainee scheme in the industry of your choosing. These days, a degree makes no difference to your employment prospects, and the graduate trainee schemes have given away to unpaid internships that no one without independent means can afford.

Instead, increasing numbers of young people are going it alone and starting their own businesses. Whether it’s making and selling things online, opening a coffee shop or setting themselves up as a freelance writer or designer, the idea of waiting around at the bottom of the greasy corporate career pole is losing out to deciding what you want, and going for it.

This is one of the big factors that’s driving many under-35s to take on pubs of their own. Good for them. They have the energy and fresh ideas to be successful.

But for every person taking on a pub, there are a hundred more taking part-time bar jobs while they figure out their plans.

Currently, the trade treats these people as minions, paying minimum wage, offering little training and investment and not engaging them in the broader business beyond menial bar duties. Publicans treat people like they expect them to move on in a few months, and the prophecy inevitably and invariably fulfils itself.

Instead, the trade might want to make better use of a resource it doesn’t quite grasp.

Your average 22-year-old can make a better film on her mobile phone than some of the promotional videos we’ve seen for pubs over the years.

Equally, if your barman has 3,000 friends on Facebook, why aren’t you paying him extra to manage the pub’s social media strategy?

And if pubcos and brewery-owned pub chains are looking for the managers of tomorrow, why not offer vocational training to young part-time staff?

If young people are only working in a pub until their big business opportunity comes along, what if more operators made more of an effort to keep them in the business and grow their talent instead of treating them as cannon fodder?

We’re just starting work on this year’s Cask Report, and one of the big themes will be about training staff. It’s received wisdom in the industry that there’s no point. But, as research into the younger generation is showing, if you don’t challenge this thinking, it won’t be too long before it’s you asking them for a job.