Nightcap’s biggest challenge is the impact of the rail strikes, chief executive Sarah Willingham has told MCA.
While the late-night bar group put in a resilient performance in its half year results to 1 January 2023, with revenue up 48.7% to £23.5m on the comparable period in FY22, Willingham said the strikes had impacted its entire estate.
“It is incredible the difference it makes” to sales. “You can see week-on-week exactly the impact […] it’s really significant.”
Willingham, who said she would continue to be vocal in her objections to the strikes, said she believed the industrial action was deliberately targeted in order to cause “the most destruction of our high streets, our hospitality industry and our retail industry – and I think it’s absolutely disgusting that it’s allowed to happen”, and that many jobs would be lost as a result.
In terms of the three businesses the group operates – Adventure Bar Group, The Cocktail Club and Barrio – performance had been pretty even across their brands, but what had been apparent was that sites outside London were holding up stronger than inside the capital, she explained. While sites like the new Cocktail Club in Canary Wharf (opened at the end of last year), has been “really flying”, “as a collective, outside London performance has been really strong.”
Demand continued to be robust over the half year period, with the business working “bloody hard” over Christmas.
“There is no place to be average. No place to sit on your laurels and I think Christmas showed us that,” she said. “The sales team were amazing and really galvanised everyone from September onwards, to make those numbers happen for Christmas, which was pretty incredible.”
Level of spend has remained consistent, but Willingham said there is definitely a different pattern, post pandemic, in terms of the way in which consumers are going out, and when. As a result, Nightcap has been finding that Saturdays are almost as busy as Friday and Saturday would have been combined, in terms of historic trade levels, with the group capitalising on this by offering brunches and day time events over the weekend.
“Our brunches are such as significant part of our business now,” she said. “If you look back to 2019 the demand for that wasn’t there in the same way.”
Nightcap has taken its foot off the pedal in terms of the rate of its expansion, and “been really sensible with its cash” in order to compensate for the impact of things like the strikes and inflation, but the group is planning to invest in a programme of refurbishments for some of its older sites over the forthcoming months, to “bring them back up to the standard of the new ones we have opened”.
Looking ahead, Willingham said that rather than feeling cautiously optimistic, she’d describe her outlook as “a lot less pessimistic”. Nightcap is confident in the mix of its businesses and in demand for consumers, with Willingham “very comfortable sitting in front of investors and saying we are a really good place to put your pound – you will get your money back quickly and you will get a really strong ROI”.
Commenting on the upcoming Budget announcement, she said that while continued support on business rates would be beneficial for Nightcap “in all honesty it’s less about the specifics of our business, and much more about what it does for the whole economy”.
