The Questions We Asked: JW Lees

This journal series goes behind our work and gives an insight into the issues or opportunities our clients were grappling with that led to our work together. In this edition of The Questions We Asked, we speak to William Lees-Jones, Managing Director at JW Lees.

The brewer and pub company JW Lees is nearly 200 years old, yet William – the sixth generation of his family to lead the business – maintains a restless spirit to keep moving forward. William explains: “This is one of my favourite cartoons. This is a typical family-business board meeting. You’ve got Dad at the end of the table and the kids along the side, and he’s saying: ‘Instead of risking anything new, let’s play it safe by continuing our slow decline into obsolescence’.”

“My inspiration as the leader of our family business is really just to build a great business that is a source of pride for us all: colleagues working in the business now, those that came before us, and those that are coming next,” says William. This is an attitude that can be traced right back to the founder of the business.

JW Lees was founded in 1828. “John Lees, who was our founder, had a vision. He’d been in textiles and he bought a row of cottages in Middleton Junction and started brewing beer. This was the 19th century equivalent of buying a vineyard in the south of France and retiring.” At this time, customers would go to breweries with a jug and buy their beer. Due to the prevalence of cholera, drinking beer was actually safer than drinking water. This started to change around 1900, when public houses emerged, alongside coaching inns and hotels. As William explains, “The British pub started with the end-of-terrace house and a gregarious person selling beer. These people weren’t actually very good at the business side of things because they were much better at selling beer, so they ended up owing money to breweries. To get paid, the breweries repossessed the pubs, and then accidentally became the owners of these pubs.”

After university William worked in advertising, so when he decided to join the family business at the age of 29, he was tasked with setting up JW Lees’ first marketing department. At that time, JW Lees were still presenting themselves in a very traditional manner.

He recalls the situation in Manchester at the time. “Boddingtons were the monster; they were the enemy. Boddingtons was the beer of Manchester. Everybody drank it. The thing that kept me awake at night was that if we were going to build JW Lees as a brand that would be anything other than ‘not quite Boddingtons’, then we needed to be really aware of the fact that they had the firepower of one of the biggest international breweries behind them. They were established 50 years before us. They had this great big chimney that you’d drive past every time you went into Manchester.”

One of William’s first initiatives to address this was to create an advertising campaign. While the approach would be seen as very politically incorrect now, it was less so then and they had to do something that was provocative to get people to view the brand as acceptable. “Although people loved the heritage of JW Lees, they saw it as an old man’s drink. We had to position the brand way over on the other side of the spectrum to give young people permission to drink our beer.”

The advertising helped move JW Lees forward, but it was a phase that William describes as their “adolescence”. By the noughties there were major changes taking place in the beer industry, with an array of mergers and acquisitions. Many of the independent family brewers that had been the backbone of the industry ceased to exist during this time.

“There was a revolution happening in British brewing that nobody was really aware of. We were seeing the beginning of the craft beer revolution, where customers were saying: ‘We want different, individual beers.’ At this point, we sat there with our glass of ale and thought: ‘Is it half-full or half-empty?’ We decided that we needed to become much more specific in terms of how we were reinventing our business for the current generation of beer drinkers.”

Part of the process William initiated was to start thinking about the vision. Every year, JW Lees hold a company conference in central Manchester. Their first attempt to work on the vision was to develop it collaboratively during one such conference three or four years ago. This led to the vision: “Going further together to brew great times”.

Looking back now, William describes their approach as “one of those worthy, management-consultancy-style ‘we’re listening to you’ type processes”. And 12 months later, no one could remember it: it wasn’t working. There was also confusion between the vision statement and the brand’s strapline (“Be Yourself”) that had been developed a few years previously. While the sentiment of individuality was important, since JW Lees are defiantly not a chain-pub company, it was causing problems. “It was giving colleagues the opportunity to do whatever they felt like. You’d say to people: ‘Why did you do that?’ And they’d say: ‘I was just being myself’.”

Rather than being tied to the past, William maintains a strong desire to keep improving. “If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got. No matter how much we try and fight it, things are never going to be how they used to be, because everything will continue to change.” So with the previous vision not working, William had a strong desire to find something that would.

“It was at this point that a mailshot from Squad arrived. It was a really impressive piece, and having worked in marketing I appreciate when people do good work. There are lots of sharks out there. And there are lots of really terrible consultants who want to come into your business and create problems that you didn’t even know existed. But what appealed to me was that these guys aren’t like that.”

