Beales Hotels A family business for 250 years
Contents
• Preface 9
• Eight generations in the family business 10/25
• Andrew Beale 26/27
• The Beale Family Tree 28
• Interview with Andrew Beale 29/31
• Beale Hotels 32/43
• Awards 44/45
Preface
9/ Preface
As many family businesses grapple with the complexities of transition from the first to the second generation and second generation to the third, you will no doubt be interested in Andrew Beale’s story of his family’s business, Beales Hotels Limited, based in London and the south east and the effect of the diverse generations and their impact on the business, the challenges faced, decisions made and lessons learnt as they have developed through eight generations, culminating in the hopes for the curent ninth generation. Andrew is an eighth generation family member of the business and its current Managing Director. This is his story.
01
We are an 8 generation family business, having started as bakers in Oxford Street in 1769 when the first John Beale moved from the family home in Hertfordshire to the bright lights of London. He was succeeded by 2 more generations of the family with baker’s premises in Oxford Street, Wigmore Street and in Islington. In every long term family business there are certain generations that make their mark, and the fourth generation William Beale was one such person; a typical proud Victorian businessman, popular, forward looking, ambitious and a very public figure. He moved the business into large new premises in Holloway Road, branching out into catering, restaurants, groceries, as well as the core bakery business. He even installed electricity in the basement, and sold the excess to other local businesses and homes in the area.
01/ Beales restaurant and bakery in Holloway Road, London, the headquarters of the firm for 80 years
11/ Eight generations in the family business
4th Generation
01
Growth aspirations - floatation Pride comes before a fall and William was a proud man who, in 1890 tries to float the company with a public offering of share, but only received the universal derision of the Financial and National papers of the time: it was a complete failure and the greatest humiliation for William Beale. It was certainly an event that I believe has haunted the company ever since and perhaps made us over cautious of going public.
01/ William and Cristine Beale, circa 1900 02/ Restaurant location on the map 03/ Beale’s letterhead 1927 04/ The Beales, 1890: L to R. William 1st, Thomas, Archibald, and William 2nd.
13/ Eight generations in the family business
02
03
15/ Eight generations in the family business
16/ Eight generations in the family business
04
5th
Generation Cousin rivalry and its impact on the business
17/ Eight generations in the family business
The Dynamic fourth generation was followed by the antithesis of William - the fifth generation William, Thomas and Archibald who spent 30 years arguing over petty issues, inter-departmental tansfers wtc - a feud which culminated in 1927 with the voting off the board of Archie by his own brother and fellow shareholders. The company effectively stayed still during all these years, and its fortunes declined. Thomas was a skilled craftsman, training at the Jockey Club in Paris (where Marcel Proust was a member), and winning many confectionery prizes. The firm was incorporated as Beale’s Ltd in 1895, and after their father’s death the three brothers kept the business going till the mid 1930s, handing over to Thomas’s son Edward (Ted) and his brother John, the sixth generation.
01 01/ Horse traffic in Holloway Road, circa 1905. Beale’s and Jones Brother’s rival towers seen in the distance
18/ Eight generations in the family business
6th
Generation 01
03
Time of harmony
01/ Edward Beale and US President Johnson 02/ Valerie and John Beale, Sept.1939 03/ The Beales, 1970: L to R. John, Edward, Trevor in the offices at Southgate 04/ Beales restaurant plan
Along came a much more impressive sixth generatioon - my grandfather Edward Beale and his brother John - opposite character types - Edward, like his Grandfather William Beale, the public figure, on every committee, proud and ambitous, while his brother John Beale was the quieter one who got on with the job while his brother was changing the world. The company changed out of all recognition on their watch and grew in prosperity and influence. By the second world war the grocery, meat and provisions departments had been closed as being uneconomical, but the bakery business developed under John Beale, becoming the largest independent bakers in North London with 12 shops, while the restaurant and banqueting side continued to be busy until 1969, when the Holloway premises were sold and the bakery side closed down after exactly 200 years.
