You’ve visited 100 pubs this month and had 200,000 beer mats printed to convince customers to vote to leave the EU on 23 June. What are the benefits of Brexit for small businesses?
Business success and democracy are very closely linked. Small businesses have to look at the big picture – the EU is becoming less democratic and that has had bad consequences for a number of states in southern Europe.
But I do think successful economies have a reasonably high level of immigration, and that’s what we should have in the future. If it were left to me, I would allow the current inhabitants of the EU to come and live here without visas, just as we did with Ireland before the EU. That’s what I would personally campaign for, but I know that’s more liberal than the majority of the leave campaign.
You opened your first pub in 1979. How did you get started as an entrepreneur?
There was a fair amount of luck involved. I wanted to start a squash club, but I had no idea how to do it and I didn’t have any money – it was what the Americans would call a half-assed attempt. I was studying law and would go to a pub in Muswell Hill most evenings. It was very small and had been converted from a bookmakers. I got to know the landlord and one day he said “I’m really fed up of running this, do you want to take over my lease?” So I did – it was an eight-year lease and I made every mistake going for the first few years.
What mistakes did you make?
Drinking too much – don’t drink in your own pub! That seems obvious to me now, but it wasn’t at the time. I would also say you have to make sure that you create good conditions for your staff. Listen to what they say and don’t think that you know best. The people on the frontline know more than you.
Eventually, I found a way of running the pub to a reasonable level – no music, good ale, low prices – and we opened a second one in 1981, which was converted from a motorcycle shop in Crouch End. In that era, almost all of the pubs were owned by breweries and they didn’t sell them. We found a way of getting planning permission to convert shops in to pubs (mainly by appointing a good legal team and a good operational team), first in London and then the rest of the country. Most people thought it was impossible to do that.
The JD Wetherspoon chain has 955 pubs in a very crowded market – what would your advice be about staying competitive?
I think that making constant small adjustments to a business is a good philosophy. Don’t try and change the world. You’ll be lucky if you [come up with the next multimillion pound idea], but if you can just make tiny tweaks every day to make it that bit better, that’s a very powerful force over time. At Wetherspoons that’s exactly what we’ve tried to do. We’ve almost never had a reorganisation of any description, we’ve just tried to evolve through small weekly improvements.
As an overall company you can increase profit by opening more pubs, adding beer gardens, increasing the size of a pub, etc. But once you’ve been running a pub for five to 10 years, you’ve got to work very hard just to maintain profits; to keep it where it is if it’s doing well.
Where do you get your ideas from?
I try to visit at least 10 of our pubs a week. I call in, make a note of what the pub looks like from the outside, and what my first impressions are when I walk in the door. I order half a pint of beer, which I only take a sip from to taste the quality, and I say thank you to the staff. I think you get so many ideas from doing that – I can’t imagine running the company without doing it. We also have meetings with as many staff as possible every Thursday and talk through everyone’s ideas.
You see opportunities in other places too – be it competitor pubs, or supermarkets, restaurants, coffee shops. I was walking around central London about 10 years ago and I passed by a Starbucks that was full at 3pm. This is what pubs used to be like, but now coffee shops were busier than us. I realised that we had to get involved in this business; if we didn’t get into coffee, we would suffer in the future.
How do you maintain a work-life balance?
It’s easier when the company has been going for many years. When I started off the intensity of the job drove me mad and I’d come home in the evenings a big ball of angst. Now I do a lot of walking. If I’ve got a lot of things to do in London, I’ll walk between meetings, walk to the station in the morning. Things start to clear in your head and you begin to see a path through the problems. I would say actually walking is one of the best things you can possibly do for ideas. This year, I’ve averaged 11km a day – it’s not massive but I find that it helps. I think angst can be a good thing, but not if it eats you up.
What’s next for JD Wetherspoon?
I worked out that if we opened one pub per 30,000 of the population in China, we’d be as big as Microsoft. Then I woke up. I think we’d probably be lucky to expand overseas. It’s taken us this long to open up throughout the UK, and I think a pub is more of a UK thing. I’m not sure that France or Italy would be our stomping ground, but I wouldn’t mind giving it a go.
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