In the spotlight
Mark Stretton meets Eldridge Pope's chief executive Susan Barratt who has been pushed on to centre stage by a series of takeover threats since taking the reins in June.
Susan Barratt doesn't want any new pubs for at least a year but if there were one thing she could buy, it would be more time. "We just need six months to get a really good run and get some better numbers coming out. All this attention is frustrating," she says. "There is no pipeline, we just want to get back to running the core estate and get some value out of the assets we've got."
The "attention" has come in the form of several potential takeover threats - one from Michael Cannon, the other from Jersey-based CI Traders - which have thrown Eldridge Pope's chief executive into the spotlight.
"We have had too much publicity," she says. "It would be good to get out of the limelight and get on with running the business."
Having replaced Michael Johnson in June, the new boss has endured a rocky time in the weeks since Mr Cannon launched his share offer. The serial pub entrepreneur wanted to lift his stake in the under-performing company from 10 per cent to 29.9 per cent.
Mr Cannon has made millions buying and selling the Devenish, Magic and Morrells of Oxford pub groups and clearly saw value in Eldridge Pope. His attempt to muscle in on Pope would, it is believed, have led to an outright effort to buy the business.
The Eldridge Pope board described the move as opportunistic and said that shareholders should not accept his offer. Given that the shares were once pushing 350p, his offer of 165p per share must have been galling and for once he did not get his own way.
But the unwanted attention from Mr Cannon meant the new Eldridge boss had to get on the diplomatic front foot, visiting shareholders and engaging with the national media.
"It's not something I enjoy," Susan admits, "I don't mind talking about the business but I'm not that great at talking about myself. But we need positive PR - all this publicity impacts on the employees and shareholders and it's difficult to manage."
Rumours still abound that CI Traders is ready to go hostile but Susan is focusing on getting the business up to speed. "In the last three years the business has been pushed further than it can go and we have lost the basics," she says. "We are putting back some processes and some basic standards but it will take a while."
The company's 121-strong managed house operation is split into three divisions - Pubs, Inns and Bars. The Pubs division contains community locals including Your Winning Local - the equivalent of Mitchells & Butlers' Ember Inns. The Inns business is largely accommodation or destination food and the Bars arm is predominantly the 23-strong Toad chain plus about a dozen other high street outlets. In the last three years Eldridge Pope has focused on the high street, developing a range of concepts alongside Toad, such as the recently opened nightclub called Bongogo in Plymouth. Aside from blessing it with a name very much like a children's soft drink, the company decided to do a Latin theme about five years after everyone else.
"We shouldn't have done it but we are where we are," says Susan Barratt. "It's a good site in a good location with a good manager. We are detuning it - it was a bit too posh for Plymouth without a shadow of a doubt. It was developed by marketers and designers and was over-specified."
There is plenty more detuning to be done it would seem but the new boss seems a good person to lead a back-to-basics approach. Susan seems straightforward, sensible and is not into "status stuff", as she calls it.
She drives a VW Golf, lives in Exeter and on the news that Michael Cannon had only raised his stake by a couple of per cent, decided to go camping for the weekend. She is part way through a walk around the South West coast and other pursuits include tennis, squash and cycling. "I'm quite a social animal," she says. "I quite enjoy going out and eating and drinking, as you would expect."
She studied economics at Reading University, then joined accountant Coopers & Lybrand in London before going travelling on "the normal backpacker's tour" of Asia, Australia and New Zealand. On her return she joined insurance firm Eagle Star, then went to food manufacturer Geest, where she had stints in Edinburgh and Costa Rica.
She joined pub group Whitbread (which seemed "more frontline and customer-focused") working on Beefeater and then Whitbread Inns with Ted Kennedy of Mill House. She then got the call to join Eldridge Pope as finance director.
Her appointment as chief executive was not met with overwhelming approval in the City, where many believed the company needed a proven operator at the helm, not an accountant. But the news was welcomed with a round of applause in Dorchester.
"Internally, it was very positive," Susan says. "I haven't got a City profile but you have to start somewhere. I understand the business very well and without blowing my own trumpet I am a pretty good leader.
"I was an operationally-minded finance director. Yes, it would be good if I had a fantastic operational background but the board is very balanced and I have a fantastic operations director."
She is keen to put the record straight about the much-maligned Toad. "We have struggled a bit with Toad and sales are not great at the moment. We have a few that are giving us some pain but the problems probably aren't any worse than Yates or any of the other high street bar brands," she says. "We are fighting, we're fighting big time and we are focusing on each individual outlet. Forget the Toad thing, let's look at the pub."
Susan says the company is running Toad according to the localities. "It's not just about cheap drinks and DJs," she says. "In Camberley they hold karaoke on Tuesday night because that is what people want. We are running them on a local level, thinking about what we can do to get people in."
The rest of the managed estate would seem fairly bulletproof, containing a large chunk of freeholds. Alongside the managed estate the company has 53 tenancies.
Susan says the performance is starting to come through and that like-for-like sales - comparisons from one year to the next - are getting better. "Let's not talk about concept models or brands or any of that nonsense, we are a small pub company with a bunch of great pubs so let's maximise what we can get out of them," she says.
The numbers are recovering. A recent trading update showed that like-for-like sales in the Inns and Pubs divisions had improved from -6.3 per cent and -9.9 per cent in the first half of the year to +0.4 per cent and -3.5 per cent respectively. Like-for-likes in the Bars arm have improved from -9.6 per cent to -5.3 per cent.
"We need to prove that we can run pubs," she says. "Back to basics is the thing that we've talked about and that means focusing on our people, our standards and our customers.
"Our key competitive advantage is that our heartland is, with the exception of some of the Toads, actually pretty solid and we need to be flexible enough to operate pubs at a local level. The Waterman's at Ashby sits right on the River Dart - let's get rid of the corporate menu and sell crab there because that's what people want."
"We need to give our managers the confidence and the tools to actually to do that - we have gone through a period where it was all driven from the top."
The Eldridge Pope board has won this particular battle with Michael Cannon, but with CI Traders said to be mulling a hostile bid, one question that remains is can it, and can Susan Barratt, win the war? "I know that until we start improving the performance of the business the analysts and everyone else will be critical and that's fine, I understand that," she says. "We now need to prove we can get the numbers out, get the inputs right, and that we can run pubs. We can do it, we ju