Nearly three years later, JW Lees will report an increase in turnover this year of £8m to £78m and net profits are up 41%. Manchester Craft Lager, which didn’t exist three years ago, is now the brand’s fourth best selling beer. As William says, “this has given us the confidence to launch a beer at a premium price in the market whereas previously we always focused on being good value. But probably most importantly, we measure our staff engagement every six months, which is currently at the highest level it’s ever been.”

To read more about our work with JW Lees that took them to this point, please see our case study here.

The Questions We Asked: The Westmorland Family

The Questions We Asked goes behind our work and gives an insight into the issues or opportunities our clients were grappling with prior to briefing us. Sarah Dunning, CEO of The Westmorland Family, takes up the thread:

We’re a second-generation family business. Mum and Dad were and still are hill farmers just outside Tebay in Cumbria. In 1967 the M6 was being built through the corner of their farmland. The government decided there was to be a motorway service area at this point and my parents, in their 30s and keen to get on, made a bid to build and run it. They won the bid and in 1972 they opened Tebay Services northbound.

Over the next 30 years they grew the business and in 2005 Dad handed over the reins to me. The challenge for me was to retain the DNA of the business whilst redefining it for a new generation. It is easy to feel between the devil and the deep blue sea – you don’t want to be the one that destroys the work of the past generation but you know you must be bold if you are to move it on.

We formed a new leadership team and agreed that we wanted to grow and that another motorway service area seemed like the logical step. It took seven years to plan but we finally opened the northbound side of what became Gloucester Services in May 2014. So in the last 10 years we have gone from a local Cumbrian business employing 450 people to one with businesses 300 miles apart, employing 1,000 people.

One of the decisions you have to make as a business is when to bring in external expertise. This can be difficult, especially when it relates to your core brand, but that’s sometimes when you need it most. In 2012, prior to opening Gloucester Services, we were discussing problems that were strategic but also creative. Squad were a small and young organisation, they knew our business and had some empathy with it and they came with both a strategic and creative background. And so we set about working together.

There were many questions at that time, which tended to pose themselves in the order that the problem arose. One of the first ones was what to call our new services in Gloucestershire, partly because we had to invest a lot of money in motorway signage. However, in trying to answer one question, we often found that we couldn’t do so without first answering a series of other questions. It became apparent that the initial question wasn’t always the most important one. Often there was a question behind the question that we needed to address first.

It became clear that the most important first question to resolve was what the brand stands for. Our ethos, which sat at the heart of the business, was very much about being a Cumbrian family business that had grown out of the farm and remained tied to it. However, we had to square this with our desire to grow the business and specifically with the opportunity we had to build a business in Gloucestershire, which inevitably would take us out of our own Cumbrian farming community. This dichotomy extended to many aspects of our business – our product offer, our buildings, our branding – so we had start with some fundamental questions.

Should the buildings in Gloucestershire ‘feel’ like Tebay Services? Should the food be from Gloucestershire, or should we bring some from Cumbria?

We knew our businesses couldn’t be ‘rolled out’ as Costa, Pret and M&S are. It’s much harder to grow a business this way, because each business has to be bespoke. It also means we’ll never grow to be a giant as some businesses do; but perhaps that’s a good thing – there is something to be said for staying smaller and true to purpose.

However, whilst Gloucester Services should have its own personality, as distinct as Tebay Services, we wanted the customer to feel that they were still siblings, albeit not twins. We had to consider how the buildings and landscape should read back to our identity. We wanted to capture the essence of our Cumbrian businesses but re-express it in an appropriate way for a new build. So whilst both feature heavy timber and stone, and feel quite earthy in their way, we exchanged the agricultural and rustic approach of Tebay, for a more contemporary and sleek design.

So how could we create a brand and branding that ties together our businesses with a recognisable thread, yet preserves that character and independence of them?

I have always believed that a business’ ethos should be the compass for every initiative and every innovation you undertake. Only by doing this will the customer understand what you are about. It is not enough to articulate your ethos (even if you can) but you have to deliver it through every touch point because some things are better felt than articulated.

Delivering it through every touch point is quite involved for us because we have around 100 acres of space, about 15,000 product lines and 1,000 people working in the business. We have 10 million customers a year through our businesses and our aspiration is that each one will leave with a sense of what we are about. I have no doubt that we regularly fall short of this aspiration, but we have to keep on trying.

So how could we make sure our branding was present but with a light touch – not like a rubber stamp?

To see how The Westmorland Family’s questions were answered, read the case study here.

Sarah Dunning and RG gave an extended talk based around this article at the 2016 Family Business United Annual Conference and the Cumbria Family Business Conference at Rheged the same year.