15 minutes with...Sarah Dunning

15 Minutes With: Sarah Dunning — Westmorland Family Businesses

CLA President Gavin Lane sits down with Sarah Dunning, Chair of Westmorland Limited, the family behind the award-winning Tebay Motorway Services and Gloucester Gateway. Sarah shares how she left London in her late twenties to join the family business, navigated a pivotal generational transition when their long-standing partners retired, and took on the challenge of building Gloucester Services — a new site 200 miles from home with 150 local producers and 450 employees. She also talks about the family's next venture on the M56 in Cheshire (opening Spring 2028), the impact of the EV revolution on their business model, and whether it's still possible to build a family business empire from scratch in today's regulatory environment. A candid conversation about ambition, local food, and what it takes to grow a roadside business across generations.

Transcript

15 Minutes With: Sarah Dunning — Westmorland Family Businesses

SPEAKER_00 0:01

This is fifteen minutes with from the Country Land Business Association. In this edition, CLA President Gavin Lane sits down with Sarah Dunning of the Westmorland family, which is perhaps best known for its service stations in Gloucestershire, Cumbria and Lanarkshire.

Returning to Cumbria

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Well, good afternoon, Sarah Dunning. It's very nice to see you. And this is a bit odd for me, as you'll understand, because apart from being the chair of Westmoreland Ltd. and the runners, operators of T Bay Motorway Services and Gloucester Gateway, Histor Centre, and Kairn Lodge in Scotland. You are, of course, my sister-in-law. So this is a bit weird interviewing you. But I thought I would start really by talking. I think quite a few of our listeners will know the sort of Westman story and they will know about your mum and dad and how they came to start the motorway services up on in Cumbria. But you obviously came back, I think, in your late 20s. You were had a job in London, and you came back to to Cumbria, which probably was quite a bit of a shock at your age. And I just wondered what your initial sort of thoughts and how you how you sort of went about starting work in the company and what you how you how you dealt with everything that came your way at that time.

Generation Two & The Burket Partnership

Building Gloucester

SPEAKER_02 1:23

It was it probably was a bit of a shock to the system, if I'm honest. But I I'd been living in London with my sister, with your wife, and then she moved to Norfolk. I was working in the city, and my dad was building this project called Reged, which was a big project for the business, and it was an exciting project and very new. And long story short, it seemed like a sort of good time to join the business because it was a new project and lots to get involved in. And that was in 1999. And yes, yeah, it was it was a big move moving to Cumbria in your late 20s. I was nearly 30. Having said that, I moved up with Joel, who's my husband now, wasn't then, and he had a job in Manchester, so we spent a lot of time there as well. Yes, it sort of got stuck in, and time went by, lots happened. We got married the next year and had Alice and Ed a couple of years later. And and then there was a big catalyst in 2005, so five years later, when my our parents had been in 50-50 partnership with another family, the Burkitt family, and for they'd had a very happy partnership for 35 years, and the Burkits had got into their 70s and thought it was time to retire. And so that was a that was a big cat of this because we had to then think of it as a as a family, we had to think, right, well, do we want to carry on? Do we want to buy their shares back? What do we want to do? So that was a moment where I guess Jane and I came to the front a little more with some guidance from behind, which continues. And and then it was kind of generation two. So very different coming up to Cumbria, but things moved quite quickly after that.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

And and then Gloucester came about. And I I wondered whether you'd just talk about that and and how that came about and and why you decided to do it, and and and perhaps a little bit about what you were trying to get in terms of the ethos at Gloucester and how that differed, I suppose, from TBay.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

Yeah, so Generation 2 started in 2005, and I suppose at that point Jane was maybe a little bit less involved at that point, but um today Jane runs the farm and I look after the business. So we're we both have sort of different arms of the business, but the farm and the business work really closely together. But I think we were keen, probably as all new generations are, just to find a project that was ours in a way. And and you know, a few things came along, but the Gloucester opportunity came along, which was basically an option on some land, 65 acres of potato growing land. And so, yeah, so Gloucester was, I mean, it took a long time to bring to fruition, mainly because of planning. Yeah, I could go on about that for hours, but took a long time to get through planning. But basically, Gloucester was, I suppose, our experiment to see whether we could make the T Bay model, well, the the local model which we had at T Bay work somewhere else. And we were we were we were a much smaller and very local business at the time. And in many ways, we weren't that prepared to build a business 200 miles away. And I sometimes look back now and think it's quite a miracle that we actually pulled it together. And and we did open in 2000, we we opened both sides, one one in 2014, one in 2015, but it probably actually did take the best part of a decade or the best part of the last decade to settle it down. But we you know we have now, and we've got basically because we've got some great managers down there and in the business generally, and yeah, it's a lovely business. It it's got 450 employees and 150 local producers. It's it's a really nice business down there.

