Secrets of success in the hotel industry – Robin Hutson from The Pig

Robin Hutson OBE worked at some of the world’s best hotels before launching the successful Hotel du Vin and The Pig hotel groups. Telling the story of his career in hospitality, from starting out as a waiter to pioneering the boutique hotel movement, Robin offers insights on starting, growing and selling businesses. 

He also shares his views on working with investors, changing trends in hospitality and why culture is key to success.

Transcript

Mark Greaves:

I'm delighted today that our guest is Robin Hutson OBE, founder of Hotel Groups, Hotel du Vin and The Pig, and described as one of the UK's most influential hoteliers. I'm Mark Greaves from PKF Francis Clark, and I'll be your host. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast to get updates and notifications on when our latest episodes are available. Hi Robin, how are you today?

Robin Hutson:

Hi, Mark. Yeah, very good, thank you very much.

Mark Greaves:

Well, let's start with your current group, The Pig, which does contain two of my favorite restaurants, I have to admit at this moment. How would you describe the Pig Group to our listeners?

Robin Hutson:

Well, what we tried to do with The Pig was to de-formalise the country house Hotel, really. A lot of country hotels before that were rather formal, and quite a lot of them were fairly pretentious, I should say. I think because of that there was an issue about people actually driving up the drive. They didn't quite know what they were going to find at the other end, and were rather nervous about going to a country house hotel. We positioned The Pig really as a restaurant with rooms. The emphasis very much being on the restaurants and our USP was that we would try to grow as much food and produce that we could, and what we couldn't grow, we would source from within 25 miles. That was the sort of USP behind the, along with this informality, I suppose.

Mark Greaves:

That's a good combination at that stage. What's your role today?

Robin Hutson:

Today I'm chairman and I guess I'll always be founder of The Pig, but I tend to spend most of my time on the new developments. At the moment we're working on a fantastic project in the Cotswolds. What was Barnsley House, is going to be the new Pig in the Cotswolds, which comes with its own village pub, which we've just opened, which was a lot of fun to get my head around that one, so mainly development. I try to, I suppose, be a little bit the father figure of our team of about a thousand people and that the special interest areas are the wines that we serve, and particularly I've been a big supporter of English wine in the past decade or so, and the food, I always have absolutely one eye on the food and have a special relationship with the head chefs.

Mark Greaves:

Well, I want to come back to that and that involvement and making sure you're still in touch with the frontline, but let's wrap back. We've talked about where you are today. Let's wrap back to where you started. I understand it was your mother's suggestion to the catering college after you left school at about 16.

Robin Hutson:

Yes. I didn't cover myself in glory at school, it has to be said. Instead of achieving the 10 O levels I was supposed to achieve, I'd spent a little too much time, I think, running around chasing girls and doing all the things that you tend to do at the age of 16. Yeah, I ended up with two English O levels and art, so I managed three O levels and wasn't actually invited into the sixth form, shall we say. My mother, God bless her, she had what was clearly a brilliant idea, although I didn't appreciate that at the time. I think she was casting around for options for this boy that really, it didn't look terribly rosy at that stage. I used to like messing around in the kitchen. She was a very good cook, actually, a natural cook, as was her mother.

Yeah, I used to messing around in the kitchen with her and she said, "Well, why don't you learn to become a chef?" Anyway, I didn't take the chef's course as it happened. The next course up the page was hotel and catering operations, which involved some cooking. Without a great deal of thought, I took that one on and actually rather enjoyed it once I got there.

Mark Greaves:

Quite often in life, it's the accidents which actually make the underlying purpose sometimes. You then went on to your first job in the hotel industry, which was not a bad first job in the hotel industry.

Robin Hutson:

Well, it sounds more glamorous than it was after getting through a couple of years at college and doing reasonably well at that because I was enjoying it. I started as a trainee with the Savoy Hotel Company in London, and my first job aged 18 was as a commie waiter at Claridge's. When I say commie waiter, it was really a tray carrier. They needed 18-year olds who were reasonably fit to run up and down, I think it was 26 stairs between the kitchen and the restaurant, which you used to do with trays that were larger than we were. You just ran up and down stairs all day long, really.

Mark Greaves:

That sounds a bit like bad design to me in terms of having that sort of obstacle in the way you're designing accidents there, aren't you?

Robin Hutson:

Absolutely. There were some horrendous head first moments down the stairs. It was not pretty at times.

Mark Greaves:

The ability to bounce was probably in the job description or something.

Robin Hutson:

Yeah, and hence the requirement to have 18-year olds and not 80 year olds.

