BIG INTERVIEW: Butcombe boss - say yes to as many opportunities as possible

Lawson, who took the reins of Butcombe Group in 2019, stresses what he sees as excellent leadership as: “You need to have a vision – what are we all here to do? What do we want to get out of bed for? What are the values and the behaviours of the business? Engagement and communication are important.

“A previous boss of mine once said to me ‘I don’t think it’s possible to over communicate within an organisation’ and I think that’s absolutely true. A key part of leadership is just relentless communication.

“When you meet the best general managers in our business, invariably, part of what they do is they communicate brilliantly with their teams so even when they’re not there, they’re still delivering the business in the way that they know their leader wants them to.”

Lawson has built from the ground up and told The Morning Advertiser he started his path to hospitality via some of the big players in the off-trade.

He started out in retail as a trainee for M&S after proposing to his now wife for 30-something years while he was at university so “it was pretty important that I got a job – Tessa’s dad absolutely thought it was quite important too!” He recalls. “I applied for loads and it came down to the RAF regiment or M&S and I was probably more likely to survive in M&S. I loved retail, the people and the dynamic.”

He moved on to work at Asda and then ran the convenience division of Sainsbury’s Local, which he describes as one of the most important roles he had when it came to developing breadth in his career.

Lawson continues: “I left retail for the wonderful world of pubs, leisure and hospitality and joined Greene King in 2007 and had four years there on the board as MD of its local managed pub estate, which was great. I really enjoyed it.

“Working with Rooney [Anand] was all about developing myself as a general manager in order to be able to eventually become a CEO. Those roles are really important to learn your craft.”

Back to the role that became the apple of Lawson’s eye, was the CEO at Vision Express in 2011, which was something completely different and he stayed there for almost eight years.

Again, he remembers it as being great and states the business reached second spot in the sector in the UK, behind Specsavers but was ahead of Boots across the UK, Ireland and the Middle East, where he learned a huge amount.

“I had the view I probably had one role still in me at an executive level,” he says. “I absolutely wanted to come back into the hospitality sector. It’s my favourite sector. I love the people, food and drink, and dynamism. I wanted to get into a business and help to work with the team to build it and [the role at Butcombe] looked like a really fascinating, unique business and opportunity – and it’s proved exactly that.

“This is my favourite role and to do your favourite role after 30 years is quite something.”

Dark art

And he has little in the way of regrets either. “I’ve made lots of mistakes but I’ve learned from the vast majority of them,” he says.

“If I could start from scratch, maybe particularly earlier in my career, I might have worked a bit harder, been a bit more work and home life balanced and been a bit more present.

“As a CEO and general manager, I would have probably put more investment into my financial acumen and learning. If you come up through ops, the finance guys like to think that what they do is a slightly dark art so the more you can invest in your capability and skill set in that area, the better off you will be.

“However, as a CEO, you’re not really that much of an expert in anything, so you have to get over that and realise you’re fully entitled to ask whatever question you want – even if it’s a slightly daft one, that’s fine.”

On the balancing of his work and home life, he explains it’s been “bloody hard” but having forged the career he has, he believes he has got better at the balance over the years and puts that down to planning well, within his work and home life, and makes sure he works hard to be in the present whether that is in his work and home lives.

“You’ve got to be emotionally there too. As a CEO, it is unrelenting, your mind is always whirring away, when I’m home I’m present and at work or elsewhere it’s the same.”

Lawson has good advice for someone younger going into the trade now.

“Say yes to as many experiences and opportunities as possible,” he suggests. “At one point in my career, I said yes to a job and I didn’t even actually know what the job was! I was told ‘I need you to do this job and the answer is yes’. I said ‘but what’s the job?’ He said, ‘it doesn’t matter... the answer is still yes’. It ended up being one of the best jobs I’ve done.”

He says one should not get hung up upon the hierarchy of a company but to rather say yes and expose themselves to as many different experiences as possible in a bid to build a broad base of knowledge and skills.

“I don’t think you ever regret experiences and breadth,” Lawson continues. “We see some of our younger team members say ‘I’ve done this for a few years and I really want to travel’. Jayson [Perfect, Butcombe Group COO] says, ‘then go and travel but you know where we are so come back’ and they do.

“It sounds a little bit cheesy but do stuff that makes you happy. One of the most relentless people I ever worked for said we should do stuff we’re really good at because you’re likely to be successful and you’re likely to also be happy.”

The most pressure he faces comes from himself. He says all CEOs are different animals but when one runs organisations with large numbers of teams and people, you should – and do – put a lot of pressure on yourself.

You need to make the right decisions, ask the right questions? Do the right thing for your stakeholders, teams and the 1,800 people that work at Butcombe?

“I genuinely don’t get stressed. I only get challenged if I think there’s something that we don’t have a plan for,” he says.

Incredibly proud

His career highlights have been varied from getting to run his first site to being made a divisional director at Sainsbury’s.

He explains: “My granddad was a greengrocer and was a warehouse man for Sainsbury’s – something that he was always incredibly proud of – and the Christmas card from Lord Sainsbury used to sit on the mantelpiece after he retired.

“All the other moments for me have been about the people and the teams. Who you work with becomes so much more important. I put an awful lot of time into the teams I work with and they genuinely are reason to get out of bed every day.”

There are periods where he looks back and can name really challenging moments but wouldn’t call them ‘low points’.

“I very rarely get down in that respect,” Lawson reveals. “In 2008, in the midst of the global financial crisis, I was leading a largely wet-led pub business, following a smoking ban, that was pretty challenging. At Greene King, we developed a strategy to come out of that, which we did, and came out really strongly.”

In 2015 he learned a valuable lesson in not pushing a business too hard after overstretching at Vision Express. Of course, Covid was a tough time for everybody in the sector, in particular when during the initial period in early 2020 when Butcombe had closed all its pubs but was still waiting on Government support and the pubco was “literally at a point of needing to start letting people go”.

Survival of the business was key and, in fact, Lawson doesn’t regard it as a low point – rather as a challenge – because “we came out of it far stronger as a business than we went into it”.

Being the CEO is a lonely role he states but confesses he is INTJ (introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging) so happens to be with his own company.

“At any point in time, I have great people, great teams, and I can reach out to any of them any time but the buck does stop with me,” Lawson says. But there are always people he’s worked with over the years who he can rely on and call them at any time.

And more advice for smaller sector businesses wanting to grow is something Lawson reflects upon. “In 2019, when we reviewed where the business was at and reviewed the strategy that’s progressed us over the past five or six years, our thinking was what are we really good at? What what do we think we’re really good at? What are we really passionate about? Could we do that to a really high standard? Could we be the best? Could we be world class at that? It’s never been tougher to start a business now and to grow. It is eminently still possible but it’s even more important that you really focus in on what you are really good at and do more of that.

“We think we’re really good at premium food-led pubs with rooms. Likewise, we have an incredible brand in Butcombe and a great legacy in our brewing so let’s build on that and that’s exactly what we’ve done.

“If you deliver something that drives economic engines and creates value, you can grow and be really successful.”