I haven’t come across many directors in hospitality who say that there really are more than enough executive women on boards in the sector, thank you very much. That the job is done. That when they brief recruiters for 50:50 male/female lists, they are overwhelmed with the number of women who want to apply so that their list ends up 90:10 in favour of women. That women step forward for promotion more than men even when not as well qualified. That their own boards are really as diverse as they could possibly want. Well, some do, but not very many.

 

The vast majority would love to have more women on their boards really. They are puzzled as to why it’s still an issue. Why do they still have to ask for 50:50 recruitment lists? Why do they have to implement programmes targeted solely on the development of women? Why isn’t there more movement, more progression and more promotion of women into key roles?

 

They know the business argument that women make most of the decisions on where to eat, sleep and drink out, so it makes sense to have women on boards who understand these decision makers. They hear the commercial argument that those businesses in the top quartile for diverse boards deliver significantly better performance (27% better, according to McKinsey) than those in the bottom quartile.

 

They know that women on boards make complete sense. And that when they find (hunt out?) brilliant women for senior key roles, they deliver. They like collaborating with mixed teams – it’s just the norm. They are blind to the sexes because they just want the best person for the job, be that a man or a woman, but they do want a balance in their company overall. They are frustrated with the lack of progress as much as we are. Of course, there are dinosaurs out there but on the whole, I don’t find our sector full of dinosaurs, to be honest. I see leaders genuinely wanting to see change. 

 

I held a female advisory board some time ago and asked the question: “How do we get more women on to boards? How do we fill the funnel, as it were, so that finding the right woman for any board level role is not such a painful process?” The answer from this extraordinary group of women was mentoring.

 

And so myself, Christine Martin and Shereen Ritchie set out to establish our own mentoring scheme to ensure that the sector always has a “supply” of brilliant women, all completely ready to step up to board level – confident, experienced, commercial, collaborative and highly motivated. We call it Boardwalk, and it launched this week.

 

Of course, there are wonderful organisations in the sector who run the most brilliant, well regarded mentoring schemes – we salute them. We want though to focus only on hospitality and largely on small and medium-sized companies. We want to have a small (20 strong) cohort of women who are 12-18 months away from being on a board and where our focused programme of mentoring, tutorials, resources and support will get them there. 

 

 We are focused on one single objective – that 60% of our alumni will gain a board role within three years of completing Boardwalk. All our efforts, and those of our mentors, will be on developing the key skills of our mentees so that they not only gain board roles, but deliver brilliantly when they sit around the board table.

 

And what a group of mentors we have for the class of ’25. These include: Will Beckett (Hawksmoor co-founder), Justin Carter (Loungers general manger), Pano Christou (Pret A Manger chief executive), Thom Elliott (Pizza Pilgrims co-founder), Simon Emeny (Fuller’s chief executive), Laura Harper-Hinton (Caravan co-founder), Thomas Heier (Wagamama chief executive), Glyn House (Caffe Nero UK managing director), Tom James (Bill’s managing director), Jon Knight (TRG Concessions chief executive), Paula MacKenzie (PizzaExpress chief executive), Eadaoin McDonagh (White Rabbit Projects chief operating officer), David McDowall (Stonegate chief executive), Alan Morgan (Big Table Group chief executive), Caroline Ottoy (WatchHouse managing director), Marta Pogroszewska (head of Bread Holdings), Sunaina Sethi (JKS co-founder) and Emma Woods (Tortilla chair). Our mentees are incredibly fortunate to have such exceptional leaders to guide and mentor them.

 

Our four founding partners – Access, HaysMac, Troika and Prestige – have been very carefully chosen. They echo our values, support our ambitions, will be active on our advisory board and will support our tutorial programme with their invaluable expertise. Our chair, Bronagh Kennedy, has extensive experience in the sector and will ensure the board is constructively challenged when we meet. Our advisory board is completed by Jon Hendry Pickup, chief executive of Butlins, who will act as an independent advisor for us.

 

We are so excited to have brought Boardwalk to fruition. We know that balanced executive boards really are possible, and that hospitality will be so much more successful if it can create such boards. So, look in your own organisations and find women who you know have the drive and talent to join your board and who will benefit from Boardwalk for that final push, and put them forward by 23 May 2025.

 

The programme starts on 9 June 2025. Wouldn’t it be great to see your own mentee on the programme in a few weeks’ time? See here for full details.

With Propel’s Excellence in Pub & Bar Retailing Conference fast approaching on Wednesday 14 May, in this Friday Opinion piece, I will focus on that very subject: excellence. Coming up: a reference to Einstein, a frog, squinting and interpretive dance. I will also draw a comparison, from another sector, on how easily excellence can turn into mediocrity and then pale away to irrelevance.

