BIG INTERVIEW: Longbow boss: I’ve always been in the industry – even before I was born

Having opened five venues in the glorious Derbyshire countryside, there is a sixth on the way in the form of the Charleston in Bakewell, which is set to be every bit as enticing as the previous hits that encompass food, drinks and accommodation.

Hattersley talks about his background in the sector: “I’ve always been in the industry since way before I was born. My grandparents owned pubs. My mum and dad owned a very successful restaurant in Bakewell and I started working for them as a pot washer at the age of 14 and just got the buzz, got the love for it and never left [the sector].

“I started working as a pot washer and went into the kitchen then ventured into the front of house side. I’ve always kept my hand in both front of house and back of house.”

After education, he did a “big stint” for Pitcher & Piano – which was purchased by Marston’s back in 1996 from its founders – then went on to an independent group in Newcastle and worked on cruise liners for two years as a beverage operations manager.

On his return to the UK, Hattersley took on a Pitcher & Piano site in Nottingham Marston’s Revere Pub Company wanted him to take on a site in in Derby that had received a big investment so he “got into hotels” and loved it.

However, after some time he reached a point where he “wasn’t happy with the direction of the company and the great culture around people with learning and development all seemed to be stripped back and it just became all about the bottom line. It became thankless and I lost the love for the industry and was trying to progress upwards in that company but realised I was losing touch with what I love about the industry and that is people, that is service, that is quality”.

The only way he could change that was by going out alone so looked at a few different ventures. After finding one, he put his house on the market and put everything into it and opened the Maynard on 2 February 2020… obviously we know what happened six weeks later.

“I wasn’t paying myself any money, got myself into crippling debt, ended up living on universal credits but you’ve got to take advantages in every situation you get into,” he explains “We took advantage of Covid loans, we benefited from the 5% VAT rate, the staycation boom – which is when we acquired the second site.

“When I started Longbow Venues, I wanted to do something different and I wanted to put people at the forefront of the operation and making sure it wasn’t just our employees that had more priority but also our customers, local suppliers and everyone else that comes into making this a great business.”

A leader must have vision

It’s clear Hattersley puts people first and is known for giving staff Christmas Day off so they can enjoy the festive time in the way they want to.

This is borne out in what he believes are the top qualities a good leader should have.

“Number one has got to be vision,” Hattersley begins. “You’ve got to have vision for the company, for your own leadership, for your team.

“There’s got to be compassion. There’s got to be a real ‘people element’ of being a great listener, a great empathiser, a great mentor-trainer.

“You’ve got to be a role model for all the employees of the business. You’ve got to be there at the front line. You’ve got to be there to protect them. You’ve got to be there to influence and you’ve got to be the one they see driving the business forward.”

He adds an excellent leader is someone who will reflect, self-motivate and self-scrutinise, adding the employees are the heart of the business and sees this as a “very Richard Branson-esque sort of ideology”.

He states: “If you put your employees first and you’ve got happy, motivated and enthused employees, they are going to deliver great product, fantastic service and great atmosphere.

“I have taken some inspiration from Richard Branson but a lot of it is where I’ve had great leaders who I’ve worked for before but am also able to learn from the bad ones as well.”

There have been some real highs for Hattersley and, undoubtedly, many more to come.

He says: “The highlight is being recognised for doing something different and for putting people first. You always get bits of happiness where you see people progress through the company.

“I’ve got a great example of Josh, who’s started as a 16-year-old food runner and is now our high-flying general manager who is going to open the newest site, which is the Charleston in Bakewell. It’s seeing those people develop and progress and have the love for hospitality that we have.”

Proud moments are key too but he states he finds it hard to think about personal pride because everything is all about the team and the business.

“I don’t take credit for things personally,” he says. “I guess one of the things for me was when I was Unsung Hero at the Visit Peak District, Derbyshire & Derby Tourism Awards in 2022. That was a big thing for me and that meant a lot.

“The biggest thing is when we can turn around buildings and businesses that have been suffering for years, bring them back into the current day and actually bring life back into lovely historic Peak District buildings again.”

Hit us emotionally

Naturally, low points occur and Hattersley explains: “We had a flood at our second site, the George, which was hit by Storm Babet in October 2023, that was definitely the worst thing.