“...My great uncle John Beale wrote in 1972 “We never really expected to see the colour of our money. A family business is something of a sacred trust. it is not to be exploited for the benefit of one generation...”
19/ Eight generations in the family business
02
20/ Eight generations in the family business
04
21/ Eight generations in the family business
01
06
02
04
03
07
05
01/ Holloway cake shop, open front and new counters, 1964 02/ Shop interior Gifford Street 03/ Fortress Road branch, one of twelve shops supplied from Holloway in 1963 04/ One of twelve delivery vans, circa1960
05/ Travelling Oven 1955 06/ Holloway shop front, 1964 07/ Holloway bread bakery 08/ William Spackman Confectioner to Beale’s for 63 years. Painting by E.J. Kealey accepted for Royal Academy 1948
08
24/ Eight generations in the family businesss
7th Generation
01
Drive, vision and foresight for a profitable future My father Trevor was the only Beale in the seventh generation and capably moved the company completely away from baking and purely into hotels, a path we have followed ever since. His achievements included making our West Lodge Park Hotel four stars and setting up wonderful chamber music concerts which carry on to this day. His care for the staff was notable, and although he retired in 1999, he continues to entertain his staff to lunches at the hotels. Needless to say, everyone adores him.
02
01- 05 West Lodge Park hotel booklet, 1969 06/ Caterer magazine cover, 1969
04
05
06
25/ Eight generations in the family businesssiness
03
Andrew Beale
26/ Andrew Bealesiness
Where we are today Like any family business of this longevity (we believe we are the second oldest family business in London and the south east that is still fully owned and managed by the family) we have had huge setbacks, great success, and periods of relative calm. We could have done more, become bigger, and maybe become richer in the process, but have chosen a relatively conservative route of keeping the ownership tight, the borrowing low, the focus local, the growth organic, and the daily management of the business under the close attention of each successive generaton. In conclusion it may be a rather old fashioned view in these days of private equity and venture capital with their ludicrous time horizons of no more than three years, but it is one I am happy to subscribe to. I will be thoroughly delighted to see the ninth and tenth generations take their turn in this
wonderful family business. Allowing the time to consolidate on past success and investing in the future. I am also the only Beale in the company in this, the eight generation. I have carried on the good work of all those previous generations while at the same time bringing some solid changes to the business, including notably the ÂŁ5.5M investment in the stunning Beales Hotel in Hatfield and the award of a total of four AA rosettes for our cuisine as well as becoming national champions in the 2008 Sustainable City Awards and runner up in the National Coutts Prize for family business 2008. The ninth generation consists of 5 children aged from 14 to 8, and 4 first cousins. I have no idea at this stage how the succession will make an effort to involve as many of the next generation who wish to be actively involved within the confines of a relatively small business with an annual turnover of no more than ÂŁ7m.
01 Edward
Trevor
“There was a lot of expectation riding on me. I’m the eldest son, and eldest ones are always meant to be the serious ones. But it’s not a burden-I love it. I have total security of employment until my retiring day. As a family business, there’s less pressure to produce profits at the expense of everything else. We can concentrate on old -fashioned things like giving good service. If you put yourself at the head of everything and you family ‘s reputation is at stake, you don’t want to lose it. You’ll be more motivated to give guests a positive experience than someone working for a corporation.” Andrew Beale
01/ 3 generations of Beale’s 1990
27/ Andrew Bealesiness
Andrew
28/ The Beale Family Tree
Interview with
Andrew Beale How do you classify the term career? That’s a difficult question, because I joined this business just under the age of 30, so in other words I often think I had my career before I joined the business. I worked for ten years all around the world in different hotels from Switzerland, to Germany, to Canada, to England to France to New Zealand, and I travelled everywhere, worked in lots of different big companies: Four Seasons, Holiday Inn, etc. Then I joined the business at 30. The trouble is that in a small family business the career angle kind of stops. I’ve joined as the General Manager and then at 40 I became Ending Director. I am Ending director now and I am 47. For a person in a normal job in a normal big company there would be another career step maybe at 50 another one at 55 and maybe the agenda role at 60. For me it’sflat, because I’m the Ending Director till I retire. That’s what’s different I suppose from a normal business.