Mark Greaves:

But then that led on to you becoming the youngest ever reception manager at the Barclay.

Robin Hutson:

Yeah, that's true. Part of the training scheme was to spend time in various different departments. It was six months in the bar and six months in the accounts office and that sort of thing. Anyway, I ended up on reception and they sent you to work abroad. I was in Paris for a year when I was 20, and then there was an opening, came up as assistant reception manager, which I took, and then my boss left fairly shortly after that. All of a sudden I found myself age 22 or something, and I was reception manager of one of the best hotels in London. It was a plum job really. A, I thought I'd really made it. I used to swan around in black stripe and tails and a stiff collar and all that. But literally the guest list there was a who's who of A-list celebrities, and I was the person doing the room allocations, and so I was on first name terms with lots of them. Yeah.

Mark Greaves:

But how did you develop into that Ryan? That's quite difficult for a 22, 23-year-old to be plunged into suddenly dealing with the Dustin Hoffmans of this world and things like that. How did you cope?

Robin Hutson:

I found it a fairly sort of natural transition. Much of the hotel business, it does feel as if you are on the stage sometimes in it is a little bit like theatre. You get ready for the main event and so on. Yeah, I took to it and I was always fairly good at working hard and that sort of thing once I'd left school. That wasn't a problem, the long hours and all that sort of thing. Yeah, it was an exciting job meeting all these people. It was great.

Mark Greaves:

You spent a few years working for other people. Where did the idea for your own hotel group come from? What drove you for that?

Robin Hutson:

After the Barclay, I was five years at the Barclay, then we went abroad. We were two years out in Bermuda. I then got an amazing job. I was only 28 years old and I was offered the job of general manager at the Chewton Glen Hotel in the New Forest, which is, it was and is a fantastic hotel. That all happened, I was very young. By the time I did eight years in that role as general manager and then managing director, and I was only 36 years old by the time that had all happened. This is where, really, the slightly dysfunctional start to my school and all that sort of thing, it really played into my hands because by the time I was 36, I'd got a good deal of experience under my belt and I thought to myself, well, is this what I'm going to do for the rest of my life, be a general manager? Is that what I'm doing?

There was a real wind of change at that time. It was when, so we're talking about 1993, I think we started Hotel du Vin in '94. There was a real wind of change and a modern British food was starting to happen in London with places like Quaglinos, and Mezzo, and 190 Queen's Gate, and Alastair Little. All those places were just starting. Prior to that, it had been a very formal affair restaurants. I could see all this going on in London. There were townhouse hotels were just starting in London. I thought, "Well, there's nothing like this out in the sticks, and I think I'd like to have a go at doing something myself." Yeah, I spoke to my friend who was the head sommelier at Chewton Glen, and we decided that we'd start Hotel du Vin, really.

That that's how it happened. We raised the money. We didn't have money. We put together a raft of shareholders, borrowed a lot of money from the bank, and if anyone that remembers back to '94, interest rates were very high. Our first loan of three quarters of a million was at 12.5%, I recall. My wife, God bless her, she was the brave one really, because she allowed me to put the house up as a guarantee for the business, or at least a charge against the house. We got going and it took off very, very quickly and thankfully, and yeah, that was the first Hotel du Vin.

Mark Greaves:

Now, I understand that funding package, you managed to actually miss the funding for the wine for the first hotel?

Robin Hutson:

Well, it wasn't so much as miss the funding for the wine. Wine, we really ran out of cash. We were called Hotel du Vin and Gerard, my partner was the top sommelier in the country at that stage. We really had to have put together a decent list. We blagged a lot of wine from various wine merchants in the guise of sponsorship. That was the first thing we did. We were a week or two out from opening, and the list looked really rather thin given that the name of Hotel du Vin was across the door. We decided that we would add a few bottles each from our own rather meager collections, from cupboards under our stairs. Anyway, I put in, I recall to this day, it's etched on my brain, but I put in three bottles of 1982 Chateau Pichon Longue, which is fantastic wine, and it was rated as 99 out of a hundred, which doesn't happen very often.

Anyway, we were so naive and so stupid that we priced up the wines and put them on the list. Of course, we got all the prices wrong, and so we put them on far too cheap. I remember this particular wine, it was on our list for then 60 pounds a bottle or something like that, which at the end of the first week, all of these random wines that we put on the list had all disappeared. They'd all been sold, and it was because we were selling them for less than you could buy them in the shops, basically. Once we sold Hotel du Vin in 10 years later, the first thing I did was I went out and bought myself a case of Chateau Pichon Longue in 1982.

