Don’t be snobby on Made In Chelsea – it helped City Pub Company boom

Clive Watson’s resume is a bit unexpected for a pub owner. His educational achievements suggest he could be a political pundit, a diplomat, or even a spy. His degrees in international relations, history and diplomacy indicate a serious academic type with a penchant for tweed suits.

Instead, City Pub Company’s co-founder and executive chairman is warm and enthusiastic, dressed in a smart casual blazer and shirt, as he storms into his luxurious Chelsea pub, The Phene.

This is no ordinary watering hole but decorated down to the last detail to be photo ready for Instagram. Both his profile and the profile of the company have had a head start with The Phene’s appearance in several episodes of the reality TV show Made In Chelsea.

Watson’s two daughters Lucy and Tiffany starred in multiple series of the programme, which follows the lives and loves of some of London’s wealthiest people. The publican himself made a number of appearances on the show, although this brought out some snobbery among his peers. “I don’t understand why some of my friends made negative comments about it,” he muses.

One of the main reasons why he is in such a good mood is that business is going well, much to his surprise.

Even the increasingly popular ‘Dry January’ and people working from home and missing Friday evening drinks after the office have not affected the unexpectedly strong trading since the start of the year.

“We were all pretty nervous that it was going to fall off a cliff after Christmas,” he says. But Friday evenings are definitely back. Even as people work from home, I hear of some who work remotely and then come to London in the evening for a real night out.

‘In London there is certainly the return of the office worker, the tourist and general urban life.’

After months of battling the energy crisis and the cost of living, the current calm gives him the chance to focus on his true passion. While most bosses hardly have time for hobbies, Watson spends his free hours writing a history and current affairs book. He hopes to complete a first draft by the summer.

A few years ago – and more than three decades after completing his studies in international relations at the University of Reading – he took a course in international diplomacy at the University of Buckingham for fun. He then won a place on his dream course, a master’s degree in history at Cambridge.

‘I tried to get into Cambridge when I was 18 and in some ways it’s always been a bit of a nightmare for me,’ he says. past.

His dissertation focused on the Conservative Party’s attitude to Scottish devolution from 1966 to 1979, but it just missed the points needed to be promoted, which he had been reflecting on.

“I’m always up for a challenge, I probably would have done it — and I think it would have gone horribly wrong,” he says. “It’s part-time for five years and you have to have so much focus and dedication.” This was probably for the best, as Watson’s attention would soon be diverted when he graduated from Cambridge in March 2017 and the City Pub Company went public just eight months later.

The 61-year-old founded the group in 2011 with fellow entrepreneurs David Bruce and John Roberts after Greene King bought Watson’s latest venture, Capital Pub Company, for £93 million.

As the name suggests, Capital Pub Company focused on running pubs in London, but going by the broader name of ‘City’ gave it scope to buy or set up premises in places like Exeter, Bath, Bristol, Oxford and, of course, Cambridge.

But City Pub Company’s five-and-a-half years as a publicly traded group have been uneventful, first due to the pandemic and then the ensuing toxic cocktail of double-digit inflation, skyrocketing utility bills, labor shortages, and rising costs. -living crisis causing ordinary Britons to limit their spending. When it joined the London Stock Exchange’s junior market, AIM, it had around 34 pubs and was valued at £90 million. Now post Covid it has 44 pubs but is worth slightly less at £87m.

In the final three months of last year, sales rose 8 per cent higher than in 2019 through the World Cup and Christmas holiday season, although rail strikes are estimated to shave £750,000 off that quarter’s turnover.

A fall in wholesale gas prices means that at least one of its biggest problems is finally starting to subside.

When pubs closed during lockdowns in 2021, the company’s utility bills stood at around £1.2 million. In 2022 this skyrocketed to £3m as wholesale energy prices rose as a result of the war in Ukraine, but this is expected to drop to £2.4m this year and, he hopes, to be below £2m by 2024 pounds could fall.

The arch-Remainer is generally in favor of Jeremy Hunt’s current tax policies, but would like the forthcoming budget to address corporate rates, a problem that has plagued the high street for years.

Starring: Clive Watson’s daughters Lucy and Tiffany

Business rates are primarily a tax on physical retailers, not online, and I think the shift should be towards taxing the revenue that businesses make. For online businesses, their premises are a lot smaller, so the taxable value is a lot lower, and they get away with blue murder. It will be a property tax when it should be a sales tax.’

For all his optimism, the pandemic’s only lasting effect was on Watson’s ambitious expansion plans for the company. Pre-Covid this included the target of having 120 pubs by the end of 2026. This target has now been reduced to 80 during the same period when Watson was put off by the prospect of higher debt, difficulties in hiring new employees and the multiple shutdowns.

“If there was another Omicron for six months and we had to close again…” he fades away. “I think we are now much more careful about things like financing.

“I’d like us to be in Canterbury or Chichester, but we’d rather buy an existing pub than open a new one in a town where we don’t have a representation.”

Watson entered the job market in the 1980s, around the height of the Big Bang yuppie excess, joining an investment bank as an accountant. But, unlike many of his peers, he did not enjoy the culture and soon broke on his own.

“I was sitting at the same desk every day and I just found it suffocating and wanted out. I wanted to sit at the decision-making table.’

He insists he would never want to be CEO of a FTSE 100 company – preferring to take a more hands-on and personal role in his companies, preferring a collegial atmosphere to a corporate one.

And finally, if his company was that big, how would he ever have time to finish that book?