Into the future...

Well then, aren't things looking up?!?

Since my last post there have been some dramatic changes taking place in the life of Mr Perry & family. I'm out of the pub, have had a fantastic summer with my boys and am looking forward to starting a new job and a whole new chapter of my life.

The last couple of weeks at the Punch were probably the best two weeks I had there. Having admitted defeat and accepted that I would be moving on I was released from the pressures and stress of all the things that I would otherwise had to have done. Friends and supporters of my time there came out in force and helped me to "Drink it dry" as I was told that I would not receive any monies for my outstanding stock. This culminated in the final weekend when I priced everything at £2, got in a heavy metal band purely for my own enjoyment and, quite frankly, had a weekend long party! The remaining stock came home with me and I have thoroughly enjoyed consuming it over the course of the summer!

I managed to pay off all of my local suppliers and am left with just a few (albeit huge!) creditors with whom I am currently negotiating.

Also in my last few weeks there I became aware of a vacancy at Severn Hospice for a "Community Fundraising Advisor", a position that not only suited my natural skills but one that also suited my sense of community and my ideal of wanting to do something that benefitted others as well as my own self and family. I threw everything at getting the post and was delighted to be offered the position, starting next week the 13th of September.

I'll obviously write more about it once I am settled into the role but it is a largely "office hours" position that will herald a whole new way of life for myself and my family. I will be free most weekends to "do stuff" with my boys and MrsP as well as regaining some kind of a social life for myself.

There are many things yet to be sorted out as I put the self employed period of my life to bed but for now I can only look forward to a new direction and the exciting times that lie ahead.

There will shortly be a separate post celebrating the wonderful time that I have had this summer but for now, thanks for reading....

Mike

Contradictions!

Ok, so my last blog in March claimed that I wouldn't "do my dirty washing in public" but is that not the whole point of a blog? An opportunity to get things off of one's chest which is only really likely to be read by one's closest friends and by those that actually give a stuff?
Since October '09 I have known that my business was in a pretty desperate state and have put up with so many other things that many would have given up long ago.
But that's not my style. Instead, I buckled down and did my best to make things better. I took someone on to put my paperwork in order and have tolerated their sporadic visits in return for a huge amount of positive work being done. I coped with my chef quitting with 24 hours' notice and so, became a chef myself overnight, albeit with a huge amount of support from the excellent Mick Poole.
I culled my staffing levels at the same time and commited myself to a vast number of hours over the busy Christmas period during which I had to sack two key staff members for giving away my stock to their friends. I won't mention the cash thing as I cannot categorically prove it but I know.
The slight boost of a busy two weeks was immediately swallowed up by the coldest, snowiest January of a generation and it cost me £200 a week to heat the pub for the few hardy punters that dared step out in the conditions.
As the weather eased the stress levels didn't. Another chef came and went, this time with a weeks' notice which at least enabled me time to breathe.
Throw in the fact that my body decided to tell me what my head wouldn't listen to and an ankle that decided to become so inflamed as to not allow me to walk on it and you might have thought that it was time to raise the white flag!


In amongst, and despite of, all of these difficulties I was actually receiving some excellent feedback from those that WERE coming including a huge double sitting of 69 people on Mothers Day which was entirely repeat custom and achieved without advertising. So a place on the "Best of Oswestry" website was earned and some excellent new friends made via Twitter including a "TweetUp" that I was able to host at the Punch.
Too little too late to save my business one suspects. I'm spinning around the plug hole so to speak but will continue to maintain the standards I have set myself until it is no longer possible to do so.

The company that owns the pub and from whom I rent it for the princely sum of £32k + vat p/a have put it on the pub leasehold market as I am wholly unable to meet their rental demands. Let's not even discuss the other debts :( Needless to say, the public marketing of the pub has had it's own negative effect on business.
On top of this I have had to put up with a small group of small minded people who have no idea about the concept of running a business. All they can see is what they want to see and think they can do what they want to do. In my pub. A two year battle of wills has culminated in a couple of them being barred. So they took it upon themselves to tell a whole rafe of other people that they were barred too.... They waited until they new I wouldn't be in the pub to really up the ante of their disrespectful behaviour and involved a whole bunch of other people too. Police got called, people got arrested, all entirely unnecesarily.
Even now, I still can't help but hold up a hand of responsibility. The ringleaders should have been barred a long time ago and that is down to me. Hey ho, one can only live and learn as I have from all of my mistakes.

So the long and the short of it is, I won't be the "landlord" of the Punch for all that much longer. Trust Inns must find a new tenant and assuming my creditors don't "call me in" before then I will remain here up until that point, doing my best to reduce those debts in the meantime.
I don't regret anything save my blind belief in the general "goodness" of people. I treat people with respect and trust and expect the same in return. To be so repeatedly let down has been a disappointment that certainly my business won't recover from. As for the pubcos, theirs is a broken model for as long as they remain unable or unwilling to alter the way they go about their business. I don't dispute that bad housekeeping has been one of my biggest problems. But £723/week rent has always been the biggest problem and that could have been changed to reflect the market as a whole.

