Star Pubs & Bars managing director, Lawson Mountstevens, has told MCA that the now 2,900-strong group plans to develop bars centred around some of its key drinks brands.
While stressing that this would only ever represent a small proportion of the estate, he said there was the potential to use pubs as a vehicle for brands such as Lagunitas.
Mountstevens also told MCA that the company planned to convert the c100 retail contract agreements currently still under Punch’s Falcon model to Star’s own five-strong Just Add Talent stable. However, Punch’s fledgling wet-led turnover-related model, Front of House, has been discontinued.
He said the game-changing acquisition showed Heineken’s commitment to the UK pub sector and said that the secret to the success of the integration had been in the “discipline and rigour” applied by the integration team, headed up by head of business support, Stephen Rooney.
The acquisition of the 1,900 pubs, as part of a joint deal with Patron Capital – which took the remaining 1,300 – meant almost a doubling in size of the Star estate. It has meant a restructure, which took the business from three regions to 10.
Mountstevens said: “It was a huge undertaking and as much as there was an enormous amount of preparation it still felt like being in the eye of the storm at times. What was key was to have the right experts accountable for their areas and to own it internally. It’s a real achievement when you look back on it.”
But Mounstevens insists that the focus is now on pushing forward and assessing the opportunities for investment across the estate.
This assessment will also determine the number of disposals likely but Mountstevens said he had seen too many “how did we let this one go” moments, to rush into decisions about package disposals.
On the Falcon agreement, he said the pubs under the model were split fairly evenly between the A and B packages divided between Heineken and Patron.
He said: “We have our Just Add Talent programme, which is broadly similar to Falcon, but we were very much in the enthusiastic amateur camp when it came to retail agreements. The Falcon pubs have given us scale.
“The core operating model is the same – an individual operator sets up a limited company and works on a self-employed basis, taking a percentage of turnover, and we provide the retail impetus. Our approach with Just Add Talent was probably a bit more disciplined – there is a very solid template to the offer. Falcon has a bit more flex to it. In mist cases, we would say that if there is local flex needed, then a leased and tenanted agreement is probably the right option.
“Ultimately we will transfer them all to Just Add Talent. We will talk to operators over the next few months about moving them across.”
The agreements now sit under retail concept manager, Rebecca Davies, who was previously a divisional director at Ei Group, who reports into property director, Chris Moore.
Mountstevens stressed that one of the strengths of a leased and tenanted estate was in the limited exposure to high streets and the pull of individual businesses “rather than having our eggs all in the basket of one brand”.
He added: “It does get debated to what extent the pubs are vehicles for the brand and fundamentally the pub comes first.
“Over time - where it’s right - we will use the pubs as vehicles to develop certain brands, as long as it’s profitable for the pub. There’s stuff we could do with a Lagunitas craft-led bar, for example. But those are ones and twos, not the core of running 2,900 pubs.
“You wouldn’t force fit a brand to a site. The lead would always be the pub.”
