Turning full circle

Gerry Martin, brother of JD Wetherspoon chairman Tim Martin, has gone back behind the bar as he down-sizes his company, Stone Hill Taverns. The PMA Team met him

Gerry Martin has been working 85-hour weeks for the past months or so behind the bar of his Old Monk pub in London's Leman Street. Faced with variable trading at his sites outside of London, Martin has been cutting costs. Running his London site himself ­ and selling his other sites ­ is the way forward. "Financial performance has not been great overall," he says. "It's very tough out there."

Earlier this year, he sold his 1,200-capacity Old Monk site in Cardiff, which was losing a fair amount of cash, to brother Tim's JD Wetherspoon after six months on the market. It's now a Lloyds No 1 and doing very nicely by all accounts. (It's the second juicy site that Tim's company has picked up from Gerry, incidentally ­ JDW brought an Old Monk site in Windsor a few months before Old Monk crashed).

A Springbok site on Birmingham's Board Street is on the market, as is the Old Monk in Peterborough and Martin's best site, a well-located Old Monk in Sheffield, netting £20,000-a-week. "Sheffield is the jewel in the crown and I'm sure it will attract a lot of interest," he says. "The company's geographic spread was never going to be very easy ­ and proved very difficult. Selling the sites outside of London is a commercial decision ­ it will cut down the company's turnover but also its bank borrowings."

There's no doubt the past two years have been the most traumatic of his life. In October 2002, Royal Bank of Scotland called in the receivers at his AIM-listed Old Monk Pub Company. The decision came weeks after Martin's father, now deceased, had invested £300,000 of his own money in an Old Monk site in Houndsditch.

Rumours abound in the industry that relations between Gerry and brother Tim have been less-than-warm as a result of Old Monk's collapse, not least because of their father's position as an unsecured creditor. Martin was quickly back on his feet with a new company, Springbok, which bought a number of Old Monk's pubs. The list of big-name operators who have seen their companies fail in the past few years has become quite lengthy.

Martin's lustre was further scuffed by the failure of his Bush Pig company, which was operating a single bar in Covent Garden with investment from sporting heroes such as rugby's Lawrence Dallaglio and Jason Leonard. Bush Pig was running the site on a management contract for eight months ­ with plans to invest in the site and open until 2am.

However, Bush Pig was forced to walk away from its single site after its solicitors allowed the public entertainment licence (PEL) to lapse. Reapplying to Westminster City Council for a fresh licence was clearly going to be too expensive. "There was a technical cock-up by the solicitors, who didn't renew the PEL," he says. "It would have been a terrific site. But I will never go for a late licence in Westminster again. You need to have an infrastructure behind you, plenty of resources and people to take the headaches. If you don't have a lot of backing, it's very difficult ­ it's like being a salmon trying to get up the Thames."

A creditors meeting was held last month but Martin is unwilling to talk too much about the financial fall-out except to say that "not a great deal" of money was lost. His appetite for the trade undimmed, Martin's focus in recent weeks has been on re-learning his bar skills at the Leman Street site. It's a full-circle situation for Martin ­ he ran brother Tim's first Wetherspoon's pub in Muswell Hill for a number of months in 1979.

"The pub's on the edge of the Square Mile. The idea is to run it at low cost and I've been running it for the past six weeks, Monday to Friday. It's physically and mentally very demanding, but I enjoy the customer contact."

He makes the point that the success of Stone Mill Taverns will, once his other sites are sold, come down to his own endeavours. "You're at the coalface when you get to the level of running one or two places yourself. You've got a much better opportunity [because] you're not really involved in that branded warfare [on the high street].

"Pub managers have a huge effect on business, so if this manager is any good, sales should go up. If I'm not a good manager, I could be in real trouble."

Martin hopes to pick up one other London site in the coming weeks to run alongside his other site. But after that, caution will be the watchword. "It's very much one step at a time. I think anybody expanding at the moment has to be pretty sure of themselves and have a lot of backing."