The Big Interview: Be brilliant and take risks says Lees-Jones

The Manchester-born boss of the brewer, pubs and hotels operator, told The Morning Advertiser​ that being a leader can be a lonely role to have but its key to listen to sound advice too.

“Any leadership role is lonely because if you’re a leader you do need to take risks and sometimes you need to learn to listen to the right people,” Lee-Jones explains.

“I always say the business we’re in is a taxi driver business on the basis that everybody else can do it better than you can do it. It’s like ‘do you know what you should do in that pub of yours?’ And I go ‘well, do you know where you should go?’!”

His advice for smaller pub groups and brewers is: “It’s all about being brilliant at whatever it is that you’re doing. If you can work out what you’re brilliant at and then give it scale that’s all that matters, and, in my mind, in this sector, you’re only as good as your last shift.”

He goes on to explain the ethos: “I know they’re not pubs, but Flat Iron, for instance, opened in Manchester and I got an e-mail saying would you like to come and be on one of our dummy runs. I couldn’t believe it. I walk into Flat Iron and the great and the good of Manchester are all there because we all we all like a free meal! Charlie Carroll’s wandering around talking to the team and talking to all the guests, and it was proper and professional. It’s a really great operation.

“Charlie said ‘I’ve got a pub now’ to me and I say ‘of course we know you’ve got a pub’ and I don’t think there’s ever been a pub that’s been so written about as the Devonshire. It’s really annoying that it wasn’t done by a brewer or pub company so well done to him and Osh because we’ve all visited and it is selling a lot of drink, particularly Guinness, and selling a lot of food.

“So it’s all about being brilliant and the danger – and so many people get this wrong – is that they then come up with a roll-out strategy and they open a few rubbish sites and they keep pretending those sites are quite good but then the sites are no longer rent free and you end up with the business being compromised.”

He adds JW Lees owning freeholds has been really important for the business. It only has one lease but admits owning freeholds is much more expensive form the outset.

He continues: “I’m happy to encourage anybody to do something that’s brilliant and to keep it brilliant because as soon as it’s less good, sometimes people blame the location or the management and that can be an excuse rather than the reason for it not working out.

“We’ve just opened a new bar that we’re really proud of called the Founders Hall and part of the principle is that it’s a modern beer hall but it’s service at the bar – it’s so easy to drift into giving the guest who wants to be served at the table and we can do this and do that but we’ve done something in a very deliberate way and the things we were hoping we’re going to happen have happened.

“So, for me, it’s about the constant change that’s really important I use the Tesco motto, ‘every little helps’, on the basis that if we keep making small changes all the time, we improve things dramatically rather than having just one ‘bish, bash, bosh, look at this… it’s brand new’. Sometimes it’ll work, sometimes it won’t.”

The ’dynasty’​

Lees-Jones states he was “shamelessly born with a silver spoon in his mouth” and entered the ‘dynasty’ of brewing back in 1994.

The company employs more than 1,600 people – 150 at the brewery and site in Middleton Junction and over 1,375 in its 47 managed pubs, inns and hotels. It also lets another 87 pubs to JW Lees Pub Partners.

He adds his eldest son has recently joined the business after the ‘five-year rule’, which is if anybody from the family wants to work in the business, they must work for five years in the “big wide world” and bring something back to the company.

He began working in the business aged about 13 in one of the shops. His brother and cousin started working in the business while Lees-Jones was working in the advertising sector in , which he describes as “a million miles away from Manchester”.

All the family members who came to work in the business were able to bring complementary skills – his brother was a chartered surveyor, his sister was a fund manager in the City, his cousin Christina who set up the catering in the managed houses was working in the catering sector while cousin Michael became a qualified brewer.

He joined the business in 1994 and, six years later, became joint managing director. His father Richard and uncle Christopher had effectively been running the business as a separate beer company and a pubco for the previous 40 years, and there was another chief executive running its wine and spirit distribution business called Willoughby’s.

Lees-Jones says: “We had a two-and-a-half-year transitionary period where they came off day-to-day management of the business in 2003 and it’s brilliant that they still attend our main board meetings, even though my father is in his 90s.

“One of the things that’s fundamental about JW Lees is that we really are a family business. All of the shareholders sit on the main board and we’ve recently brought in non-exec directors like our chairman Jim Tully and Simon Townsend, who is also on the board of Adnams and Wadworth, so from a board and governance perspective, we’re all really well aligned.”

Our industry… is the ultimate meritocracy​

Further to his son’s move to the business, Lees-Jones offers his advice to a young person starting out in the industry.

“The great thing about our industry is that, irrespective of your education and background, anybody can be successful – it’s the ultimate meritocracy,” he states.

“People say I’d love to come and intern in your company but when asked where they want to work, they always go well, marketing, HR, finance, etc. and I say ‘well, you won’t learn anything in marketing, HR and finance’.

“If you’re a young person coming into the sector – and we’ve had quite a few who’ve gone on to much greater things – doing split shifts, earlies, lates, etc. are good because everybody needs operators and once you’ve worked out how to be an operator, you can then start getting into like-for-like sales, return on capital, all that sort of stuff.

“I look at competitors who actively recruit from hospitality because those customer-facing skills that people have, whether it’s just working behind a bar part time as a student, collecting glasses, whatever else it might be, it’s things you don’t get in many sectors so, in an increasingly AI-driven world, that customer contact is in hospitality is fabulous.”

