​24-hour party pioneer

In an eventful career spanning four decades (so far) within the hospitality sector, Clive Consterdine has had an impact on every segment of a highly diverse market.

The operator-turned-supplier has worked across managed and tenanted pubs, late-night bars and nightclubs and has spent the past nine years building up technology solutions specialist Zonal’s presence in the restaurant market.

This varied career included a leading role in the push for 24-hour licensing laws. As operations director for club operator European Leisure in the early 1990s, Consterdine was leading a progressive company that had been making national headlines in part thanks to hosting the first club night aimed at bisexuals, at Warehouse in Leeds.

He was summoned to meet the head of the city’s licensing committee, and went in with the inevitable sense of foreboding.

“But instead of ticking me off about something or other, she said she liked the fact we were putting Leeds on the map and then said – ‘Clive, I want you to apply for a 6am licence’. I said, ‘But you’ll refuse it’. She said, ‘Clive, I want you to apply for a 6am licence’. I took the hint.”

The resulting hearing, after the inevitable complaints from the police, was eagerly followed by the rest of the industry. The sticking point was the Sunday Observance Act, which banned the use of any public building for dancing on the sabbath. However, once it was pointed out to the chief constable by Susannah Poppleston, representing European Leisure, that fully policing the act would also mean officers checking each member of the clergy was wearing a hat, it was clear the game was over. The Warehouse went on to trigger a revolution which completely changed the face of the late-night sector.

Consterdine admits that as much as it was a landmark moment “we slightly shot ourselves in the foot” as pubs and bars, now unshackled by chucking-out time, started to eat into traditional nightclub territory.

This increased competition, alongside the rising power of promoters, signalled to Consterdine the writing on the wall for nightclubs, prompting his move into pubs.

In 1996, he became commercial director for Regent Inns, with its strong base in London pubs and a fledgling growth brand in Walkabout. It was Consterdine’s task to grow both sides of the business across the UK and the story he tells has clear echoes of current trends in casual dining.

He says: “Between 1996 and 2000 we were hell bent on expansion into every high street we could get into – buying banks and post offices. I would bump into the guys from Wetherspoons and Marston’s looking at the very same buildings.

“When I hear the casual dining CEOs now coming in and expressing disbelief at some of the openings the previous management signed up to, it’s like deja-vu. I remember the conversations around Walkabout, when we’d done all the major towns and cities and there was talk about going to Grimsby and Bradford. These places weren’t as well developed back then and it was so obviously unsustainable.”

Manual labour

His time with Regent Inns, where he was also responsible for rolling out the Jongleurs comedy club estate, saw Consterdine develop his interest in the use of data. However, the laborious manual processes which saw marketing departments stuffing individual opening night envelopes based on electoral roll details left him frustrated and looking around for solutions.

His fascination with data led to his first venture outside operations, teaming up with the Commer Group founder Jim Walsh to create Nucleus Data. The business model of extrapolating data that came back from beer flow monitoring systems put the business up directly against Brulines. However, the approach of moving away from using data to police the tie and instead towards revealing the effectiveness of particular brands and promotions endeared Nucleus to the family brewers. Brulines saw the upstart as enough of a threat to buy it out in 2007, with Consterdine moving across as a director.

However, two years later, the industry was once again changing and tenanted pub companies were now becoming bogged down in debt structures and hammered by the fall out of the smoking ban and aggressive off-trade promotions.

Consterdine had already known Zonal founder, Stuart McLean, for a number of years having been the company’s client at several companies. When he was offered the chance to come on board to lead sales and marketing it seemed an obvious choice.

He says: “At that time we were seen very much as a partner to the pub trade but we weren’t strong enough in restaurants. I joined just as the time that casual dining was really taking off and while it was a new segment of the market for me, I knew how operators thought.

“Since then we have signed up the likes of PizzaExpress, The Restaurant Group, Casual Dining Group, Mitchells & Butlers, Living Ventures.

“What I’ve loved about working for Zonal is that it’s a private company with no debt that is in control of its own destiny and has consistently invested 10% of turnover back into the product every year.”

Next cycle

Consterdine, who stepped into a strategic advisory role ay Zonal earlier this year, reflects that the wheel is now turning again, with the tenanted pub sector back in vogue and further hard lessons to be learnt by casual dining operators.

He says: “It’s all a cycle and as those big chains fall, the sites they leave empty will be snapped up by someone who has hopefully learnt from their mistakes and will push the industry in a new direction. At the moment a lot of the momentum is with experiential leisure and I think that’s going to have a big impact going forward.”

Whatever the challenges, Consterdine is a passionate supporter of what the sector can offer prospective employees.

He cites the example of the 24-year-old manager who launched Walkabout’s Birmingham Broad Street venue in the early 2000s, saying: “In its first year it made over £1m in net profit. That could be an AIM listed company on its own but he was also running operations, marketing, cash and man management. Just looking at crowd control alone – you’re getting 600 or 700 people in a venue at any one time on a Saturday night. I can’t think of many industries where a 24-year-old would be in charge of all that.”

He also shares the frustration that the Government seems unwilling to show any flexibility in the face of the increasing pressures on the sector. Our meeting comes a week or so after the Jamie’s Italian collapse and we discuss the inevitable comparisons with another business failure.

He says: “There’s a sense for some people that British Steel is what you might call a “proper industry”. But actually the UK economy is powered by the service industry. The Government isn’t going to bail Jamie’s out but they could take a moment to look at some of the reasons why this happened and do something to help.”

Looking back on his career, Consterdine says that while the methods may have changed the central message of the hospitality sector remains.

He says: “In my first job, at the Cheshire Cat nightclub in Natwich, we were one of the first to capture data on people’s birthdays and send them personalised offers. Back then that system was as sophisticated as writing people’s names in a page-a-day diary. Now we have systems that can tell you not just when someone has walked through you door but also when they’ve walked past and target them with personal offers.

“But the job is still selling food and drink and coming up with a compelling reason why customers should do that at your venue, not at your competitors. Operators might have more tools to do that now but the job is as hard as it has ever been.”