Mark Greaves:

I dare even not think about how much a case would be. Let's come on to that sale. Could you owned it for about 10 years, something like that. You then sold it for a chunky sum of money. Was that always an aim, the sale?

Robin Hutson:

Well, I think we'd grown the business to seven hotels at that stage. I think we always had, once we realised that we were onto something with Hotel du Vin, we were right at the vanguard of the boutique hotel movement, I suppose, and some people credit us with having a hand in that. We had an idea that maybe at some point someone would come along and want to buy us, and maybe that was a good opportunity to realise some of the financial rewards from our efforts. Anyway, yeah, we had an approach from a company called MWB who already owned Malmaison at the time. Hotel du Vin and Malmaison were started north and south of the border in the same year in '94. They were natural bedfellows in a way. Anyway, look, we were made an offer we didn't understand, as I say. Yeah, we sold and yeah, no, it was a very good result. It was exactly 10 years to the day that we sold.

Mark Greaves:

Well, that's a nice offer that you don't understand instead of a horrible offer that you don't understand. But you mentioned geography there, a natural fit for the two groups. What else do you think contributed to the value of that sale from your perspective?

Robin Hutson:

Well, I think the brands had actually captured, as I say, this new boutique wave, really. They were incredibly popular. They ran very, very high occupancies. We'd had tremendous press from day one. Up until that point, town and city center hotels weren't really known for food very often, but we had a very good reputation for food. The wine lists were really interesting and so on, of course, by that stage. Yeah, I think it was the sum of the parts, really, that eventually got us that value for it.

Mark Greaves:

Having done that, having grown a group, made a really successful exit at that stage, you then decided to spend a little while doing other stuff, but you then decided to do it all again by The Pig group, which you talks about earlier. Where did that come from?

Robin Hutson:

All the time I had Hotel du Vin, I was a director of Soho House as well. Immediately after the sale, my good friend Nick Jones, the founder of Soho House, said, "Look, before you do anything else, why don't you become chairman of Soho House?" He was growing in the States at that time. I became chairman and then eventually we sold the majority stake to one Richard Kerring at that point, three years later. I rather sold myself out of a job, in fact. I was literally thinking about what to do next, and I got a call from Jim Ratcliffe who obviously-

Mark Greaves:

As you do.

Robin Hutson:

Nowadays, is known for many other things including Manchester United. But in fact, our kids went to school together, and so I knew him vaguely. We'd had dinner a couple of times we went great friends or anything. Anyway, he had started work on a country house hotel in the new forest that is now called Lymewood, it was then called Park Hill, which I decided sounded like a block of flats in Croydon. Anyway, we changed the name to Lymewood. I launched that. Obviously, he'd put quite a lot of cash into that building, but I think there was a void on the operational side at that point. Anyway, we launched that successfully and I was looking at what else was within the Lymewood portfolio, and there are a whole bunch of buildings and other little businesses and things. I was tidying up that portfolio, getting rid of various things.

I closed down a restaurant that wasn't really functioning properly, sold off a couple of other bits and pieces, and there was a little hotel in Brockenhurst called Whitley Ridge Hotel, and it was the last thing to tidy away, and I had it valued, and it was only valued at a million pounds because it was losing money and it was in poor state of repair at that stage. I was wandering around, I wandered into the kitchen garden that was there, and I thought, "Well, this is quite interesting." But there were only weeds and a couple of carrots in there.

It was not really much going on. I suppose that was a bit of a light bulb moment. I thought, "Well, what if we brought the kitchen garden to the fore in the story and try to do something with this hotel," given that it had only been valued at a million pounds. I came up with the idea of The Pig being a sort of agricultural based hotel, and I said to Jim, "Look, I'll buy half of it and you have half, and we'll see if we can do something with this." Yeah, I bought half, I paid 500,000 for half of The Pig. In the end, I split that with some of the management team, and yeah, there we went.

Mark Greaves:

Okay. That lightning spark as you go through the kitchen garden, anyone who's been through a Pig hotel will know that involvement, especially what you mentioned about local suppliers there. But you emphasize that The Pig hotels aren't a cookie cutter operation. How do you get the differentiation, but the consistency of the brand?

Robin Hutson:

Well, I think the interesting thing is that we buy buildings that have often historical and architectural merits and differences, and I have a firm idea of whether a building is right. If a building looks too grand and formal, then I walk away from that. It has to be a rather friendly building. That sounds quite wooly to say it like that, but it needs something that makes you smile when you walk up to it. The architectural detail of the building gives the clue to what the interiors are like. Judy, my wife and I work on the interiors together, but it's always working with the building rather than against it. Yeah, there are common themes through the hotels, but we try very hard to make them look rather different, but part of the same family.