Career posibilities in your company? Very important actually, and that is absolutely the key to what we do, and infact is my greatest passion to see my fantastic people grow through the organisation and get to more and more senior roles at young ages. For example, we took on one of our waiters, who joined us when he was 18 and we helped him through college. He became student of the year at his college. And one year later he was back with us as restaurant manager aged 22, with the turnover of about £800.000 a year and a team of about 20 people. So we promote young and we promote from within, so we’ll always have a default position. If there’s a choice between employing a good person in the company or a good person from outside the company, we will always take the person inside the company and give them the opportunity. I believe in this bubbling up effect when people grow up through the organisation and there’s more space in the bottom for other people to come in. So that’s how we generaly believe in growing our own from the career point of view. I have many good
examples. Another example is our Finace Director who’s been with us for 40 years and he started at 1971 as a part time waiter and 40 years later he’s a finance director. And it’s a good example of career progression really. We believe very strongly in promoting from within.
What’s special about your business? So many of the staff have been part of this business for so many years. We recently had a long service lunch for 38 members of staff and between them they clocked up 620 years of service, which made the average about 18 or 19 years each. Secret of success? The secret to continuity in a family business is to not overextend yourselves with banking, so don’t borrow too much money. Spend what you earn, but not more. Have modest dividends. Look after the customers and after the staff. Hey, it’s not rocket science it’s a bit boring, but there is no more than that. The other thing we need to get right more importantly is the succession from one generation to the next. So in my case I’ve 5 children, they are aged from 17 down to 11, and in due course one maybe two or three may want to join the business, so getting those plans done correctly is very important to make sure that any family member getting a job in family business has a real job to do not just because they are son or the daughter, and very much of common sense and education to understand so they can take it forward to the next generation.
Common values? Family is the biggest value, and when I say family I mean not only the fact that the business is owned by the Beale family. Incidently I am the only member of my generation in the business. But then the family translates to staff, so I would like to think of all the staff in the Hotels as family, so they either fit in or they don’t fit in. The one’s who fit in will last for a very long time. Why have you chosen to continue the family business? I always worked in hotels for summer jobs, but never in this particular business. When I left university after geography studies I went to hotel school in Switzerland for three
years to do a sandwich course. Five months working at the school and then seven months working in business. I worked as a chef, receptionist, waiter, front office, night porter etc. After three years of that, I had lots of training, I still didn’t want to come to the family business and that was about 25. So then I had another 4 years of doing other hotel jobs as a part of a career, keeping my options open, seeing what was out there, enabling me to travel. Because in the background my father was busy working in hotels, and there was no logical reason to come into the family business just yet. I do believe that family members on a whole should not join the family business until a little bit later in their career, so that they have gained experience in the outside world and seen what the life is like on the outside. So we tend to believe that a family member should not join till 25-30, that kind of age.
Are you happy about your career path? Yes I am happy, because it’s fine. There’s never a dull day. About 90% of all my problems are staff related. Only 10% is marketing or finance or reputation management. So from that point of view there’s never a dull day, there’s something going on. Somebody had an argument or someone’s got a problem in their department etc. I have never been bored once. I supose the question is if there’s no family business to join, what I would be doing? And the answer to that is I’d probably be doing something in geography, because that’s what’s my degree was. Teaching or something in the outdoors, nothing to do with hotels.
