Our strategy
We want our brands to be the first choice for anyone looking to go out for a relaxed, casual meal or drink, whatever the occasion and so, for over ten years, we’ve focused on running food-led pubs and restaurants, rather than drinks-led pubs. Our strategic review in January 2010 set out how we planned to achieve this and we’ve made a great deal of progress. We sold most of our smaller, drinks-led pubs as well as our hotels, lodges and bowling venues. We now have almost 1,600 restaurants and pubs, trading under 13 key brands. Each of these businesses takes an average of over £21,000 a week and makes an industry-leading £180,000 operating profit a year. Only five years ago, food accounted for just 31% of our sales. It now accounts for around 47%.
Our strategy is clear. We want to ensure customers keep coming back by keeping our brands fresh and building on their reputation for quality, choice, service and value. We want to use the strength of our brands to develop more sites, trading with recognisable and popular offers. With more sites and more customers, we can make the most of our scale in purchasing, marketing and more, and achieve even better returns on investment. And we want to make sure we’ve got the right people in place, with the right training and motivation to ensure our customers always get excellent service.
The Company must also continue to be financially sound and we have reduced our debt significantly in recent years. Our remaining debt is guaranteed at very favourable terms against our high-quality and cash-generative restaurant and pub businesses, most of which are freehold. However, we intend to be flexible about our property ownership to ensure we make the most of opportunities as they arise.
We believe the strength of our brands, the quality of our property and the location of our restaurants and pubs, our great range of food and drink, and the friendly professionalism of our people mean that our business will thrive and successfully grow in the future.