Simon Emeny: The local boy who swapped spreadsheets for pints at Fuller's

The first outsider to head this family firm gets to grips with the capital’s oldest brewer

Hometown glory: Fuller Smith & Turner chief Simon Emeny says London is an "amazing city"

Paul Dallimore

22 July 2016

Simon Emeny is angry. In fact, he is very angry. His ire is directed at one man — Boris Johnson.

“The man who was mayor of London for eight years has let London down,” says the chief executive of Fuller Smith & Turner, the brewer and pubco which is emphatically London.

Sitting in the Blue Boat on the edge of the Thames, it isn’t Johnson’s surprise decision not to stand in the Tory party leadership contest which annoys Emeny, it’s the fact that, despite knowing perfectly well London would vote solidly Remain, he chose to lead the Leave campaign, and helped it to snatch victory.

Emeny was up at 4.30 to watch the result. At 8.30 he chaired a meeting of executives at the brewer’s Chiswick headquarters to discuss how to reassure Fuller’s 4000 staff — 60% of whom come from abroad, the bulk of them from Europe.

“Some of them have been with us for 12, 15 years,” says Emeny. “They have brought up their families here. We wouldn’t be where we are today as a company without them and we treat them like our family.

In the doghouse: Boris Johnson

Getty Images

“London has been in a fug recently over Brexit but it will bounce back. I’ve worked through the London bombings, the aftermath of 9/11, the worst recession in living memory and the high of the London Olympics. It’s very important that we don’t talk ourselves into recession, but London always comes back.”

Emeny, who is anything but angry most of the time and has quickly put a pint of Oliver’s Island in my hand, was born within a stone’s throw of Fuller’s Chiswick brewery in a cottage hospital which, like so many of those buildings, is now a block of luxury flats.

His father, who left school without any O-Levels, became managing director of Laurent Perrier in this country. His mother was a hairdresser. He went to the independent Hampton School and still turns out for the Old Hamptonians football team.

Having headed off to Southampton University to study accountancy, Emeny — with an ironic grin of understatement — says he quickly discovered the subject was “not captivating”. In fact, he got his tutors to allow him to change as many courses as they could to get him away from bean counting. At the same time he turned his spare time to running the university halls’ student bars, which at that time in the late Eighties “were pretty big accounts”.

"People actually feel they are back in London when they come off the M4 and drive past the brewery."

 <p>Simon Emeny</p>

So a graduate trainee offer from Bass — which then encompassed InterContinental Hotels, Britvic, Coral betting shops as well as pubs and brewing — was pretty much a no-brainer.

“I lived all over the country doing all kinds of things,” says Emeny. “It was fine while I was a single man but I always wanted to come back to London. So when Fuller’s approached me 20 years ago to run the managed pubs business I was more than interested.”

His main interview appears to have consisted of a lunch with several members of the Fuller, Smith & Turner families, in a boardroom hung with portraits of their ancestors.

There are still Fullers and Turners in the business, although the last Smith directly involved died a decade ago. The extended families (some 200 individuals) still own 50% of the business and through a byzantine share structure, which has corporate governance do-gooders whistling through their teeth, control 75% of the votes.

Emeny does not think this is a bad thing.

“We still run like a family business and we have a very strong shareholder register outside the family,” he points out. “The family shareholding gives us a stability not just through the bad times but also through the good times. It also means I don’t have to spend much time with people from the City with fancy financing ideas.”

He also points to the family as one of the key reasons why the Chiswick brewery, a prime piece of real estate in leafy west London, remains a brewery and not a sprawling housing estate.

But there are other reasons, he says, without naming rival Young’s which closed its Ram Brewery in Wandsworth 10 years ago. “We are London’s oldest brewer and we think our beer company is successful because it’s brewed in London. It gives the company its exclusive DNA and people actually feel they are back in London when they come off the M4 and drive past the brewery into town.”

But when Fuller’s decided in 2010 that it was time for Emeny to succeed Michael Turner as chief executive and made him managing director, they deliberately sent him away from London.

As it had with Turner, the firm paid for him to attend a three-month MBA course at Harvard.

“It gave me a break and a chance to put a new perspective on things,” he says. “There were 180 people on the course and I was the only brewer. I think it made me more reflective and more innovative. It also changed my view of London, how it is perceived from across the world and what an amazing city it really is. I came back brimming with confidence and with a contact book full of people I still keep in touch with — such as the chief executive of RBS.”

The chief executive of RBS, I query, expecting him to qualify it with something like the chief executive of RBS’s commercial lending division.

Contemporary: RBS chief and London Pride drinker Ross McEwan

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

“Yes, Ross McEwan. I see him regularly for a drink. His local is one of our pubs and his favourite pint is London Pride.”

Now that is what I call networking.

Emeny succeeded Turner as chief executive in 2013 but had already been very much running the business with him.

That included focusing on two areas to make Fuller’s stand out; food and service. “Ten years ago we wanted to be famous for something,” he recalls. “So we ensured all our food was fresh, every pub had its own chef with a fully equipped kitchen and as many locally sourced ingredients as we could get.”

The result is that his pubs are not the cheapest in town but half the people going to them go for the food. In our meal of mixed starters, the octopus carpaccio was outstanding.

At the same time Emeny strove to achieve the best possible service. “It’s the hardest thing to get right.”

He turned to the Olympic Games and how the 70,000 Games Makers had been such a large part of London’s success. “We took a lot of lessons and use the same methods to recruit staff. You can train people to pull pints and serve tables but you can’t train them to have personalities.”

Emeny, who has four children ranging in age from 14 to grown-up, is busy planning his 20th wedding anniversary. He met his wife, Selina who works for music group Live Nation, in a Pitcher & Piano in Clapham. Today it is an M&S Simply Food branch, so he plans to whisk her away there and pick up a £20 meal for two. I hope, for her sake, this is some kind of romantic joke. She got him tickets to a Beyoncé gig.

When I ask him the straightforward question of what he drives, he comes over embarrassed. “Well you know I just turned 50?” he asks. “I celebrated by buying an Aston Martin DB9. The kids are banned from it.”

Emeny keeps fit running four times a week and, having done two London marathons, is entered for a triathlon in Valencia in September.

“I have to keep fit because there’s quite a lot of eating and drinking in this industry,” he points out. “I visit a pub every day of the week. Not just ours but other people’s too. And I visit every single one of our 400-plus pubs at least once a year.”

Enough to make anyone envious.

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Simon Emeny: The local boy who swapped spreadsheets for pints at Fuller's

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