Bruce raises a glass for Capital gain

THE man behind toxic brews such as Dogbolter, Pebbledash and Froghopper has retired from the pub business four times, only to make a comeback with more ambitious plans.

On this occasion David Bruce, founder of the Firkin boozers with their cheeky names and micro-breweries, is planning to float his latest venture, the Capital Pub Company, on the stock market with a £40m price tag.

In the process he hopes to make more than a dozen of his pub managers windfalls of £200,000 while he pockets a thirst-quenching £5m.

Larger-than-life Bruce, 56, was tempted out of his last hibernation by the prospect of changing the pub landscape. His chain of 14 unbranded 'locals' dotted about the capital are designed as an antidote to the tired, over-themed hostelries that have come to dominate Britain's High Street.

Fit and tanned after a recent stay at his Greek holiday villa, Bruce is itching for a fight. For a start, he has some strong views on the binge-drinking culture, which has turned Britain's town centre's into no-go areas.

'The High Streets are littered with drunks and the bars have bouncers on the door Thursday through to Sunday. I would not want to cater for that market any more,' he says.

He also believes innovation is being crushed by mass-market pub chains. 'The entrepreneurs have scarpered from the pub business and the bankers and the professional managers have come in,' he says.

As if proving that entrepreneurs - of which he counts himself one - run pubs better, Bruce has to raise his voice against the din of lunchtime drinkers and clinking glasses at his Ladbroke Arms pub, in London's trendy Notting Hill.

Watering holes

HE is considered to have been at the cutting edge of pub innovations over the past 20-odd years. His brainwaves have included Firkin, Slug & Lettuce and Hogshead & Hedgehog chains.

Now he has ditched the horrible puns to nab top-notch London watering holes such as the Ladbroke and the Anglesea Arms in upmarket South Kensington. He has also just exchanged contracts to buy the Kew Gardens Hotel.

He seems to delight in going in the opposite direction from the rest of the industry. 'Everybody else is on the High Street, they've all got stupid names, so we've got into community pubs,' he says.

'We are definitely apart from our peers in this industry at the moment. There's an awful lot of what could be best described as running pubs by manual. We have an entrepreneurial culture within our business.'

Bruce has always had a penchant for self-promotion reminiscent of Virgin tycoon Sir Richard Branson, and seems perfectly willing to make a fool of himself.

He has paraded around dressed as a frog, bee and a Beefeater to advertise previous enterprises. He donned a Sherlock Holmes-style tweed cape and deerstalker to launch the prospectus for the Capital Pub Company, for the rather tenuous reason that his business partner is called Clive Watson and the pair are 'tracking down growth'.

Capital, he says, has a novel slant on certain aspects of the pub game. He claims it stands head and shoulders above the rest of the industry in terms of caring for its staff - it has already dished out share options and gives employees a say in the way the business is run.

'We have a total open book, everybody knows exactly what's going on, all the pubs know the good figures and the bad figures, who's got stock losses, who has not.' he says.

'It's a very open, democratic system. Some of the companies I used to work for almost reduced me to tears by their horrible management style. They were just nasty bullies - - distrusting, assuming everybody was at it. We're exactly the opposite.'

Bruce and Watson, a former Regent Inns finance director, have also been innovators in the way they are funding Capital.

They are using the tax efficient Enterprise Investment Scheme for small businesses. The plan eventually is to float Capital on the junior Alternative Investment Market, but probably not for at least another 18 months. The float will result in a pretty big tip for Capital's bar workers. A manager sitting on 50,000 options could be in line for at least £200,000 once the pubs are floated, Bruce reckons.

Attention span

BUT he can afford to be generous. The father-of-two is a millionaire several times after selling the Firkin brand for £6.6m in 1988. He also received a large chunk of shares from his involvement with Slug & Lettuce owner Grosvenor Inns, though he declines to say how many.

By his own admission, Bruce has a short attention span - he first retired at the age of 40 after leaving Firkin.

'When things are fun, I'll toe the line and sometimes put a suit on. If it's not I won't do it,' he explains.

'You could say the more fun I have, the more money I make.' Bruce, who has been married to Louise for 31 years with two grown-up daughters, is a pub industry veteran.

Glancing at his early CV, it reads like a 'how not to' guide to business, strewn with abject failures as well as the success stories.

Stints with Courage and Theakston's taught him the rudiments of the pub and brewing game, but also gave him a healthy disrespect for authority. During the 1970s he sampled the seedier side of life, working for a nightclub chain.

Something they didn't teach him as part of his Cheltenham public school education was how to deal with a murder at the company's Newcastle establishment.

'When I got there all that was left was a small pool of blood and chalk outline, while 400 customers had to be carted to the nick by coach,' he says recounting the stabbing.

He emerged from this apprenticeship determined to go it alone. But in doing so, the budding pubs magnate spent nine months on the dole in 1979, before literally stumbling on the Firkin idea.

A keen runner, he spotted an almost derelict site in the rundown Elephant & Castle area of London, which eventually became the site of his first pub, the Goose & Firkin.

Price of expansion

THE then 29-year-old Bruce struggled to raise backing. Banks wouldn't lend him the cash, which left him having to re-mortgage his flat to raise £21,000 start-up finance.

One unkind City analyst, asked for his opinion of the scheme, wrote back to the budding publican: 'This project has absolutely no chance of succeeding - I suggest you abandon it immediately.'

But Bruce was not dissuaded. 'The whole culture was that you had to have a job,' he says. 'This was pre-Thatcherite Britain and people just didn't start businesses.'

Firkin's cult following in the 1980s made it a critical success, though financially it eventually floundered as a result of trying to expand too rapidly.

Headlong expansion isn't on the cards at the Capital Pub Company, which is run to some fairly exacting financial benchmarks by Watson, a chartered accountant.

Bruce, meanwhile, has carved out a niche in the MBA lecture circuit, delivering his pearls of wisdom to business school students.

'I've become more professional and I now recognise the things that need to be done to make a business successful,' he says.

'My co-founder in this latest venture is a chartered accountant. It means we have fantastic control over procurement and costs and are very commercial.

'It's not just some great big woolly free trading sort of party. We do believe that the manager should be given the authority to make decisions and they know the customers better than any us.'

But he insists that his new grown-up outlook has not dimmed his enthusiasm. Bruce says he's getting that 'Firkin feeling' about his latest baby, Capital.

But it remains to be seen whether the City will raise a glass to him this time.