Finding Local Producers

SPEAKER_01 5:32

Yeah, I mean, talking about the local producers, you you famously don't use franchises, you don't know, you don't have concessions, so you don't have the likes of uh Greg's or the Cornish Pasty Company or whatever in the service area. You do everything yourself, but of course, that's reasonably re easy to do in an area where you have uh a sort of base and you have uh uh the the local contacts and you have the farming contacts, but obviously you didn't have any of that in Gloucester, and so you went from from sort of a a standing start of of knowing very few people to having to know 150 producers at at one level or another. I mean, uh just explain how that happened, why how you managed to make those contacts and and and how you found those producers.

Hiring Outside Expertise

SPEAKER_02 6:16

Well, because planning took so long, we had years to make contact with them, which actually, in a in a funny kind of way, actually was quite nice because we didn't know planning was going to take all that time. It actually took probably for the best part of five years. So we started early thinking it was gonna happen quicker and it didn't. But actually, one of the benefits of that was that we did get to, we were able to get to know the producers and we were able to almost kind of build the shops around them in a way. So when we when we got found found this really fabulous Patisserie producer, for instance, Xavier Pelou, and it was just beautiful. He had the this Patisserie business in Cheltenham. And so we were able to build a beautiful Patisserie counter for his staff and various others as well. So actually, it it was it was kind of a blessing from that point of view that we had loads of time to get to know the producers, were able to kind of slightly build our shops around them. I I think the hard bit actually of building Gloucester wasn't the meeting the producers. There were loads of absolutely amazing producers. We were really lucky. I think the hard bit was getting a really settled employee base. Yeah, we just didn't have that experience, and it was really rocky for quite a long time.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

Yeah.

The New M56 Service Area

SPEAKER_02 7:41

Until, I mean, af after we opened Gloucester, actually, we I I I and we as a family decided that we we needed to get some more expertise into the business. So at that point, a little after we opened Gloucester, we found Nabil, who's our current CEO, and he became the first non-family CEO really. And Nabille had lots of experience of multi-sighted businesses and systems and big teams and all that stuff. And I think that was a bit of a turning point for us, really. It was really, really good. And so he then brought in a brilliant people director and uh manager at Glost of Services and all that, and then it began to settle, which was nice.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

Great. And then you are about to launch into a new service area. And just explain a bit about that.

The EV Transition

SPEAKER_02 8:34

Yeah, so well, we just started building and it's going to take two years. So all being well, we'll open in spring 2028. So Tat and Services is on the M56 in Cheshire, basically just west of Manchester Airport. It's a completely different customer, it's a really busy motorway, but very different customer base. So it's slightly heart in mouth to hope that they actually like our pies and sausage rolls and actually want to come. But it's it's much more of a well, it's a very kind of affluent residential area, lots of footballers and all that, and lots of commuters, big football stadium nearby, big international airport, so very different kind of traffic on there. But so yeah, I mean it's funny now. We we've we've had the experience of Gloucester, but still this is a bit of an unknown. It's one of those things you don't really know until you open whether whether whether anyone's gonna come.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

And presumably a move away from uh diesel and petrol to electricity.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

Yeah, yeah. So that's probably the biggest thing in terms of what's happening in our market. That's probably the biggest, well, is definitely the biggest thing that what we all are having to cope with is the decline of petrol and diesel cars and the growth, slow growth, albeit, but the growth of EVs. So we're doing lots of it in the business. We've got 102 EV chargers in the business now. So we've done actually been really active over the last three or four years, but it's a it's quite a careful balance in our business because even though we see ourselves as a food business, the the petrol and diesel profit stream is a very steady, guaranteed stream, and so we have to just be very careful to make sure that we replace that carefully with EV, which is a completely different business model to petrol and diesel. But anyway, so far, so good.

Can Entrepreneurs Still Build Big?

SPEAKER_01 10:44

Yeah, no, great. I I I I see we're running out of time, but I just the last sort of question I wanted to ask was do you think that it's I mean, it's a it's a hypothetical question. It's a very I I don't expect you to give uh a precise answer, but do you think that it's possible in the current sort of political climate, the current economic climate, do you still think it's possible that someone could do what your dad did and start a a business, maybe not a service area, but maybe a a business that turns into something much, much bigger and turns into a multi-site business? Or do you think that those days are over because politics and economics are so complicated now that it would be very difficult to get it done?

SPEAKER_02 11:30

I I don't know. I mean, Dad had uh I I think everything is more difficult now than it was 50 years ago, or yeah, 50 years ago. It is more difficult, just everything, compliance and planning and regulation, all these things, it's more difficult. But I think I think it is still possible. I mean, I think this the sweet spot of our business is roadside, being on a roadside and doing kind of small scale food retail or small producer food retail. And I think if I look at those type of businesses, the reason our business works is because it's in locations where you've got loads of footfall and people want to stop. And I think if I were thinking of CLA members and people with with with land and things like that, I think finding locations where you've got great footfall or great ability to drive footfall is is really key.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Yeah. No, thank you. We've run out of time, but thank you very much. I will obviously see you very soon, and hopefully, people have enjoyed that. It's been great talking to you.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

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