 

Do you remember when the BBC’s Have I Got News For You was good? When HIGNFY, as they call it, was cutting edge; a must watch TV gem of clever, topical, satirical excellence? Jokes rolled off the tongues of team captains Ian Hislop and Paul Merton quicker than the rate-of-sale of burgers at a Beefy Boys pop-up. It was a glorious watch – a programme people would talk about down the pub the next day.

 

But over the years everything about the show has dropped. Everything. From the ratings to Ian Hislop’s jowls. Putting it bluntly, Have I Got News For You has lost its sharpness. And that leads me to ask a question of all pub people reading this, especially pub company area managers. Which one of your pubs is most HIGNFY? Have a think.

 

Oh wow. That was quick. That one, is it? Yes, I know you’ve got a lot on your plate, you don’t have to make excuses to me. Yes, I get it, staffing issues, the cost-of-living crisis, national minimum wage, national insurance contributions. And I know, overall, your numbers look okay. But that pub, your HIGNFY pub, what’s the plan there?

 

You need a strategy, and I can help here. I can help by confidently telling you that none of the strategies below will work. And I speak with great authority, as a former pub company managing director who has tried them all (except six):

1.  Hoping for change

2.  Keeping my fingers crossed for improvement

3.  Deciding to tackle it when everything else calms down

4.  Squinting a bit and telling myself it’s not as bad as it looks.

5.  Getting on my knees and praying to a higher power.

6.  Sending positive vibes via interpretive dance.

 

Self-deprecating jesting aside, the only way to tackle a pub with HIGNFY is to take action – and take action now.

 

You’re a pub company specialist, so you know what you have to do, but something is holding you back. Well, I can help here too. Try any one of these strategies:

1.  Swallow the frog

2.  Bite the bullet

3.  Rip off the plaster

4.  Take the bull by the horns

5.  Grasp the nettle

6.  Take off the blinkers

And, squeezing in one more idiom, start the ball rolling, today. 

 

Two thoughts before I go:

1.  “Pubs either go slowly forward or quite rapidly backwards. You have to keep pushing hard.” So said JD Wetherspoon founder Sir Tim Martin in a recent interview. 

2.  Einstein told us insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But when it comes to that HIGNFY pub of yours, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results.

 

I will be at the Excellence in Pub & Bar Retailing Conference. If you spot me, do come and say hello. I am the tall, significantly balding, slightly jowly 60-something.

When the smoking ban came into force in 2007, one of the biggest impacts was the widespread move by pub operators to introduce food into pubs that had previously never ventured further into the realm of selling solids than offering crisps and peanuts.

 

It was a revolutionary period that made the once smoky, boozy environments much more attractive to women and families, and the food undoubtedly proved a revenue-boosting boon for those venues able to add kitchens and recruit capable chefs. It certainly helped further fuel the gastropub phenomenon that continues to this day.

 

There have been a plethora of food-focused pubs opening in recent years that have done incredibly well – off the top of my head, in London, there’s The Public House Group, the guys behind The Tamil Prince, the team at The Baring and the JKS-backed pubs – but what marks these places out is that they are all independent co-owned/joint-ventures with proven chefs locked in that makes them dining destinations. 

 

Meanwhile the undifferentiated brands and pub companies with less attractive, template-driven menus are coming under severe pressure. Although the overall number of licensed premises in the UK remained flat across 2024 (something of a result), the food pub category suffered a fall of 3.2%. It was offset by growth of 5.9% in the drinks-led bars category, according to CGA by NIQ.

 

A lot of structural and behavioural changes have taken place in the 18 years since the smoking ban, most notably in recent years, the ongoing increases in the cost of operating. The upshot is that for the first time since the legislation came into force, the near-wholesale shift by pubs across the country into operating kitchens needs to be seriously reassessed.

 

One experienced pub company managing director suggested that any regular-sized suburban pub doing less than £6,000 in weekly food sales should consider whether this is a viable way to operate. Back-of-a-fag-packet calculations might put the cost of goods at around £1,500, wages at £2,000, utilities and other costs adding another £1,000, along with the various other onerous charges that are creeping in, which makes the amount of money made insufficient for the effort involved. 

 

Is it, therefore, time to have a strategic rethink about the model at many pubs? Maybe it is time for the pub companies to systematically run through their portfolios and strip out the food offer where it no longer stacks up financially. The argument against pulling back from food is obviously that custom would fall and thereby impact drink sales, thus inflicting serious damage on the business. JD Wetherspoon has long been clear that its food offer is what keeps the drinks flowing at the necessary volumes across its many venues. 