“It hit us emotionally and there were huge financial issues with that as well. We were initially told that we were fully covered so we vowed we would keep on all the staff and that everyone would still get paid and then you end up dealing with insurance companies where they go back on themselves. We had to go to breach and it took 40 working days to get a response at which point I was on the knife-edge of bankruptcy. It was really tough. We won it and got through it but there were many sleepless nights.

“The biggest fear for me wasn’t about me, it was more about letting all the staff down and the fact they would lose their jobs – that was my biggest worry but we got through it and came out stronger.”

Being wrapped up in work leads him to be unsure of how he balances his personal life and work life, he says: “I’m not sure I know the answer to that to be honest – it’s my own doing though because we just keep growing at quite a rapid rate.

“To me, it’s about putting people in positions, letting them do their job and having people being accountable. It’s also having a shared vision that everyone understands and is working towards so I don’t have to do everything because they understand, they get it, they live it and they breathe it.”

If he could start all over again, what, if anything, would Hattersley do differently?

“I would have set the company up more strategically,” he begins. “Everything that we did for the first few years was on a whim, it was off the cuff so I would put in standard operating procedures, accountability and would get the right systems set up.

“These are things we’ve put in as we’ve grown but if we have them there from the offset, life would have been easier in the early days.”

He adds he doesn’t think there is any such thing as a regret but refers instead to “big learning curves”, continuing: “You always learn from every everything that you do and every mistake you make and this is how it makes you a stronger leader and operator.

“I guess the biggest regret I’ve found is where we brought people into the business – probably because we’ve grown a little bit too quickly – is they haven’t lived and breathed our culture and our values. We have a culture of internal growth mindsets in learning, development, etc.

“All our people in senior roles in the business are all about our values and they know them and understand them but when you bring people in who don’t know them and understand them, then try to change them, change their vision, it can cause a lot of issues with the team, the morale, the productivity and the profitability. We’ve brought some people in and they’ve not been the right fit and that’s something we are looking at and we probably need to take a step back as we grow to concentrate on the internal team – to grow them so they are ready for those next moves when we next decide to acquire more sites.”

Learn from your mistakes

Hattersley’s advice for anyone wanting to achieve what he has is to absorb everything, accept feedback and push yourself to the limit.

He adds one should try to do everything that you can do to progress and take on any opportunity but the biggest thing is to learn from your mistakes and figure out how you would put those right next time.

He advice stretches to smaller pubco groups wanting to expand and says the owner must look at what the product is and what makes you different to everyone else?

One’s sites and location are paramount but also look at how you can build a culture in your team. Ensure you’ve got people who share the collective vision and can act on it – and have values that you abide to and influence all the decisions that have been made.

The Longbow Venues boss reads a lot and says why: “I read about leadership in hospitality. I look at industry trends. I look at what other companies are doing and I’ve really got into audio books recently, which I listen to when I’m in the car or walking the dog or gardening and it really helps me digest how I want the company to be.

“And you can take different things from different people, it’s how I learn and develop because I don’t have anyone to help me from above.”

His take on pressure is also founded from employees. Hattersley reveals: “It’s allowing people to make mistakes and being able to fix those mistakes and not get emotional about it.

“When we started, in the first couple of sites, I was very hands-on, I was very in-the-midst of it. They were my babies and my vision but now I’ve grown to a point where you appoint general managers, operations managers, etc, and you’ve got to allow them to make mistakes and that’s where you can’t get emotional about things not going right 100% of the time because you’ve got to let people learn from their errors and try to support them to find their balance.

“We would all find it easier, in a way, to do everything ourselves but that’s not how to grow a business and how to grow a company.

“The pressure of firefighting human error and maybe inexperienced decisions. Then you can get everyone to understand and have that growth mindset and learning mentality.”

Indeed, the things that have surprised after becoming leader of his own business are varied too.

“It’s the pressure of not having anyone there to support you – it’s all on you,” he says. “There’s the cash flow that I found quite daunting. I’m trying to make informed decisions to get that right and because I came from the operation side it’s about balancing the management of people from other departments that I’ve not worked in before. You don’t understand the way people work in departments like finance and marketing, which are very different to operations – that took me a long time to understand.

“[Leadership] can be one of the loneliest positions to be in, to be honest. You want to protect your employees from a lot of things and you want to release the burden from them. Sometimes you get drenched in the negativity so much that you don’t see all the great things that are going on.

“Try to stay positive and write down all the good things that are happening to diminish all the negativity you come across on a daily basis.”