Celebrating the best in the trade

For all the financial engineering and strategic vision-making of the big pub companies, it is the pubs themselves and the teams that run them that will ultimately determine the success of our sector.

Business experts often talk about the four ‘P’s of marketing: Price, Product, Promotion and Place. That’s fine if you’re selling goods off a supermarket shelf. But when you’re selling a service — an experience even — there is a fifth ‘P’ to consider — People.

It’s a truism to say the pub trade is a ‘people business’ — but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth repeating. Only pub people have the capacity to create the conditions for pub success.

Special​

When judging the Great British Pub Awards, my fellow judges and I look for the things that matter most to pub customers, beyond the hygiene factors that are a bare minimum requirement.

Those things might be easy to explain, such as outstanding service, consistently great food and drink, or toilets with a wow factor, but sometimes they are intangible — just how a pub makes you feel, and why it makes you return again and again to enjoy its charms.

Winners of Great British Pub Awards go above even the highest common denominators and into the realms of the truly special.

To that point, there is much for the pub industry to learn from the world of sport — which is one of the reasons this year’s awards are so-themed. Take cycling, for example. Sir Dave Brailsford, former performance director of British Cycling, and now principle at Team Sky, achieved his incredible successes with a philosophy of continuous improvement that could just as well be applied to running a great pub.

Improvement​

His belief was that if you improve every area of what you do by just 1%, those small gains will add up to remarkable improvement. Clive Woodward was the same when he coached England to victory in the 2003 Rugby World Cup.

It’s this kind of restless management; the refusal to accept nine out of 10; and the constant drive for more, that characterises winners in life, winners in business and winners at the Great British Pub Awards.

Congratulations to you all!