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Beyond the numbers

How Hospitality accountants helped Peach Pubs grow and scale-up

Stuart Crook 18/11/2022 5 minute read

Stuart Crook FCA, explains how Peach Pubs grew a successful hospitality chain to achieve an eventual exit.

How to scale-up a business successfully?

It is a question that is likely to dominate the thinking of entrepreneurs at various stages in the business journey. This is also a major area for the government, after all it's scale-ups that really drive growth and employment in the economy. At Wellers, helping early stage businesses expand is a specialist area of ours, and one we're really passionate about.

This is why we're so proud of Peach Pubs and our work with them over the years. Among numerous things, we've witnessed Peach expand to 21 sites, get through the pandemic successfully by helping feed NHS workers and care homes, and finally achieve an exit for the founders.

Scaling a business comes with many challenges along the way. Growth requires the back office systems, and processes, to expand with the business, so as to facilitate demand and additional sales. Therefore you need the right mix of support and advice, in this case in the form of specialist hospitality accountants, to guide your business in overcoming these issues.

Book a FREE meeting to scale your business with the right hospitality  accountants >

In the below video, we cover Peach Pubs and Hamish Stoddart's journey, and our role within it, as they grew quickly and realised their aspirations. 

Why having the right team helps facilitate growth

Having the right advisors around you, applying their knowledge, skills, and experience of implementing advisory services with countless other businesses is essential. It means you can be confident of receiving sound guidance, at the right time.

Having a professional sounding board combined with financial management is priceless for our clients. Whilst there is no certainty that every idea will work, or generate the desired return, the provision of questioning and application of decision making, with the benefit of extensive commercial experience, means you can be confident of making decisions with a better informed opinion.

This in turn, helps guide strategic direction based on the level of investment that is needed to achieve goals, whilst considering the performance and financial strength of the business. So, if you're looking to grow your Gastropub, bar, or restaurant chain, be sure to watch the video and consider carefully the accountants, and business advisors, you bring on board.

Guiding the client journey through to exit

Ultimately, our business is about helping yours. Nothing gives us more satisfaction than having assisted Hamish Stoddart and the Peach team to fulfill their vision. We thank them for the great journey, and all the memories.

In the end Hamish and his fellow founders achieved an exit when Peach Pubs was acquired by Revolution Bar Group for £16.5m!

Video transcript

Hamish Stoddart:

Peach is a fantastic group of people, we've created a bunch of gastro pubs, 21 now. 

3 Principles:

1. We make our teams and communities lives peachy

2. We love our planet

3. We always serve the good stuff

We grew from 3 pubs to 10 pretty fast, we did get ourselves into a mess occasionally. At that point Wellers were on board and they moved from being just auditors to being advisors, and supporters in our growth.

Stuart Crook:

At that stage we were able to understand the accounting systems that they used, the till systems that they used, and all the various key elements that went into them being able to provide a hospitality service to their clients.

Wellers like to build relationships that are based on trust, that really get to understand what their drivers are. We had an understanding that enabled us to comment back to the board to grow from 2, 3, 4, to 5, to 10 pubs. 

Hamish Stoddart:

It's always been a roller coaster, Peach. I think pub businesses are extremely hard and what you need is teams around you to support you through difficult times. Wellers has been, well it's a constant in Peach's evolution.

We did a refinancing of the business that actually completed in January of 2020. That allowed us to do some fantastic things in COVID, cooking for the NHS, cooking for care homes and care workers.

We were one of the few pub companies that were able to maintain 100% of the team, and we were able to pay all our suppliers which was, to me, really important, and that was a fantastic bit of teamwork.

Stuart Crook:

The Wellers' vision for our clients is achieved by bringing them along and informing them at every stage, getting inside their mind to a certain extent, so that you understand what drives them is really important.

We now have the relationship that we aspire to have with Peach. We can meet for a drink, we can have a chat, we can talk over the phone, and really understand each other. As a hospitality client, Peach has a massive social side. One of the things they've undertaken, over a number of years, is the Peach festival.

Hamish Stoddart:

Recently you've done a series of, what was it, 5 Freddy Mercury's?

Stuart Crook:

I remember spending 2 hours in a fancy dress shop trying to make sure that we made more effort.

The relationship has developed because the issues as you get bigger, as a company, as it gets more complicated, different things pop up.

Hamish Stoddart:

Over a long time we've got to a place where the depth of the relationship allows this big 'business oxygen' thing to happen.

Stuart Crook:

The ethos that we have is that 'business oxygen' that we talked about, it aligns with Peach's 'making life peachy'. There needs to be some cultural overlap whenever you're dealing with clients because otherwise you could be pulling in different directions.

Hamish Stoddart:

We genuinely work together as partners. Cheers, perfect.

Stuart Crook:

Thank you Hamish.

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The content of this post was created on 18/11/2022.
Please be aware that information provided by this blog is subject to regular legal and regulatory change. We recommend that you do not take any information held within our website or guides (eBooks) as a definitive guide to the law on the relevant matter being discussed. We suggest your course of action should be to seek legal or professional advice where necessary rather than relying on the content supplied by the author(s) of this blog.

 

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