Old-school landlords are our unsung heroes

If I were planning a landlord school, I would make Chas principal. The fact that he has no degree in business studies or knowledge of corporate speak are plus-points, along with the fact that he has learned his trade working as part of an East End pub-owning family (though his name isn’t Mitchell).

Believe me, he’s good — and his opinion on anything from a new beer to a pump-badge, glassware, new PoS or whatever, carries the same weight for me as that of the marketeers, the focus groups and all the theoreticians.

The fact that his opinion is always based on common sense and experience makes it doubly valuable.

Personally, I have always seen ‘common sense’ as a misnomer — experience tells you it’s as rare as hens’ teeth and there is nothing common about it.

There must be thousands of people like Chas in our industry — all more or less unsung and unaffiliated to any trade association, who, during their lifetime in the business, have accumulated common sense-based knowledge too precious to waste.

In particular I’m thinking about that feel for customer care —the ability to know what the punters want and then provide it, that people like Chas seem to have.

This is so important in a business such as our's, where more than anything else it’s the person in charge of an outlet who will make it or break it.

To some degree it’s about management skills, I know, but it’s far more about hosts’ ability to be the kind of people who can stamp their own persona on an outlet in a way that will grow customer loyalty.

That feeling goes all the way down the supply chain. Budvar wouldn’t have half as many good customers if we didn’t recognise them as being more than just another outlet to push pints of beer through.

Being a good landlord is an art, not a science, and as such defies definition. For that reason maybe the great hosts will — like so many great artists — not be recognised until after they are dead. Poor old Chas.

Tony Jennings is CEO of Budweiser Budvar UK​