BIG INTERVIEW: All is Wells with Brewpoint boss

Peter Wells, CEO of the business, which is headquartered at the impressive Brewpoint brewery in Bedford, is clearly passionate about the company and has a team and family that really help him push it forward.

The rule at Wells & Co for family members is they must work outside of the business for the first five years of their working life.

“My first job was really awful actually,” Wells explains. “It was selling discount dining cards, door to door, and I’ve seen some parts of Watford and Hemel and some of the outer suburbs of London, which were quite transformative!

“Then I got a job at a company specialising in taking company information, analysing it and then selling it in lots of different formats to different people, particularly credit information, and I was in their marketing department and specialised in learning how to do direct marketing business to business, which has been helpful here.”

He grew up with beer and pubs all around him because his father was the MD and chairman of Charles Wells as it was then so he was immersed in the world from an early age.

He continues: “The business took on some pretty cool brands like Red Stripe and when I was at Nottingham Uni doing my degree up there, Red Stripe was certainly in all of the bars and it was a pretty iconic beer and brand.

“Everyone would look at me and go ‘Pete, this is your business!’ I would say ‘well it’s the family business but I’m really proud of it’, but getting that endorsement from all of your friends saying what a cool business this is to be involved with was great.”

After university, he went to Cranfield [School of Management] to complete an MSC in marketing.

After working in different businesses for five years, a job came up as brand manager for Corona and “anyone with the same passion for beer and pubs as I do and with the marketing background I had, would go for that”.

He joined the family business in 1997 and since then has worked his way through lots of different areas and spent a lot of time in London selling some “really cool brands”. Corona, Red Stripe and Kirin were his to sell at that time and in 2003, he joined the pub company.

He recalls a couple of his career highlights, explaining: “We went through the process of building Brewpoint, which is our brewery and head office in Bedford, and we managed to do that throughout the course of 2020 during lockdown and getting all the people on site working together and then liaising with the brewery manufacturers from Bavaria to bring the brewery kit over during different lockdowns and then seeing all of that come together was incredible.

“However, I think the most emotional was when we opened up the garden outside during the ‘rule of six’, we had – and still have – these fantastic tables and benches imported from a Bavarian beer house, that were ideally suited to the rule of six and seeing people come together for the first time in our new brewery, which is a thing of beauty, and seeing the look on people’s faces and the joy they had of meeting their friends for the first time in a very long time was sensation and it still gives me goosebumps today.”

Full of vigour

Naturally, Covid created a low point and Wells states: “I took on the role of CEO in January 2020, full of vigour and dynamism and enthusiasm, and my first major decision was to have to send everybody home.

“When I took on the job in January 2020, I had this dream of creating a new chapter for the business and then walked straight into a pandemic, a labour shortage, a war that drove up massive inflation and a cost-of-living crisis, which had a big impact on consumer demand and created a change in consumer behaviour, the impact of four Prime Ministers in five years and 70 elections across the world last year…

“I thought, naively, when I took on the job it was going to be a straight up and down, normal, let’s think about our growth strategy, etc. role and that’s all I had to worry about but since then we’ve all had to learn how to adapt and be resilient.

“I certainly don’t remember much training on the absolute importance and crucial element of adaptability, resilience and innovation in the face of a challenging backdrop.”

One thing he can rely on is his family. In fact, Wells considers himself “very lucky”. He says his wife’s first job after university was working for Davies of London, where she had a “fantastic” training programme within hospitality.

She then spent some time in other retail businesses in what was Safeway and Sainsbury’s so she understands the business.

He continues: “We were married before I joined the family business and has been by my side all of that time and she is a really powerful addition to my thinking and great support.

“The brewery is in Bedford and I live two miles away so I don’t have to suffer any horrible commute and if I have a really long office day, I’ll in at 8am and leave at, say, 6.30pm and can be home at 6.40pm – so I’m really lucky.

“I’ve got a 20-year-old and 18-year-old twins and I’ve taught them about the joy of pubs and they’re really proud of what dad does – and that all helps.”

He explains he constantly practises on improving his leadership skills on his children, “who are three very strongly, independently minded individuals but I genuinely do practise my coaching with them knowing that if I am very direct with them and authoritative, it will rarely work”.

He adds: “I have to try to influence them to help them make the right decisions. I find that genuinely interesting because it can make me try a different approach and see how that goes.”

And he doesn’t feel lonely in the workplace despite being the chief decision maker.