Mark Greaves:

Interesting your comment about the smile there, I can feel myself just driving up to the two that are local down here, and you do get that as you're walking down from the car park or up from the car park to the restaurants. There is a just comforting feel that you're going to be looked after, you're going to have a friendly dinner at that stage. How do you get that consistency with the staff then? Because obviously different areas, different recruitment. How do you get the consistency of service front office?

Robin Hutson:

I'm a firm believer that the culture in the hotels, it starts right at the top. It starts with how we act and how we are with people. The staff and the team have always been at the forefront of our minds. A good example is during Covid, we didn't make a single redundancy. We had a thousand people on furlough, and actually we ended up the Covid period with more people on our payroll than we started because we were in the middle of developing a couple of hotels. But that sort of commitment to the staff, it pays back in spades. They're a very, very committed team and literally would do anything for you. But it's really because the way that Judy and I operate around the hotels, our senior team who have been with us for a long time, they've got it coursing through their veins.

It is in their DNA, and then a lot of the heads of department have been with us for a long time. It carries on through all of those channels, as well. If you walked into the hotel and I saw you with a suitcase, I'm the first person to take that suitcase from you. If there's a box being delivered, I'm the first one that picks it up and that, I think it's just a really important message to the entire team. We never make any... As directors or owners of the business, we never make any demands on the staff that we wouldn't be prepared to do ourselves and so on. There's a mutual respect, I think.

Mark Greaves:

There's two really important things the culture, because at the moment we are living with so many examples of what a bad culture can do that are almost too numerous a list on that side. But there's also, the other thing which we do see is that the bosses get very remote from the day-to-day action. They can just not see how their customers are being served. I've seen so many examples of that recently. How do you maintain that? Because obviously you've got that full group wide role and all that type of stuff. How do you maintain that not only you, but the people that are below you maintain that frontline presence?

Robin Hutson:

Well, I think first of all, none of us really sit in an office. If we are meeting each other or someone else, it's always in one of the hotels. We're in the hotels. I just came back from the Village Pub in the Cotswolds, which is the latest one, and the team there, they love us to use the properties, and comment, and engage with them. For the team, it's absolutely part of their motivation to see us engaged and have the passion for the business and the detail, and they love the feedback. It's never taken the wrong way sort of thing.

Mark Greaves:

[inaudible 00:22:06] about that culture from the top that you are setting. We talked about local supplies. You've also worked on sustainable growth, such as making sure your fish suppliers stop using polystyrene boxes and stuff like that. Where are you on the B Corp journey at the moment?

Robin Hutson:

We've just been awarded B Corp.

Mark Greaves:

Ah, congratulations.

Robin Hutson:

Tom Ross is our CEO, who's been with me forever moving back to Hotel du Vin days, but he drove that. He drove that, and there's a lot of work in achieving that. I was really delighted when it came through a couple of weeks ago.

Mark Greaves:

There is that underlying, we've talked a lot on previous podcasts about it in that it's not so much an award per se. It's almost confirmation of how you work, your philosophy.

Robin Hutson:

I think that that's absolutely true. No one ever quite does enough on the sustainable front. It's very difficult to hit every nail on the head when it comes to that. But we were doing an awful lot, and actually much of what we were doing was, it just wasn't really recorded in a good way. Actually, getting our head around that was a large part of it. But for instance, when we develop a new property, we are using an awful lot of secondhand antique, vintage, recycled articles. That's a natural part of what we do. We didn't really have to change much by growing a lot of our own food. Our food miles have to be some of the lowest in the sector, I would've thought, overall. Our commitment to English wine, even that it's being driven down the road rather than being flown from the other side of the world. I think we were doing an awful lot anyway, it came naturally to us.

Mark Greaves:

Okay, let's come up to date. A couple of years ago you sold stake in The Pig group to KSL. What was the rationale behind that?

Robin Hutson:

Well, again, we were somewhat opportunistic, I suppose. We were approached by KSL who are a specialist hospitality, private equity house based in Denver, Colorado. To start with, I have to say, they approached us not the other way around. I just listened to what they had to say and so on, but wasn't in a desperate rush to sell. Our investor at that point was still Jim Ratcliffe, who proved to be a fantastic investor for us. But anyway, the offer came through, which was another good offer, and when I reflected on it, we thought, well, for Judy and I, we certainly had in mind to try to slow down a little bit. We thought that this might provide an opportunity for that transition to take place. That was just over two years ago.