Do you have conflicts in your family about managing the business? I joined in 1992 and my father retired in 1999, so we had 7 years together and I think at that time we never argued, so that was nice. In the previous generation, which was my great grandfather’s so that was the fith generation. There were three brothers working in the business, and they argued every day, for 50 years or so, they hated each other, they could not work together and in the end what happened was that one of them was voted out at an AGM by the other two, which is terrible and broke up the family. The next generation, my grandfather worked with his brother in this business for 50 years and never argued. Then the seventh generation was my father and his
by himself. And the eight generation I by myself too. I would conclude the recipe for harmonious business is to have one or two family members in each generation, but certainly not three or four or five or six or whatever. I don’t know how the ninth generation will turn out, but for now is quite harmonious.
Do you have non-family members on the board of directors? Yes we do. On the board of directors there’s myself as the only family member as managing director, then we have a non-executive chairmen, who is not part of the family either, he’s a food expert in food service, he comes along about 10 to 15 times a year, and then we have a non-family finance director who’s been with us for about 40 years. So Im the minority on the board.
Has there ever been a study done on the history of the business? We are very keen on history, we are constantly archiving, putting everything live on the website, we have written books about the family business. The history is a big part of who and what we are. And a big part of our appeal we believe it gives a big selling point. So we happened to be in the hotels, but we might not be, we might be in restaurants, computers, or groceries or whatever. But if you’ve got a story and narrative going back in our case over 240 years then it’s very important that you tell people that story. So yes, it is a very important part of what we do.
What difficulties have you faced in your work? The biggest diffuculty is that we always short of money. One of the reasons for that is that the hotels are very expensive to run, and customers tastes change so quickly, you always need to be ahead of customers and their expectations are always rising. Another problem is that in family businesses you can’t raise public money as easily as you can do in non-family businesses. You can go to the stock market and float, and that way you can get lots of outside investors who become equity shareholders in the business. But we made a firm decision to keep the shareholding very tight, very narrow. We are just 8 shareholders and as such, none of us have any money that we could len to the business. In other words our money that we use to invest in the company has to be from either retained profits from one year to the
next or going to the bank and borrowing it. Those are only two routes to the capital. That’s the biggest single problem that we would face as a business of this age and relatively the small size.
Competition with companies doing the same stuf? We hold our own against the competition. So as I say we are in the hotel business so we are up against Inter Continental Group, Travel Lodge, Premiere In, Holiday Inn, Marriot you name it. All the big chains of hotels. The only way to compete is not on price, but is on service and quality. If you go to tripadviser.com which is the world’s biggest website for travel you will see that in Hertfordshire this hotel West Lodge Park is the highest rated hotel in Hertfordshire between 143 hotels. And our sister Beales Hotel in Heartfield is the second highest rated. So we are in the spots number one and two in Heartfordshire out of the 143 hotels. That proves for me that we’re offering our customers value for money and a satisfaction level which is higher that the competition. Against that is the fact that those hotels have lots of access to the capital and they can grow and grow and grow. And we remain the same size. We’ve got 112 bedrooms in our company, I would love to have 200 or even 500 bedrooms. So we are struggling in terms of size but we make up in terms of personality.
How beneficial is your strategic location? We are located just in the outside of the North London at 12 o’clock from London. We’ve got two hotels with a population on the doorstep, in this case of 12 million people in London, all of them about an hours journey from here. If you reduced the time scale to 10 minutes from here both hotels have about 400.000 people within 10 minutes drive of them. That makes up for a successful location.
advertise here on a regular basis in the local media, so that is the local counting magazines and the local newspapers broadly speaking. We used to advertise on a local radio station. I find the advertising is the most problematic part of marketing for a small business. Lord Leaver who had a huge budget for advertising Proctor & Gamble said: I know half of advertising works, I just don’t know which one. But he knew that without advertising his sales would go down. Here in global marketing terms we spent about 3% of turnover. We find these days that other forms of communicating with customers are more effective than traditional advertising.
Have you changed you logo since the company’s inception? It’s been going 1769, yes we had a few incarnations of the logo, but the current incarnation of the logo reflects the company in the Victorian period so in another words in the 1850s -1890s so we reverted to a crown logo which is similar to how it was some hundred and fifty years ago.
