A former banker at Merrill Lynch has given up his lucrative career to launch a radical new business model to save the traditional British pub. Noah Bulkin, 37, has acquired hundreds of struggling pubs and is using detailed, intricate data to turn them around.
According to Bloomberg, Bulkin is monitoring everything from daily sales, to the price charged for a pint of beer, to fluctuations in customers’ drinking preferences.
“Understanding pricing and the mix of drinks is incredibly important,” Bulkin tells Bloomberg. “A lot of pubs don’t have that data. If you can make them the core of your business, there’s a fantastic opportunity.”
Bulkin says that so far this year, he has bought 363 pubs and says there are over a thousand more that he is thinking of acquiring. He is boosting sales by adding food, repairing games facilities and increasing the selection of beer on offer.
Although this doesn’t sound radical – other chains have been trying similar things for years – what sets Bulkin’s project apart is the huge amount of data he is collecting.
“Applying some granular analysis of what a person might drink and what they will pay is an incredibly important element. This hasn’t been done in the bottom end of the sector.”
Bulkin says that two beers that are identical in price per pint, and taste similar, could give up to 80 percent difference in profit, if only pub landlords had the data to show which was more popular. Area managers will check in on the tenants who run individual pubs on a regular basis and discuss which drinks to offer at which price.
Other companies are already following Bulkin’s lead. Last year, Cerberus Capital Management LP bought pub firm Admiral Tavers, while Risk Capital Partners of London this month invested in the Laine Pub Company, all signs that big business is starting to take British pubs seriously, and is prepared to apply sophisticated data analysis to keeping them open.
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