Mark Greaves:

I think there's a couple of good really lessons in there in terms of the private equity side and that they approached, you weren't in a rush at that particular moment, and they then have to come back and prove themselves to you. In terms of that ongoing negotiation, that sale, did you always maintain that "If it happens, it's good. If it doesn't happen, I'm still okay," attitude?

Robin Hutson:

Yes. I think first of all, no deal is done until it's done. I think it was very important that we remembered that we weren't desperate to sell. If it collapsed at some point, it wasn't the end of the world. We didn't have our backs against the wall or anything like that. We were very comfortable. Of course, that puts you in a very strong negotiating position. We had a pretty... It was a sale process, but there weren't any funny tricks from either side in that. It was fairly straightforward. As we got towards the end of the process, I thought, "Well, actually, I think this is really going to happen," which in business, there's always people that flirt with you and so on. You never really know how serious an offer is or an interest. But yeah, it went through and yeah, KSL had proved themselves to be a very good outfit.

Mark Greaves:

I have horror tales of certain American equity funds, which just teach your lessons. But I think there's a philosophy within there of maintaining that equilibrium, not getting carried away with it. But I am often in rooms where the light bulb does go on, where it's actually, this is now much more likely to happen than not happen. It is part of the advisor's roles to jump on the client at that particular moment and go, "No, just relax. It isn't signed yet. You haven't got the money quite yet, just relax."

Robin Hutson:

At any moment, of course, these things can collapse and you have to try and keep your cool. There's an awful lot of moving parts in a sale process like that. Confidentiality was a big factor. Then when we actually did announce to the team in the right sequence, all of that and the press and everything else that goes with it is complex. Trying to get that right whilst not really, or planning for that when you don't really know that it's actually going to happen is tricky, but part of our business life, I guess.

Mark Greaves:

Part of the successful business life. Now, I understand you are transitioning, you're stepping back from the group at the end of this year. You've been very good in spotting the next trend, at least twice, possibly three times within your career, significant next trend. Where do you see the hotel industry going next?

Robin Hutson:

It's a good question. I actually think that there's so much talk about AI at the moment and the digital world and so on that encompasses all of our lives. I rather think that personalised service will be valued more than ever. The sort of thing that we do, which is very much a human touch in our business, and you mentioned the culture that we have, I can absolutely see that being at some sort of premium in the future as the world goes more digital.

Mark Greaves:

I wasn't expecting to cover AI today, so well done for that, but I couldn't agree more. There's lots of fancy rumors and all that type of stuff at AI, which 90% is going to be turned out to be wrong. The personal touch... It is, I'm still smiling at the back of my mind as I'm walking up to your restaurant. It is that I'm just going to be taking care of for the next couple of hours. I can just relax at lunch and I won't have to think apart from choosing between some very nice dishes, that's going to be the hardest part of the lunch. It just works on that side. Okay. As you sail off into the sunset or perhaps stand by a river bank fly-fishing, which I understand is one of your hobbies, I need to finish on just a lighter note here. If you were to pick your favorite hotels and you can't pick your own, so I'm going to take this abroad. If you had to pick a couple of favorite hotels abroad, what would you pick?

Robin Hutson:

Well, the first one that comes to mind, I was lucky enough to do a off-road motorcycle trip in South Africa a few years ago. One of the countries we rode across was Botswana, and we went to the Makadikadi Salt Flats in the middle of Botswana. In the middle of those salt flats is a place called Jack's Camp. Jack's Camp is a small tented hotel, but the main... What is it? The main dining tent, I suppose, is something out of the British Museum. It's all sorts of natural history, fossils, skeletons in amazing Victorian cases and so on. It really is like one of those films you see of the last days of the Raj or something.

Mark Greaves:

[inaudible 00:30:17] chance coming out of the tent or something.

Robin Hutson:

The tents, they're full of antiques, and even the loo is one of those throne loos inside the the loo part of the tent. It's just a brilliant concept. It's very famous. It's been there for a long, long time. I mean, it's just one of the most extraordinary hotels that I've ever been to. Actually, from there, you can go into the middle of the salt flats. You can look for 360 degrees around you and not see anything. It's just salt flat. That's pretty extraordinary.

Mark Greaves:

Okay, well thank you, Robin, so much for joining us today and for sharing your story with our listeners who I hope have enjoyed it as much as I have. It's been fascinating and also a real reflection of how a business in the hotel industry can actually work. I re-emphasize that culture thing that's threaded through our conversation. Thank you for that.

Robin Hutson:

Thank you, Mark. That was great.

Mark Greaves:

Thank you to our listeners for listening to our latest episode of Business Noodles. We hope you've enjoyed our conversation. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast to get updates and notifications on when our latest episodes are available.