Ideas, suggestions for those who want to start their own business? The most important thing that one must have is the sense of belief in the product, you must believe that what you’re doing is fantastic, because if you don’t believe in that than nobody else will. I will give you an example, we used to have a hotel in Hatfield called Hatfield Lodge hotel, and it was a run down I had a vision one day that said to me - do you know what, if I am a customer I wouldn’t want to stay in here. This is a hotel we used to run for 20 years. I thought if I wouldn’t want to stay here, I rather suspect that lots of other people from my generation wouldn’t want to stay in here. So we knocked it down and built a brand new hotel at a site very different, superstilish and expensive. That gives an example of belief in a product. You got to believe in the product, and if you don’t believe in it, then it’s probaby not going to work.
What role does advetising play in your company?
Plans for the future?
I find advertising difficult and a problem. I am in charge of all the marketing for the company, so I run a website, I run all the broshures, all the print and everything like that. That’s my kind of baby. I’ve always struggled with advertising. Advertising is expensive and we can’t track it. So we
Plans for the future are rather difficult. In the hotel business it is very difficult to grow the hotels. You can grow it small in number of bedrooms, grow them organically. But it’s very difficult because the costs to buy another hotel are so high. Our turnover is £5.5m a year so we probably make profits
Customers? We have lots of customers here who have been coming for years and years. And been having their own family celebrations over the years. Weddings, wedding anniversaries, christenings, funerals all the key events of their lives have been held in our hotels. So you get to know these people, they’ve been coming for multiple generations themselves so a long side ownership generation after generation are the staff for generation after generation and the customers for generation after generation.
What’s your business philosophy? We try to do everything in our power to ensure our guests want to return, which is really treating them with courtesy, respect and dignity. Describe your business’s special qualities… The wonderful staff and the quality of the environment of the two hotels.
Why are you passionate about what you do? It is deeply satisfying to know that we have created cherished memories for so many wedding couples, or to know that a conference has gone well or a special anniversary party has been enjoyed by so many people. Most of all it is the staff that drives my passion on a daily basis–seeing them evolve and grow into senior roles in the business and giving the very best of themselves.
03/15/10 West Lodge Park Hotel
31/ Interview with Andrew Beale
£1.5m maybe maximum. Now to buy another hotel of any size would be £5m or so. So in truth the vision for the next 10 years or so is to constantly refine and constantly expand our existing 2 hotels. Come back in ten years time and I suspect you will see not a 112 bedrooms in this company, but something in the range of about 140 bedrooms, expanded facilities. Not a huge change but it will be along those kind of lines really. It will still be expensive to do, but we will stil be here.
West Lodge Park Hotel When Henry IV (then duke of Lancaster) married Mary de Bohun he acquired, through her, the manor and chase of Enfield. In 1399 the care of the chase was placed under higher office of state known as the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The principal task at the time was the preservation of the trees and the game. For the administration of this work and the organisation of the large staff, three bailee lodges were therefore built - West Lodge, South Lodge and East Lodge. Enfield Chase was the scene of the overthrow of the Earl of Warwick by Edward IV at the battle of Barnet in 1471. The battlefield was Monkey Mead, now called Monken Hadley. The name Monkey Mead is retained by the brook which runs along the boundary of West Lodge Park in Cockfosters Road. From 1694 - 1716 West Lodge was owned by the disreputable Sir Basil Fire-
