The call went out around the bar: “Tim is on his way. Smile everybody.” Within seconds Tim Bacon, former Aussie soap star, strides through the door with business partner Jeremy Roberts and a mini-entourage of well dressed men in dark, tailored suits.
Bacon, the public face of his and Roberts’ company, hurriedly introduces himself and offers apologies: he wants to take five minutes to look around as he has not yet seen the bar in its new guise. With that, Bacon is off exploring as Roberts goes to do his own surveying. It is 1 September, and there are only 57 minutes left to the midday opening.
The 8,000 sq ft building in west Smithfield, London, is at the end of its facelift. It is being transformed from Living Room – the restaurant-piano bar concept, into Bar & Grill, a new concept based around pizzas and grills, because the capital already has one Living Room with two more set to open.
Since the first Living Room opened in Manchester in 1999, the chain has gained a great reputation among agents. It is praised for its ability to expand carefully and ensure it always provides a balance between good food and a bar atmosphere that appeals to all, including celebrities such as David Beckham.
Different brands created
There are now 10 Living Rooms, averaging 8,000 sq ft, with ventures in most of the UK’s major cities. But to allow the Cheshire-based company, Living Ventures, to take different- sized units, new brands have been introduced. Bar & Grill, which will be around 4,000-5,000 sq ft, offers “a more leisurely concept of dining”.
Having different brands appears to be working : the company, worth £19m, is now ripe for stock market flotation (see panel).
Bacon sees Living Room reaching 25, 30 maybe even 40 units – the tally rises as he speaks. As for the other brands, he says the sky is the limit.
The big dream started small – but with help. Bacon was living in Manchester in 1993 when he took the opportunity to buy a well-known business in receivership – JW Johnson’s on Manchester’s Deansgate, where he worked with Roberts.
Entering into a joint venture with an undisclosed company meant there were no money or covenant problems. “The beautiful thing about being with a bigger partner meant capital was never a problem,” says Bacon.
At JW Johnson’s, the philosophy for running a business was honed. Bacon drew on his experience of the Australian bar-restaurant culture, with its equal combination of dining and bar space, and his time as a bartender at London’s TGI Friday’s in Covent Garden. “If you come up from grass-roots level you look at the trade from grass-roots level.”
Site that nobody wanted
Bacon describes the time at JW Johnson’s, which attracted the likes of Oasis and Mick Hucknall, as “fantastic in its day”. Selling it in 1996 is something he regrets, but the majority shareholder wanted out. After that, Bacon, now with new business partner Roberts, turned his attention to a second jv to start Via Vita, eventually selling the seven units to jv partner Marston Thompson, & Eversheds. Two Life cafés followed, and again were sold off to Whitbread.
The selling stopped in 1999 when the Living Room was born in a small unit next to JW Johnson’s. Given the type of building Bacon and Roberts went for, it is surprising that they survived. “Nobody else wanted the site because the building was considered to be too narrow at 7m wide by 38m deep and therefore difficult to use.” But Bacon saw the Living Room concept – piano-bar, restaurant with fairly priced food – fitting right in. And of course, the location helped. “As far as pitches go, Deansgate was fantastic.”
Living Ventures’ growing reputation as a quality operator has meant that securing top sites has become steadily easier.
“Landlords like us. They like the concepts that we do because – thanks to our mixture of food and drink – they are very licence-friendly, very police-friendly, very female-friendly,” says Bacon.
After Manchester came prime A1 sites, in other major UK and Scottish cities before the chain was brought to London. “London is important to us. To be a caterer in the UK and not have something in London would not make sense,” says Bacon.
With the west Smithfield conversion to Bar & Grill, the capital has only one Living Room, in Islington. But of the four units to open next year, two will be in the capital, at Heddon Street and Leadenhall Street, which Bacon says is in the “final throws of signing”. The others are in Oxford and Cambridge. All will have the average fit-out for a unit, which is around £1m-£1.5m.
Living Ventures will be capitalising on its other concepts. “We have just trialled the Living Room in smaller places like Chester. And it’s worked. That’s opened about another 30 towns across the UK that we could see ourselves in. But we won’t have more than 40,” says Bacon.
Ambitious plans for growth
As for Prohibition and Mosquito – Bacon says they could have up to six in every town.
Places being considered are Cardiff, Exeter, Cheltenham, Brighton, Richmond and Kingston. “And then there’s Essex,” says Bacon.
And the company is not afraid of getting too big, too quickly. “People used to say that you were too big when you got to four or five units, then when you got to 10 units. We are not opening new units quickly. We are not breaking any speed records. I would rather sit on a property than fail.”
Just to prove a point, the company has joined forces with hotel group Niche Hotels in Newcastle, which has bought a Grade-II listed building in the city’s Grainger Town area to turn into a 49-bed boutique hotel. Living Ventures took a 25-year-lease on the ground floor, and signed a contract to provide the hotel with all its catering, from room service, which is served by hotel staff, through to catering for delegates in the 100-seat capacity conference room.
So has this seemingly perfect company never failed? Yes, admits Bacon. Shortly after opening Living Room, Manchester, Living Ventures embarked on a chain called Miniccinos in south Manchester. “It was like a mini Carluccios,” says Bacon, “but I couldn’t get my operations people to buy into it. I forced it on them, but they just weren’t enthusiastic and it quickly became apparent that it just wasn’t going to work. I eventually offloaded it.”
Bacon says a valuable lesson was learned. “Unless you can get your staff to believe in what you are doing then it won’t work.” And he says it highlights Living Ventures’ approach to management. “I have a clear structure. We don’t scream, but every now and again we raise our voices. We have a strong team.”
The man who spent his early 20s playing stalker Chris Bainbridge on Australian TV’s Sons and Daughters is keeping an eye on time. With six minutes to opening, Bacon has to leave, but he fires a parting shot before he disappears into the kitchen to help with the first service. “You won’t play too heavily on the soap opera thing, will you?”
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1993 Bacon buys JW Johnson’s from receivers in a jv; before selling it three years later 1996 Bacon gets together with Jeremy Roberts and starts Via Vita. The venture is later sold to Marston, Thompson and Eversheds 1998 The pair start Life Café 1999 Life Café sold to Whitbread. Living Room started 2001 Miniccinos comes and goes 2003 Prohibition, a smaller “classic bar”, and Mosquito, the nightclub attached to the Living Room concept, are born. Their average size is 4,000 sq ft May 2004 Tie-up with Niche Hotels. August 2004 Bar & Grill launched Bacon (left) on prospect of flotation “Personally, I think it is a good time to float,” says Tim Bacon, MD and co-founder of Living Ventures, a company now worth £19m. Bacon says that even though the stock market is fairly flat at the moment, it is better to float now “if you are not looking to raise any money”. “Our backer of three years, SagittaPrivate-Equity, wants to get out within five years.” |