Of course, it’s not all work, work, work yet Lees-Jones doesn’t find the balance between his work and family life particularly easy.

He says: “It’s difficult in a family business and, as a family, we try to avoid talking about the business over the dinner table.

“Probably the biggest challenge when I first joined JW Lees was that we didn’t have anywhere to live. We had this grand plan to move up north from London after getting married and we got gazumped so we ended up living with my parents for about six months so that was tough.

“There’s also the danger in this trade that people can burn out because you can be up with the lark and be mashing beer with brewers or be in the pubs at closing time so finding that balance is really important.

“If I’m doing a trade event in the evening, I’ll try to go to the gym in the afternoon and keep myself in as reasonable shape as I can.”

Additionally, his family can create pressure too. Lees-Jones continues: “If I go into one of our pubs with my wife and four children, they’ll all tell me what’s wrong with it!

“Our eldest son, who’s come to work in hospitality and my twin daughters – one of them works as a field sales executive for a drinks company and the other works in concierge – have all got a point of view in terms of how we should be running our business so it is quite easy to turn a nice family meal into a stressful battle of trying to justify all the things that we do.”

Award-winning prowess​

His highlights include the fact JW Lees employs 1,000 more people than it did before Lees-Jones became managing director.

He says there is a really strong ‘people culture’ in the business and he cites award wins as highlights too.

“It’s always nice to win awards and winning the Publican Award for the Best Brewing Pub Company in 2019​ was significant,” he declares. “And we won the Best New Bar Design for the Rain Bar when we opened that in 2000.

“We won the Best Community Pub Operator in 2012 so that peer-group affirmation is good. We’re all a little bit competitive, so to speak, so those things go down well.”

Meanwhile, Covid was the low point for him. He explains: “I hated lockdown. I’ll never forget that evening when all the pubs closed on Friday 20 March.

“I’d been on the telly making the case for pubs staying open and just going out in the pubs that week, I probably went to about six or seven pubs every day and each day there were a few less people there and people were saying it was reckless and irresponsible that we should continue to trade but, at the same time, we were running a family business and in our worst week, we lost £600,000 – so when I look at the aftermath of those businesses that no longer exist that was a low point.

“The trade associations worked particularly well in that time. I’m vice chair of the BBPA (British Beer & Pub Association) so with Emma [McClarkin, BBPA CEO], we were all on a weekly call with Paul Scully, the business minister, and I remember having a one-hour one-to-one with Kwasi Kwarteng and it was one of those things where even the ministers weren’t listening.

“At least they were engaging with the sector and Emma, Kate [Nicholls of UKHospitality] and Steve [Alton of the British Institute of Innkeeping], in advocacy terms, did a great job.”

He explains more about his position: “I guess I always wanted to be the boss and the thing that surprised me the most is that most people are more comfortable being led so there’s a huge responsibility being the boss but it’s a bit like the Sword of Damocles meaning it’s a fragile position and you’re going to make mistakes.

“You need to be able to learn from those mistakes and we’ve got a strong learning culture in the business so we try not to shoot the messenger so to speak but that doesn’t mean we don’t try new things but we try not to do anything that’s going to represent such a risk that we might not be around for too much longer.”

No regrets… it’s been a lot of fun​

If he were to start from again from scratch would he have done things differently?

“This probably sounds a bit arrogant but I probably wouldn’t have done,” Lees-Jones says. “I probably would have worked a bit harder at school and university but it probably wouldn’t have made much difference.

“I tend to spend my life looking forwards, not backwards, and we make mistakes all the time but we learn from them and we move on and do bigger and greater things.

While regrets are natural they are probably not worth lingering on for him.

He explains: “I suppose you always wonder what might have happened and I was just starting to get quite senior roles in the advertising sector and my best mate in advertising went on to be the global chief executive of Saatchi Group and I wonder where I might have ended up but I have to say I feel terribly proud of everything we’ve achieved at JW Lees so to be able to be a part of it is something I have no regrets about because it’s been a lot of fun.”

Going back to his family is a key theme for Lees-Jones, who states his greatest moments are as a parent.

He says: “When I look at our eldest son Louis joining the JW Lees business, I feel incredibly proud because he’s built his career in hospitality, working at companies like the Ritz in London, the Four Seasons in Kyoto and came back to the UK to work at the Pig on the Beach hotel then was restaurant manager for D&D London at 20 Stories in Manchester and so it’s perhaps validation for what I’ve done in my career but the fact the next generation of the family want to join the business – and I’m sure that there will be other members of the family – it’s fundamental we have family leadership within that business.”

He finishes on what excellent leadership mean to him.

“Without getting too corporate, it’s about being a role model for your brand and I don’t aim to be popular but I also don’t expect anybody to do things that I wouldn’t do myself.

“The world keeps changing and when we look at our mission statement, which is that we deliver hospitality with brewing at its heart, we surround that with our sort of core values of being proud, passionate, savvy, personal, honest and together, it’s my job to live those values and make sure everybody within the wider JW Lees business understands those are fundamental to how we run the business.

“And, going back to lockdown, but it was easier making the difficult decisions using those values because that was being true to ourselves so we came back stronger than we went into it.

“It’s been a very difficult four years and the challenge of not quite knowing what’s coming around the next corner has given everybody a sense of paranoia perhaps.”

• JW Lees announced its annual results earlier this week. To read about them click on this link​. Meanwhile, William Lees-Jones discusses what the business is up to right now and its plans for the future, here​.​

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