brace, who at one time was sentenced to imprisonment in the Tower of London for bribery and fraud. The next owner was James Brydges, the first duke of Chandos, who made his fortune in only a slightly less disreputable way than Sir Basil Firebrace, by being the paymaster - general to the army from 1706 - 1712. On his death in 1744 the property was passed to his son Henry, the 2nd Duke. Like his father he did not live at West Lodge but at the main residence of Edgware. After nearly 650 years, the Enfield Chase ceased to exist as a hunting forest and West Lodgebecame a gentleman’s country seat, losing its responsibilities for the protection of the chase. John White Carter then took the lease of West Lodge Park in 1850 and lived there until his death in 1889. Alfred Mosely then took over the lease in 1890, until Ernest North Lewis became the
first man to convert West Lodge into a hotel, taking the lease in 1921 My Grandfather, Edward Beale bought West Lodge Park in March 1945 and moved there with his wife Betty and son Trevor. In 1958 Edward Beale aided by his brother John raised the standards by installing central heating and a start was made on building private bathrooms en suite. Edward Beale lived at West Lodge Park for over fifty years; he formed the hotel’s collection of old Master paintings and took particular pleasure in creating the nationally recognised arboretum in the 35 acres surrounding the hotel. Edward Beale devoted much time to public affairs, and was awarded the C.B.E in 1966. He died in 1998 at the age of 94. For 35 years the hotel had only two General Managers, Douglas Lunn from 1957 – 1969, then John Phillips from 1969 – 1992. Under the careful eye of my father, Trevor Beale, the hotel rose from
01/ West Lodge Park Hotel Reception
33/ Beales Hotels
three to a four star status and became well known when the England football team started to train in the grounds. Trevor started the series of classical concerts that are still running today, 30 years later. The hotel grew in size during this time with the addition of several extensions. In 1992, Andrew Beale became the eighth generation to join the family firm, and the third generation to work at West Lodge Park. Under Andrews leadership as General Manager the hotel gained one, and then two rosettes for the cuisine, and further enlargement of the hotel followed. Shareholders area
01
Beales Hotels has 7 individual family shareholders, in nearly every case descended from former generation of Beales working in the family firm. A unique feature is the Beale Trust which owns around 33% of the company and gives out a significant amount of money each year to worthy cases.
01
34/ Beales Hotels
Country mansion in its own 34 acre park about 12 miles directly north of Piccadilly Circus. Although so near to the centre of London, it is in the middle of several thousand acres of beautifulrolling country - part of the ‘Green Belt’ of London.
01/ West Lodge Park Hotel floor plan
35/ Beales Hotels
36/ Beales Hotels
37/ Beales Hotels
The Beale Arboretum The Arboretum was started in 1963 by my Grandfather, Edward Beale, then chairman of the family firm owning the hotel, on the recommendation of Derek Honour, trees adviser to the G.L.C. Edward developed and promoted the Arboretum enthusiastically for the rest of his life. He was helped at theplanning stage by (former director of R.H.S.Wisley) Derek Honour and Frank Knight and in the planting and maintenance by Frank Hillier and Michael Helliwell, who served as head gardeners for 17 and 11 years respectively. Our 800 species of trees from around the world are planted here around the 35 acres of the West Lodge Park Estate.
39/ Beales Hotels
Beales Hotel 2004 01
We redeveloped Hatfield Lodge Hotel in 2004, after the old Hatfield Lodge Hotel had become too dated. We renamed the hotel Beales Hotel to keep the family name alive in the mind of the public, and toget rid of the “lodge� in the name which sounded like a Travelodge. However we have stuck with West Lodge Park as a name as this has many historical connotations going back to the 12th century.
02
43/ Beales Hotels
03
01/ Hatfield Lodge Hotel 02/ Beales Hotel Front Facade 03/ Beales Hotel art gallery opening
Awards 44/ Beales Hotels
Beales Hotels has a proud record in competitions over the years. Of all the awards there are two that give particular cause for satisfaction. The first is the award Four stars 2 Rosettes 80% quality rating to Beales Hotel in July 07, rating Beales Hotel at exactly the same standart as West Lodge Park which has long been the highest rated Four star hotel in North London and Hertfordshire. The other award is the investors in People award, which was received on four consecutive occasions from 1997 to 2007. This award is dedicated to the staff, which is over 200 people, because those wonderful people, there is nothing. Many of the team have been in the firm for decades and have become valued friends with the Beale family and with so many of guests.
45/ Beales Hotels