What makes Tuppen tick?

IN an industry where there is no shortage of colourful characters, Ted Tuppen's desire for anonymity could attract attention. But the chief executive of Enterprise Inns is fiercely protective of his life outside the tenanted pub company he founded in 1991.

When named Man of the Year by trade newspaper the Morning Advertiser last week, Tuppen again shunned the limelight. Guests at the awards ceremony were instead treated to a video in which Tuppen accepted the award not for himself, but on behalf of the whole of the Enterprise Inns team.

And even his public relations people - normally desperate to get their clients positive media coverage - are tight-lipped about Tuppen. 'He'll talk to you about the business,' they said. 'Anything else - no way.'

But Tuppen, 50, may find it rather difficult to avoid the media spotlight from now on. Last week, Enterprise, as part of a consortium led by private equity groups Cinven and Legal & General, paid £2.01bn for the Unique and Voyager pub companies put up for sale by Japanese bank Nomura, formerly Britain's biggest pub landlord. Now it is Tuppen who is effectively the largest pub owner in Britain, with nearly 4,200 former Nomura pubs to add to the 3,500 under Enterprise.

This takes Tuppen to about 15% of the pub market and a hefty distance from Punch, the second-biggest pub company and a rival in the race for Nomura's pub assets.

Enterprise is investing £75m in a 16.8% stake in the new joint-venture company that has bought the pubs. But it has an option to buy the whole lot in 2004, an arrangement that has set the pub industry poring over calculators to work out how much of a good deal it really is.

Investors certainly seemed pleased. Enterprise shares leapt by 16% to 780p after the deal, even though the 2004 option means cash is likely to have to be raised in a rights issue. However, Tuppen is more than capable of understanding complicated financial transactions.

He was a chartered accountant at Peat Marwick, later part of KMPG, until 1980 when he became managing director of an engineering company. Then in 1989 the Tory Government introduced the Beer Orders. This restricted ownership of pubs by brewers, forcing them to sell many licensed premises.

As Tuppen later recalled: 'All of a sudden there were 11,000 pubs on the market, which would have to be sold. I thought that there has to be a business here.'

Hence the birth of Enterprise Inns, which Tuppen founded in 1991 by buying more than 300 pubs from Bass. A trade journalist remembers Tuppen at that time as knowing 'practically nothing about the industry. He would turn up for meetings with Bass in his battered Renault 5 and not know what ABV [alcohol by volume] stood for'.

But he was a quick learner. Enterprise floated on the stock market in 1995 and soon snapped up rival groups Discovery Inns, Mayfair Taverns and Century Inns and large numbers of pubs from Whitbread, Scottish & Newcastle and Laurel Pub Company. Punch's Hugh Osmond is a fan, in a typically teasing way. 'Ted is one of the best people in the tenanted pubs sector. And he is a role model for me - he does even less work than I do.

'In the autumn he shoots five days a week, in winter he skis five days a week and in the summer he sails two days a week. He races cars the rest of the time. I hear he's quite good at it too.'

Laurel's chief executive Ian Payne is also an admirer. 'He's done really well with this deal,' he says. 'He stuck with tenanted pubs when they were unfashionable and it has paid off for him.' So far, the strategy appears to have paid off for his investors, too. They have seen their shares double in just over a year.

The ink is barely dry on the Nomura deal, but Tuppen is already said to be looking at more acquisitions, such as a rumoured interest in Oxfordbased pubs and brewing company Morrells. Clearly, he has no intention of resting on his laurels.