He also said the family-owned pubco that has existed since the early 1990s is aiming to reach 20 sites – from its current 18 – within five years but has no plans for large-scale growth.
However, an uncertain future lies ahead as news on inheritance tax reforms remains painfully cloudy.
Collinson said: “Summer trade’s been good for us. The weather’s been fantastic. The good numbers we had last year have been exceeded and we’ve also exceeded our budgets as well. It’s another record year so we’re very pleased.
“We’ve just bought two new pubs as well, which is at the back end of our financial year and next year we’re hoping to build on the success of the past 34 years but certainly on the back of the past two or three years for sure.
“We’re doing more and more work to increase the number of events in our pubs. We’ve introduced them this year where we’ve done things like cider festivals, beer festivals, Oktoberfest, cookouts, all sorts of stuff like that.
“I’ve tried to put events on in our pubs and we’re also still identifying small schemes that would add some value. For example, garden schemes have done really well for us for four or five years now and we’ve got two or three in mind for the first half of next year so they’ll be ready for next summer.”
Collinson runs the business – created by his parents in Oxfordshire – with brother David as commercial director and sister Emma Stevenson as marketing director.
He said Oak Taverns is looking to buy one pub a year for the next four or five years that fits with what we the business currently does and fits its geography.
Great management teams
However, he stated there is no plan to get back up to the 35 sites the company once had but would rather have 20 freehold pubs within the next five years from its current total of 18 but Oak Taverns still has “a couple of tied leases that do well for us”.
He added: “We’ve also got one site that is on the market, which is in Dorset, which is miles away from where we are. It’s a great pub and there’s a great opportunity for a bit of development there but it’s just too far away – it’s nearly three hours away from our office.
“It was one of those we bought back in the day that seemed like a great idea at the time but, in hindsight, it’s just too far away.”
Selling that site would put the total down to 17 pubs but Collinson said it would look to maybe buy three more while the two leases it has have “great management teams in… there’s no short-term plan to get rid of them”.
“But if there was a five-year plan, we effectively come out three of our pubs and then we buy effectively another five or six so we get to 20 pubs,” he explained.
“We’ve got to a point now where we don’t want to be a big business. Me, my brother, my sister and my parents are very happy owning all the business, running it successfully and earning some money out of it. We don’t need to be turning it into some sort of 100-pub estate where I spend my entire life looking at spreadsheets all day long. That’s not where I want to get to.
“I’m 54 years old so, quite frankly, do I need even more stress in my life?”
Have to sell pubs
The elephant in the room for Collinson is inheritance tax and the lack of clarity on it that needs to be amended in the Autumn Budget.
He explained: “It is an absolute nightmare for us. I’m not sure there will be another firm so strongly hit by it as ours is.
“My parents started the business in 1991, I joined in about 1997 and all of us have built this into a freehold business. My car, my house, everything is not as big as it should be because we have pumped everything back into this business to build it to the point where it is every single accountant we’ve ever spoken to has said ‘you inherit the business’.”
But, he added, the inheritance tax could be “just shy of £1m” and continued: “It would mean we’d have to sell pubs. I honestly thought about ringing the sort of Oxford Mail where most of our pubs are say ‘this is the list of pubs we have in your area, dear Oxford reader. Which two do we sell so we can pay the inheritance tax bill?’.
“The farmers have done a fantastic job raising the awareness of this, but this is not a farmers’ tax or an agricultural tax, this is a family business tax. And I know there are a number of big generational regional brewers that feel exactly the same way but they generally have lots of shareholders.”
“We’ve got just two shareholders and it’s just fundamentally unfair. Nobody ever saw this coming.
“I’ve created jobs, resurrected pubs. I’ve taken closed pubs in villages and breathed life into new communities. We’ve done all of this and for that we are going to get taxed into oblivion.
“This is going to completely dominate the way we develop this business and it’s going to be wrapped around the potential that somebody’s going to want to take 20%.”
Collinson concluded: “The future of what we do in that wet-only good-quality pub business is going to certainly going to see me – and I’m hoping my kids – out but you never know.”
- To read what Collinson thinks about the unfair playing field the sector plays on, younger drinkers and a proposal on cask ale, click here.
