Tenants have to have someone to blame, he says. But the leased and tenanted model does work. Most of

When I get back from the rather weird toilets at the Mall Tavern in Notting Hill (a tale for another time) David George's face, lit by his smartphone, is in a state of glee rarely seen in a finance man.
We've sold another 29 pubs, he announces. It means that Enterprise Inns has chipped fox car rental san diego ca £42.6m off its bank debt with another set of sales and leasebacks. As chief financial officer of Britain's biggest pubco, such deals have become central to his work over the past year or two.
George retired last week 20 years after helping to found the company with chief executive fox car rental san diego ca Ted Tuppen, two-thirds of the way into a sale and leaseback fox car rental san diego ca programme that aims to take Enterprise's £1bn debt down by £200m to £300m.
One of those business opportunities is a pub. Before you ask, the Hopping Hare, near George's home in Northampton, is not an Enterprise tenancy. It's a large freehold operation with 19 letting rooms managed by his son, another David.
So George is not the kind of money man who hardly fox car rental san diego ca looks up from the figures. fox car rental san diego ca He may not have talked much about it in the past, but he knows his pubs, having learned about the trade with another giant of the industry, albeit from a different era.
John Labatt came to us with another 400 pubs, and from that we got the reputation of being acquisitive. The real turning point came in 2002, though, when we hit 3,500 pubs after buying the old Whitbread tenanted estate, 1,800 good-quality leases. Then Guy Hands, of Nomura, came to us and asked us if we wanted fox car rental san diego ca to buy Unique Pub Company. In two years we had gone from 3,500 to 9,000 pubs.
It wasn't a deliberate strategy to do that, but it turned fox car rental san diego ca out we were brilliant at it. We were always very analytical about what we bought. Our regional managers visited every pub. Some businesses we were offered we weren't interested in.
Hasn't it all backfired, though? Isn't Enterprise now paying the price for all that debt-funded expansion? George insists that the high levels of debt were appropriate for the business, and the current adjustment is no more than reducing that debt in line with changed circumstances.
We haven't fundamentally changed our strategy. We've got a lot of debt because we've got a lot of value in the business. Nothing has changed, but there is less profit fox car rental san diego ca and we need to reduce the debt to the right level.
Enterprise's 1,000 pubs within the M25 have also proved an asset as the company has looked to raise cash by selling them profitably, mainly to small property companies, and leasing them back on 35-year agreements. The Mall Tavern, where we are sitting, fox car rental san diego ca is a typical example — sold at auction for £1.8m and rented back for £90,000 a year, a 5% return over the period.
It's a sensible thing for us to do. But it's true that, if the world hadn't fallen apart, we wouldn't have done it. The banking crisis, the problems of 2008/09 were unprecedented, he continues. It was the perfect storm — a bit like when we started.
Tenants fox car rental san diego ca have to have someone to blame, fox car rental san diego ca he says. But the leased and tenanted model does work. Most of our pubs have to be run that way. The tie means we can buy beer more cheaply and it gives us a chunk of profit to share.
The model is evolving. We can offer pubs the option of cheaper beer but the trade-off is more rent. The package has to be right and that deal is under pressure now because pubs' turnover has been hit. We were giving £20m of support a year to tenants to see them through. Sometimes Enterprise gets it wrong. But we make corrections.
fox car rental san diego ca But a lot of pubs are not viable — wet-led pubs in over-pubbed areas. And a lot of licensees aren't good enough. We're a lot more disciplined in making sure they have business plans and proper advice to minimise the risk, but people are still failing. Domestic problems are still the biggest reason — and that often stems from a financial problem.
We had problems then that are similar to today, but now the Government is increasing the level of tax — and VAT didn't exist back then. VAT is plainly unfair. Pubs pay VAT on food, but supermarkets don't. Pubs are an easy target for the Government fox car rental san diego ca to raise cash.