The Big Interview: Laine Pub Co's Gavin George

With the aid of a PowerPoint presentation, he talks about the six Cs (customer, commercial, compliance, climate, community and culture) and the six Ps (place, people, performance, products, pennies and promotion). Yet his firm’s 48 pubs are, without question, one of the most eclectic mixes of individual sites in the business.

While the bohemian clientele of the company’s Brighton birthplace demand the antithesis of the chain operation, its success and subsequent growth, with expansion into London and diversification into brewing, has necessitated some elements of common practice. It is a tricky contradiction to manage, but one Laine has a reputation for doing with some aplomb.

One of the keys to pulling off the ‘sizeable group with an independent operator-feel’ trick was a progressive change to the operating model, implemented 15 years ago now. The business moved away from employing traditional general managers to taking on management partners who set up their own businesses and have a contract with the group to run the pub, earning commission on sales.

“In Brighton, it was essential to keep everything individual and personality-driven,” George explains. “It gives the partners much more ownership and they control their costs better and we get more of their personality.”

None of the operations in Brighton, where the company still has its relatively small head office, display any evidence of their Laine ownership. The Brighton pubs are also very much drinking pubs; any food is small scale. In London, however, where the company now has eight pubs, the approach is rather different. Food across the firm’s pubs in the city represents a significant and growing 30% of sales and several of the London management partners are already working with third parties who have innovative part-time residences. Another difference from the Brighton sites is that, being fewer in number, the London pub managers have more opportunity to get together and share ideas. They also openly, but subtly, operate under The Laine Pub Company umbrella.

“In a city of six million people, it helps with staff recruitment and with customer association with our beers,” George says.

The increasing popularity of craft beers, both generally, and specifically those brewed by The Laine’s four microbreweries, has been a useful platform for the group’s launch into the capital’s competitive pub scene. The beers were showcased at the Craft Beer Rising festival at The Old Truman Brewery in London in February. George says this was a great way of promoting the pubs and is the opposite to what other pub-owning craft beer producers usually do – the norm tends to be to start with the brewing and to end up buying pubs in which to distribute their beers.

A natural creative​

Doing things differently is second nature to George, it seems. On one hand he sounds quite business school-like in his approach to getting the most out of a pub and on a day-to-day basis he is responsible for business policy, recruitment and finance, and spends a lot of time dealing with trade partners. But he is also obviously naturally creative, something that manifests itself not only in the look of the pubs, but also at the very heart of their operations.

For example, what is now the Aeronaut in Acton, was previously a defunct pub that not many operators would have touched full-stop, let alone with the clichéd bargepole. For one it was derelict and, even more off-putting for most, it had been somewhat notorious in its previous life and as a result had a very restrictive licence.

“There were quite a lot of things we were not allowed to do,” George recalls. “We were not allowed live music, club nights… it was quite a long list. Something not on the list of things that were banned was a circus, so we now have a big top in the middle of the pub hosting weekend circus shows.”

Typical of how the group links the pubs to their local communities’ culture, the Aeronaut also has an aeroplane hanging upside down from the ceiling, in recognition of a local man who was the first person to ever fly an aeroplane upside down.

The company also faced a dilemma with its Four Thieves site in Clapham, when neighbours repeatedly objected to live music in the cavernous former Jongleurs space on the first floor.

George said: “We had a huge bar up there and needed to use that space so we needed something that would be an attraction but wouldn’t make a lot of noise. My son had just come back from America and was raving about arcade bars so we thought we’d give that a go.”

The refurbished space, complete with retro games, ping pong tables and a giant remote- control racing car track has proved a roaring success since it launched in early August. The bar is also hosting an immersive gaming experience in a separate room behind the ground floor bar, in which groups of five pay to visit Lady Chastity’s vineyard and solve a murder mystery, with the chance to win a bottle of “aphrodisiac wine”. George describes the concept as “the Crystal Maze on crystal meth”.

George says that the pubs having a positive impact on their local community and enriching the area’s culture goes hand in hand with their commercial success. When asked about his proudest moments, he cites hosting shows displaced by the devastating fire at the nearby Battersea Arts Centre in March this year at the Music Hall above the Four Thieves. And corny as it sounds, he is totally sincere about his “great sense of pride and gratitude” for the “energy, creativity and diligence of the people who operate our pub business. We provide the platform, but it is they who create the magic.”

