That’s the situation Oak Taverns’ Simon Collinson enjoys at his Oxfordshire-based business alongside brother David Collinson and sister Emma Stevenson – and he insists all business decisions are based on the terms “we” rather than “I”.
Their father, Ian Collinson, started the business in 1991 after spending 25 to 30 years working at Whitbread and went his own way after the Beer Orders were passed.
Collinson says: “As soon as he started, I said I wanted to join him. I was selling pots and pans and pressure cookies for Prestige at the time but he said I needed to go work for somebody else first so I sold beers, wines, spirits and ended up at E&J Gallo Wines – I did that for a couple of years and ended up in their wholesale cash & carry division in London but it was very much off-trade-based.”
He realised he was getting no actual on-trade experience but had developed a rounded knowledge of the business so left to work for a small wine company called Hatch Mansfield that focused on the on-trade.
That business was “swallowed up” by Matthew Clark and Collinson switched to working out of London selling bottles of beer, spirits and more, during the ‘Cool Britannia’ 1990s phase.
He says: “It was a really cool time to do it. And I was doing exactly what I wanted to be doing. I had a couple of friends who worked for Charles Wells, which had just taken on Corona and they needed someone in central London to sell it.
“I told my father I thought I was ready and me and a mate threatened to buy a bar in Croydon without him. My dad went ‘whoa, stop, stop, stop’. So Oak Taverns bought this bar and my mate ran it so I started my journey with Oak Taverns in around 1997.”
Staying with the family side of things, Collinson says brother Dave is very much the commercial manager – “he’s the brains of the outfit and looks at the contracts, gets involved in the margins, gets involved in the products, in the range selection and what type of beers we should be selling”.
Meanwhile, sister Emma is the creative director. “She does all the design in our pubs, she also does all the website design and logo designs plus marketing, the social media stuff and puts together a lot of the events with her team”.
He refers to himself as “the ops guy” and adds “I’m the oldest so I’m the boss by default – that’s what I keep telling them”.
He adds he feels really lucky to run a business with board meetings comprising himself, David, Emma and his father.
We didn’t really seem to have any direction of where we were going.
Oak Taverns director Simon Collinson
A turnaround point for the business came just before Covid when Oak Taverns met with former Christie & Co senior director Neil Morgan – who also used to write an opinion column for The Morning Advertiser and is a judge for The Publican Awards.
The idea was for the process to be a strategic review of the business and Collinson explains: “We had about 35 pubs then. We had lots of temporaries, lots of tenancies, big pubs, little pubs, food pubs, tenanted pubs, brewery pubs – we didn’t really seem to have any direction of where we were going.
“We needed somebody to set us on a bit of a course and we then decided what we want is a pub company within the Chilterns and Cotswolds, predominately freehold, wet only and delivering decent profits – and we managed to complete that. We managed to hit the numbers we were expecting to hit in August last year.”
He says the business had to buy some good pubs but also sell some good pubs and borrow a significant money but states it has put Oak Taverns on a really solid footing going forward.
Oak Taverns now operates 18 sites and is targeting 20 within five years but has no ambitions for large-scale growth.
“We had a lot of tied leases, we had a good number of tied tenancies, we had some temporary tenancies, we had some businesses that we rented out,” Collinson says. “And we had about four properties in Norfolk.”
“We were like a mini Marston’s”, he says, rationalised by the fact they brewed beer, had tenanted pubs, leased pubs, managed pubs, big food pubs, football pubs – “a little bit of everything”.
But says they were “busy fools” for doing this for a long time but not making a huge amount of money.
Autumn Budget was a low point
This leads to the low point of his, and the family’s, careers.
He says: “The first week of Covid left us looking at each other, not quite sure what to do. As time went on, we managed to get through it. Our business was in pretty good shape before we went into it so it was almost like a pause button rather than ‘we’ve lost fortunes’.
“The next low point was the Autumn Budget last year. It’s not what everybody goes on about regarding the national insurance contributions, which clearly is a nightmare, or that sort of stuff but the one thing that will absolutely devastate my life’s work and my brother’s and sister’s and my father’s life’s work too is the inheritance tax changes.”