Now I must use my creative and imaginative skills to carve out a new niche for myself, to find a "proper" job and to find a sensible route into the future. See you along the way.....

Blog blog blogging....

So here I am then. All signed up and with a blogspace just waiting to be filled with amusing anecdotes and witty observations, funny happenings and intelligent prose that somehow puts into order the madness that is the life of a publican, or at least, this publican!

I could ramble on for hours about Pubcos, the beer tie, high rates, low margins, 80 hour weeks, 1 day off a month. I could easily fill up several pages talking about awkward, downright rude or ungrateful customers. I could even talk about the difficulties all of this places on my family life.

But you know what? Call me old fashioned but I'd rather not do my dirty laundry in public. Maybe I'll set up an alternative, anonymous blog where I talk about all of these things and more besides. Hell, one day I may even get around to writing that book I've always promised myself, then I really would have to change the names to protect the identities!!!

The only trouble is of course, that by taking those things off the list of possible blog fillers, I'm limiting myself as to what I can talk about. These things occupy huge parts of my thinking and time (especially the 80 hour weeks!) and the juggling of these difficulties that I have to do in order to be able to present a postive, cheerful, friendly end product can be exhausting.

And that's how I feel this evening. Exhausted. It's 11pm on Monday, I'm on the bar, typing away because there's only three customers left and they're amusing themselves. It's been a very successful weekend that has seen some excellent trade including 69 happy diners on Mothers Day. In order for that to happen I had to work on the bar or in the restaurant for 23 hours across Saturday & Sunday & I barely saw my mrs or my boys.

But that's what I do. And for every customer that it's easy to dislike there's another 69 happy, smiling faces saying thank you for a lovely Mothers Day. There's a precious hour with Oliver & Finlay before I take them to school in the mornings and another precious hour when I pick them up.

I think I must be reaching my "time of the month". Time to step out and take a day off. Hmmm. St. Pats Day at the Cheltenham Festival of Horse Racing? Mines a Guinness.....

Onwards and Upwards

So the mother of the Perry boys (I have four brothers) has headed off home to Almeria in Spain. 'Twas lovely to see her and we all wish her visit could have lasted a little longer as we're unlikely to be able to make the return visit this year.

But there's work to be done here @PunchBowlWF (<< Twitter handle) and if I'm ever going to be able to make the trip to Spain to visit the folks then I'd better get on with it!

I've got a new chef starting today and with it a clearer understanding of where I'm heading with my pub. I've been here 20 months with the restaurant side of the business having been running for 18 of those months. A large part of those 18 months has been spent on a huge learning curve where I've dealt with everything from chef's leaving at a moments' notice to enormous dips and troughs in trade to actually stepping into the kitchen and wearing the chef's whites myself.

Up to this point I've marketed the food side of my business by shouting about the chef and bigging up their talents and I've marketed the wet side of the pub as being all about me and being fun and friendly and warm etc. The big decision that I've made is that this will no longer be the case. There are no longer two sides to my business. There is one and it is all about me and the quality of service and atmosphere that I offer, demand from my staff and present to the public.

It no longer matters who the person in the kitchen is because what they will deliver will be done to a standard that I demand. The waiting staff will all be cheerful and friendly because that is the kind of person that I choose to surround myself with (plus admittedly, my main waitress is my beautiful daughter Emma!) and the overall product that I am asking you to buy from me ie, my pub, will match these high standards of quality, friendliness and personality at all times.

I'm very proud of what we do here and invite you to come along and see for yourselves whenever you're in the area. Bring your smiles with you when you come!
Love and peace. mjp

A brief first go...

So I figured it was about time I added blogging to my whole computer based shizzle. The headings / profile etc along with the twittering should tell you most of what you need to know about me as a person and what you read from hear on in will I hope, prove interesting, thought provoking or at the very least amusing.

This first attempt is dull I accept but it is nearly 2am and I just blew half an hour setting the whole thing up. What's more, whilst doing so I forgot what I was planning on saying in my very first blog post!

I must be up at 8am to get the kids to school as MrsP will have been long gone to work by then so I'll post this purely to see what it looks like and promise more interesting content in the future.

I have an exciting week ahead so should be able to report on these things as they occur. GrannyP (my wonderful & long suffering mum) arrives at some point tomorrow along with a selction of my brothers so I am cooking a giant roast dinner for eleven which I am definately looking forward to. I've also been accepted into the arms of the "bestofoswestry" website and all that it promotes which is an excellent step forward. Watch this space and I'll keep you informed of my progress.

Thanks for bothering to read this at all, Love and Peace. mjp

It's all very narrow isn't it! All kind of squished into the middle of the page. A bit disappointing but I'll work with it and see what I can do in due course...