Sometimes his willingness to innovate doesn’t go to plan. He rather sheepishly recalls his decision to install MiniDisc into his pubs during the late 1990s as the music platform to take the group into the next millennium: “Somewhere, at the back of a cupboard in the deepest cellar in one of our pubs, there is a place where the MiniDisc players and discs have gone to die, or perhaps to await rediscovery so that they can start mocking me again.”

Music is particularly important to George. A key objective for the group is to provide a platform for new acts to perform at the venues it owns, like Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar in Brighton. Bands that have played at the firm’s pubs over the years include The Strokes and The Libertines in their early days, and more recently a band called Toy, for whom George’s son plays bass. He clearly takes after his dad. Like many a schoolboy before him, George grew up wanting to be rock musician. Unlike most, however, he did give it a proper shot. He played bass on a dance album for a band called Beautiful People – it did well enough in the US to fund his university education back here, studying business management with a marketing bias.

As part of his degree, he had a work placement in Brighton and used to have lunch with his colleagues in a pub managed by Peter Bennett. George ended up as marketing manager of the company he’d done his work experience with and reconnected with Bennett who was then thinking about taking on his own pub.

George helped to create his business plan and to secure finance, and suggested Brighton as a perfect location for the sort of pub they agreed they would both like to drink in themselves, described by George as: “A place where the customer is inspired to discover new things and to celebrate the creativity and diversity of life.”

Growing the business​

In 1996, Zelgrain was born when the company launched the Mash Tun in Brighton. An instant success, the pub spurred the pair on to secure more leases and, for the next three and a half years, the company grew to eight sites with Bennett at the helm and George as a sleeping partner. In late 1999, they took the opportunity to buy a larger Brighton multiple operator, Original Pub Holdings, which added 16 sites.

George was now the marketing director of a plc in London, but Bennett persuaded him that the combined business would be big enough to allow them to work together, and so George moved back to Brighton, becoming MD of Zelgrain. Zelgrain grew to a profitable 30-site operation and in 2007 took over the financially declining C-Side, another Brighton operator, mainly of nightclubs, in a £13m deal that added 23 further sites, many of which have now been converted back to pubs. Graphite Capital backed the merger and resultant creation of InnBrighton, having previously brought in Gary Pettet, now chair of Laine’s, to restructure C-Side.

InnBrighton was renamed The Laine Pub Company in July last year when Luke Johnson’s Risk Capital Partners, in conjunction with Royal Bank of Scotland, invested in the business, heralding a change of geographic focus and emphasising the then three microbreweries. The stated plan was to open a further 25 pubs in the next four years.

The desire to expand in London is being hampered by the highly competitive market conditions and while acquisitions are likely to be on single site basis, purchasing a group is a possibility, although no talks are under way. Similarly, George does not rule out expansion beyond London and Brighton, but says the company is not actively looking outside these areas at present and would be mindful that senior management should still have the ability to visit the sites easily. He insists the company is “acquisitive” and is aiming to secure another London pub before the end of the year.

After a concerted effort to grow the London portfolio, George says he was pleased to be able to invest in the Brighton estate during the past year, with four sites being relaunched. The former Tube nightclub was reimagined as Riki Tik Beach Bar while the Hope became the Hope & Ruin, inspired by the Budapest nightlife phenomenon and putting equal emphasis on the music.

At the end of March, the group also finally reopened its former Life nightclub on Brighton seafront as a huge pub, the Tempest Inn, after expensive delays caused by a road collapse affected the site. George points to it as an example of how the relationship between himself and Bennett has functioned since day one. He says: “He has a fantastic ability to turn what’s in my head into a functioning reality. I had the idea of basing the Tempest around the Shakespeare play, which I’ve always thought had a real edge and coolness to it. I don’t think Pete is much of a Shakespeare fan but he immersed himself in it and created something really unique.”

But perhaps it is the overhaul of the former Riki Tik Bar in the city’s Bond Street that most effectively crystallises the Laine’s approach to its pubs.

George said: “I take a lot of inspiration from the location and the surrounding culture of the sites. Music has always been an integral part of Brighton and, historically, it had a really enviable collection of record shops, which, over the years, have died away. What I wanted to do was create a tribute to that era and so I came up with Dead Wax Social. We found pictures of the record shops that had been and gone and invited people to bring in their vinyl to play in the pub.

“What has been wonderful is that people have been coming in with pictures of record shops we never knew about and asking to add them to the wall display. It’s really been taken to heart and means this important part of Brighton’s cultural heritage is kept alive.”