When it comes to his own family, he believes he doesn’t “do it too badly” and realises he is in a very privileged position.
The business’s bar and pub teams are the ones doing all the unsocial hours he adds but his phone is always on yet admits he is “a bit rubbish” when on holiday and says he needs to be better at not checking emails and not answering all work calls.
On regrets in his work career, Collinson is somewhat mixed but it’s more over how things have turned out.
He explains: “I’m going to say [I have] no [regrets] unless you can put ‘in hindsight’ in front of these things… should we have set the share structure up differently to protect the business through draconian inheritance tax? Should we have not taken all the different pubs over the years and stuck to one style? We are happy where we are and that’s probably to do with the journey we’ve been on.
“Although we’ve taken some absolute dogs of pubs – well my father’s got a great saying ‘there’s no such thing as bad pubs, just bad people’ – and you get to that point where every single pub is a good pub if you can match it with the right person to run it. We haven’t got that right over the years.
“What that’s done is taught us what’s important and what to focus on – and that’s what we’ve done over the past few years.
“I don’t think I have any major regrets. I’m happy with where we are.”
Naturally, pressure is bound to be present at the higher echelons of operating a pubco and Collinson says it’s the things that are completely out of your control such as Government policy, credit teams and banks that give him “more pressure than I need”.
He continues: “I’d also say the weather. The more I look at it, the more annoyed I get. When it’s raining on a Friday or Saturday, I’m thinking, why doesn’t it just rain on a Monday? It’s ridiculous.
“When it comes to all the traditional pressure of running a company, because I have got that shared between David and Emma and myself, it feels like it’s a third of the pressure rather than if you were the only one operating it.
“This means I’ve got somebody I can talk to, swear about it and offload, and that helps.”
Running a pub company does surprise you every day. No two days are the same.
Oak Taverns director Simon Collinson
Meanwhile, there’s not a lot that surprises him about being a CEO or, as he prefers to be known as, a director, of a pub company.
“My father started to step back about 10 to 15 years ago so we have been doing this now for some time,” he says. “The role itself doesn’t have that many surprises but running a pub company does surprise you every day. No two days are the same.”
His advice for small pub groups wanting to grow and what he would do if starting from scratch again are practically the same.
“From where we are now, I’d ask ‘why have we spent 20 years not doing what we’re doing now?’ I would operate good-quality, wet-only pubs and possibly try not to please all the people, all of the time,” Collinson says.
“The one big thing we did is try to get freeholds – and try to buy freeholds where you can add value. This opens up bank finance to expand further.
“From our point of view, buying closed pubs or pubs that are failing tenancies that we can fit our model into and then refinancing has been transformational for our business.”
Simple business are easier to manage
“We’ve bought little freeholds, made them good pubs, refinanced them and developed them again,” he adds.
Collinson says the business borrowed some venture capital trust money about 10 to 12 years ago on a couple of sites and it worked well for them.
On finance, he adds: “You’ve got to know what’s coming in and what’s going out, and don’t make it too complicated. Simple businesses are easier to manage and if you look at the very successful hospitality business they don’t try to do everything.
“I always say to my mates who come to the pub at the bottom of my village that we don’t do Sky Sports and it drives them insane. I say I am sure Nando’s could sell loads and loads of beef burgers but they sell a billion pounds’ worth of chicken so they’re happy with what they’re doing.”
If he were to pick three qualities a good leader must have, he states it’s resilience, patience and vision.
“Patience is certainly the one thing my brother and sister would both agree that I have very little of,” he confesses. “Resilience is probably the main one because when you run your own business and you want to be a good leader, you’ve got to take hits from all over the place.”
And on what excellent leadership means to him, he concludes: “It’s running a successful business while maintaining a great culture. All the businesses that have good culture seem to be the successful ones.
“What we’re trying to do on top of that is instil those family values – everybody knows it’s a family-run business even though we’re starting to get a little bit bigger you could argue. One area we are going to look at is trying to improve our green credentials. We’ve just joined the Zero Carbon Forum so we are trying to look after the planet too.”
