Ian Payne goes back to his roots with Laurel Pub Company

Life has come full circle for the chief executive of Laurel Pub Company.

Twenty-eight years ago Ian Payne was managing the 300-year-old Bull Inn in the village of Barming, near Maidstone, Kent, for Whitbread.

Since then, he has moved around, trying his hand at selling lager and running casinos, but he is now back in charge of the pub - plus nearly 2,500 others at the newly formed Laurel Pub Company.

As chief executive, he and the rest of the management team have been poring over the 3,000-strong estate that Laurel's owner, Morgan Grenfell Private Equity, agreed to buy from Whitbread in March.

The Bull is one of 200 managed houses that are set to be converted to lease and become part of the enlarged and newly named Laurel Pub Partnerships.

"This was the job I was born to do," Ian says. "I started my working life running a Whitbread pub. It has a certain symmetry that I like."

His time at Whitbread was relatively short, going on to run one of its Beefeater pub-restaurants, the Sir Thomas Wyatt, also in Maidstone, which has remained in the hands of the "future" Whitbread.

He spent eight years at Guinness as an area sales manager, starting in the South in Bristol and then moving on to the Midlands, and spending a year working on the once-great Swan lager.

His return to pub operations came in 1986 when he joined Bass as an area sales manager for the tenanted estate, then a retail director on the managed side.

When Bass and the other big five pub owners were hit with the Beer Orders, Ian was at the heart of some of the massive changes that took place over the following years. Bass was forced to halve its 7,200-strong estate of managed and tenanted pubs, and shifted about 1,500 into a new Bass Lease Company.

Ian was involved in creating this new business, going on to become managing director and a director of Bass Taverns until leaving in 1995. Not long afterwards, the business was sold to become Punch Taverns.

Despite leaving pubs behind, Ian was still within the huge Bass empire at its Gala bingo business until it was sold to a management buy-in team in 1997.

Leaving for the casinos division of hotel giant Stakis, he was once again at the heart of a rapidly moving industry where casinos seemed to be changing hands almost every year.

In 1999, Stakis was taken over by rival hotel group Hilton, which placed the casinos within its Ladbrokes business. Ian came full circle again when, in 2000, the 29 Ladbrokes casinos were sold to the Gala group, which is now owned by Crédit Suisse First Boston.

He remained as managing director of Ladbrokes Casinos until February, when he teamed up with Morgan Grenfell to put together a new management team for Laurel.

"You have to accept that being bought and sold is part of corporate life," he said. "There is constant buying and selling and I can't see that changing."

The buying and selling has continued, with 439 managed houses sold this month to tenanted pub operator Enterprise Inns for £262.5m. It has also put 70 pubs up for sale, made up of 34 leased and 36 managed. These include the 14-strong Dôme chain of café-bars which were developed by Pelican Group - then headed by Punch Group's development director Roger Myers - before it was taken over by Whitbread.

"Some of them are good trading pubs, but they just don't fit into our core offer moving forward," Ian explains. "We are just tidying up the estate."

With all this upheaval taking place - and the inevitable fears about jobs - Ian has been keen to make sure that internal communications are effective.

"The most important thing is that everybody in the company should know what's going to happen the following week," he said.

The 200 managers whose pubs are being transferred to lease will have the chance to continue running their outlets, initially under a special trial five-month agreement, with no premium payable.

"People might have been worried that we were going to rip everybody out, but we have built on the existing management team by strengthening it," Ian said.

While Whitbread Pub & Bar Company boss Stewart Miller has stayed at Whitbread to look after David Lloyd Leisure, Robbie Halkett has remained as managing director for Pub Partnerships.

At the same time, Ian has brought in some of his former colleagues from his Bass days, including corporate communications director Maureen Heffernan, formerly at the British Institute of Innkeeping.

The new head of the managed pubs is Karen Forrester, who was also at Bass, most recently as director of the O'Neill's chain and All Bar One.

Despite Karen's background in heavily branded operations, Ian is keen to be less rigid in developing Whitbread's former brand portfolio. The two core formats are to be Hogshead and Champion, with other chains such as Bar:me and RSVP placed within a third unbranded division where new brands will be developed.

"We're trying to get away from the word 'brand'," Ian said. "We prefer to think that we are running pubs under the Hogshead 'banner'."

Laurel will be rebranding 20 of the existing 150 Hogsheads, which have evolved from being traditional alehouses to more modern pubs with café-bar elements.

Another 60 or 70 pubs and bars will also be integrated into the format to create a group of 200 outlets operated under the new Hogshead banner, although not necessarily under the Hogshead name.

One of the casualties of this will be the 17-strong chain of Casa bars, although there will not be any changes overnight.

"Casa will disappear," Ian said. "The name is not driving it. It's the quality of what is inside the outlets that is driving it.

"The real concentration in Hogshead will not be on the name, but the quality of service, products and food.

"We're going to improve the food and service, and there is some work to be done. The food offer in Hogshead is not right, which was one of the things that surprised me the most."

Whitbread rolled out its new Champion format to nearly 30 of its community pubs last year, and their initial success has won over the new management of Laurel. It will also be home to the value-for-money Giant's Plate menu, which was developed by Whitbread last year.

"Champion is one we like a lot," Ian said. "It's showing some very good returns."

The Hogshead menu is not the only food offer that worries the Laurel team. Ian was surprised to count 155 different menus through the managed estate and intends to rationalise this down to as few as nine.

"There's big potential to improve food across the business, particularly in high street bars, and that is very high on our agenda," he said.

Part of the reorganisation will see closer links between the managed and leased sides of the business, with all area managers redesignated as business development managers in line with Pub Partnerships.

"There's a lot of synergy between the two organisations," Ian said. "Innovation from the leased estate can feed more easily into the managed estate."After the restructuring, Laurel will have 1,872 leased pubs alongside the 621 managed houses.

"Pub Partnerships is the best-run leased business in the country and has the lowest level of bad debt," Ian said. "We intend to build on that."

One advantage that Ian and his team have over Stewart Miller or Whitbread's chief executive David Thomas is that they will not be under constant scrutiny from City investors and analysts.

"It's better being private rather than public, because we don't have to explain to the City why we're not rolling out brands which is sometimes all that some of them seem to understand," Ian said.

"We can focus on what is the most efficient way of running a particular pub."

He believes that if Laurel was tied to the strict reporting rules of the stock exchange, it would not have been able to sell the 439 pubs to Enterprise in less than a month after the original deal being declared unconditional on May 15.

"Being private means we can be very