JDW's amazing 30-year journey

This week's edition of the Morning Advertiser celebrates the success of JD Wetherspoon.

The company turns 30 this week. Nearly every licensee and pub operator will regard JDW with ambivalence. There will be a degree of anxiety about its relentless muscling into town after town, mixed with a recognition that it would be churlish not to admire the many things it does extraordinarily well.

The expansion of Wetherspoon from one site in Muswell Hill to almost 750 venues is akin to someone crossing the Grand Canyon on a tight-rope. It's an achievement that is incredible, in the proper sense of being beyond belief.

I am fortunate enough to be able to speak to Tim Martin on a regular basis by phone. Those chats and meetings with him over the years have given me an approximate idea of the kind of personality required to achieve what he has.

First of all, there is a dogged determination to stick to a decision when it has been arrived at logically. The banning of music is a good example. Once he had decided that it was impossible to get the playing of music right, the obvious answer was creating a neutral atmosphere. (It's striking that so few other people have followed the logic of this in the 29 years since he turned the music off.)

There is also something surprisingly self-effacing about him. Almost every personal story he tells features himself as the bumbling central character. It's a key because it's obvious that he's had to recognise his shortcomings to realise Wetherspoon's potential and make the myriad adjustments required to adapt to each stage of Wetherspoon's evolution.

It's meant trusting people to do things he's not very good at. Sometimes, this has led to him being let down — witness the treachery of his well-paid former property finder Van de Berg. More often it's led to his staff sticking around for a long time as they progress through the company.

There's also a kind of moral authority to Tim Martin. So when he campaigns on a particular issue it's always worth listening to what he says.

He started with a single pub, stood behind the bar, moved himself along the difficult learning curve of running a pub badly and then better. He's made the right decision at virtually every one of the thousands and thousands of baby steps JDW has had to make over the years. The few bad decisions have been changed quickly enough to avoid too much damage.

It's a shame that the pub industry doesn't use him more to make our case to Government. JD Wetherspoon is not a product of fancy financial engineering, of buying and selling thousands of pubs like some giant stamp collection. The company has got to the size it has because it wins customers wherever it opens. It's as simple and complicated as that.