“There are some moments when you have to make tough decisions,” he begins. “And during the pandemic when nobody knew what was going on or what they should be doing, you’ve got to stand up and take the decision and say ‘we’re going to do this’ and everybody looks around and goes ‘well thank goodness Pete’s taking that decision’.

“I’m very fortunate to be able to share lots of lots of ideas and thoughts with my wife because of her hospitality background. She can tell me quite quickly whether they’re good ideas or not.

“And I’ve also got a great team at Wells. I’ve got a fantastic CFO in Anthony Friar who I share everything with, and Franki Hale is our people director who just awesome in every way – and they are incredibly supportive and able to have very open and honest and frank conversations. They will tell me exactly what they think and not what they think I want to hear so we have a strong relationship of trust between the three of us and that’s incredibly helpful.”

Pressure affects everyone and it’s no different for Wells. He says: “There are a number of things happen in this role and sometimes you have three or four of them in one particular day. For example, when sales struggle, you have to really think hard about what is driving that and what you need to do about it.

“Some decisions can impact people’s jobs and livelihoods – that’s pretty tough.

“The event that always makes me most anxious is our AGM because, being a family business, that’s all the family turning up and ‘marking your exam sheet’ and they are quick to provide constructive feedback should it be required.”

For anyone wanting to reach the heights of this CEO, Wells has this advice: “While it’s easy to stay in your lane and focus on your natural skill set, if you are rising through the ranks of any kind of business then the more you can do to get experience in lots of different parts of the business, the wider your breadth will be.

“Therefore, when it comes to conversations with senior management, they will see that broader scope and wider understanding of the business and will see that as a strength and work with you to develop all aspects of your personality and ability and not just that specialist skill set, which you probably would have had to join the business and pick up a particular role. Get involved with everything really.

“And the more people you know, the easier it is. Everything about the hospitality business is people-led and those with the widest networks generally are the ones who go furthest.”

Emotional intelligence

And indeed, further to that his advice to small pubcos wishing to grow is if you are a single-site operator, such as the many he works within the group’s Pub Partners estate, when you move to your second site, it’s always going to be more than double the workload and he advises try to be more ‘hands off’ before you make that change to the second site. He adds you must be very clear about where you want to go in terms of numbers and make sure you have all of the systems in place.

He says: “So for labour control, for stock management, for tills and for GP control, you have all of that in place and you’re really comfortable with it before you move on to that second site because if you keep going without those systems then once you get to three or four, it becomes really hard and you suddenly find yourself working seven to eight times harder – and not necessarily quadrupling your profit either.”

So, what would Wells say are the top three qualities a good leader should have?

“You need a good emotional intelligence so you can empathise with your employees and the team around you, but also so you have a sense of how your customers are feeling within the pubs,” he states.

“You need to be an effective communicator. You would hopefully have a vision of where you want to take the business so you can articulate that to everybody and they understand that. And that you are able to provide constructive feedback as part of that. And, of course, listening is as important as talking.

“And, nowadays, you have to have adaptability and resilience because it seems there is a new log thrown in front of the boat every single day. You have to be able to respond quickly to unexpected challenges and have a mindset that can think about innovating and generally go ‘where there’s risk, there’s often opportunity’.”

Excellent leadership is based around the ability to create the culture and environment where your team feels inspired, motivated and empowered to be able to make a difference on a daily basis, Wells explains.

“We’re a medium-sized business but we now have 800 people on the payroll and 28 managed pubs in the UK, and once you get to that number, you cannot influence or control every single person, so it’s really important to create the culture where everybody feels they can make a difference and create an environment where you celebrate success and recognise achievements where people feel they are encouraged to make a difference every day.”

The final word is on regrets. Wells says: “At much the same time as starting here, I really dreamt of running my own pub or hotel, particularly with my wife and I still do – and I think we would be bloody good at it between us. I really do.

“It’s ironic that now I’m in charge of 180-odd pubs across the UK and France, I still hanker for the cut and thrust of running my own business and I’m 100% aware of what a challenge that is.

“I still look at our best operators, who still continue to grow in a very challenging environment and, while we are all well aware of the impact of the costs coming down the road, they’re still running great businesses and are passionate about it.

“So, while I have quite a large amount of responsibility now for the entire business, I think having the responsibility of running a pub or a group of pubs yourself is perhaps something that maybe it’s still out there… maybe in a few years’ time.”

• To read about an uptick in sales at Wells & Co, Peter Well’s study of weather patterns and a bid to increase competitive socialising at its sites, click here.