 

There is an alternative route, of course, and it is the bar snack. My favourite pubs are invariably drink-led venues run by operators such as Grace Land, Thornbridge and Pivovar, Bloomsbury Leisure and Barworks, before it was bought by Urban Pubs & Bars. They cleverly supplement their top-notch drinks offers with more snack-focused food offerings. You can find menus of pizza, cheese toasties, pies, gyozas and other easier-to-prepare offerings that suit the individual pubs.

 

Such has been the impact of cost increases on pub food that I have taken to ordering a batch of starters/snacks when dining out with my family. Taking eight starters/snacks at £6-£8 apiece works out much better than four mains at £20-£25 each. There’s plenty to share, lots of variety, and it is cost efficient. I cannot be the only person who has recalibrated how they approach food in pubs.

 

The much-loved Southampton Arms in Gospel Oak, north London, is renowned for its beer and cider range along with its concise snack menu, which it has replicated at its new pub, The Pocket, in Highbury. We are talking Cornish pasties, sausage rolls, Scotch eggs, vegan rolls and various pork pies. This offering can be undertaken without chefs, expensive kitchen facilities, and complex things like extraction systems. 

 

A similar offering is also available at many Young’s pubs, and it is doing brisk trade, I’m informed. It runs this bar snacks menu alongside its fully-fledged bill of fare, but maybe it should be bold and jettison its full offer and simply run the snack-only option at certain venues. 

 

If we are set to be in a harsher cost landscape for the foreseeable future, then some tough decisions need to be made about their food propositions by all pub companies that are running expensive kitchens for possibly questionable returns.

This week, I had quite a disappointing conversation with an operator. He didn’t make that much money and lived above the pub, taking out around £200 a week. We sat down together and went through his numbers after April’s increase in national insurance (NI) and national minimum wage. All of his profit was going to be wiped out; something that many of us will face. Sadly, it feels like the standard at the moment is cost increases are equal to current profits.

 

Even worse was the fact that he didn’t believe he could do any better at running labour; he did not see any efficiencies in his business. With this mindset, he likely will fail in the next 12 months – it is depressing and sad, but unfortunately, without spurring ourselves to get better, it will be the truth. 

 

I would say that the current environment is probably going to be the hardest we have faced for a while. Was 2008 as bad? Or the smoking ban? At the time, I was working for a big corporate, so perhaps it didn’t quite feel the same. Right now, we need to be our best and at our bravest; we need to try things that we might not like as much. 

 

You’ll be pleased to hear that with some persuasion and encouragement, we did manage to produce a plan with this particular operator to get him that extra £200 a week, so I thought I would share it with you all.

 

Top of the list was taking on single shifters. I speak about this quite a lot, as it is something I am a big fan of in my own businesses. When you bring on someone for a single shift, they will still fall below the NI thresholds, so you will immediately save 15% of wages, which is around £2 an hour. But single shifters are not just good for cost; they also typically only work when you need them, either seasonally or on a specific day of the week. In my own sites, Sundays close 30% of the sales for the week, so they are vital. We do not need more full-timers; we haven’t got enough hours in the week for them. Part-timers and single shifters are great for effective deployment and cost. 

 

The second thing we focused on was managing to a cost. One of the major opportunities and improvements that many single sites can make is to know what they are planning to spend before the week starts. On-costs of NI, holiday and pensions add up and can vary significantly by employee, so it is becoming increasingly important to know what you are planning to spend before the week starts. As the adage goes, what gets measured gets managed. Once you know what you are going to spend for the week, you address some of the more marginal shifts and start and finish times.

 

Plus-one management was the next idea we looked at. Many owner-operators run their business by having themselves as an extra rather than being part of the shift. This is an expensive way to run the business, and probably also an exhausting one if you feel like you have been at work but haven’t been required, and yet have still been on the floor. Surely it is better to be a part of the shift and work in it. It requires the best sales forecast you can make, and then to add yourself in as part of the team. 

 

So, three things to help get profit back to required levels, and maybe more. But as always, it is about changing the habits, which is difficult to do. Planning is one of the inescapable habits in our industry. I am a planner by nature, so I can never understand those who don’t like to plan, but it is a habit that many people avoid doing. 

 

Whether it is changes for the business, financial planning or seasonal planning, it is crucial. Once we begin planning, we can also plan to change certain habits: looking at the week ahead, knowing what your cost is and changing from plus-one management are all key habits to have. 

 

Many can proudly pat themselves on the back and say they do all of these well. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t challenge yourself to get even better. We’re facing one of our biggest challenges yet, so I can’t think of a better time to do so.