Director of Property, Hospitality and Retail in Southwold, Suffolk

What do you need to know about Adnams and our Team? We make amazing award-winning beers and spirits from our home in Southwold, have some great shops across the region and operate some stunning pubs and hotels. We understand the value of every customer and work hard to deliver amazing service in a time of exciting innovation and digital transformation. We do all of this while caring passionately about the environment, our local communities and our wider social responsibilities. At Adnams we really care about diversity and are proud of our culture where everyone is respected, valued and treated with kindness.

An opportunity has arisen within our business for a Director of Property, Hospitality and Retail. As part of the Senior Leadership Team, reporting into the CEO, you will be responsible for leading and strategically managing Adnams’ direct-to-consumer business areas to drive customer experience, reputation, profit and shareholder value across hospitality, retail and property operations.

This is a pivotal leadership role for someone with significant experience across multi-site retail, hospitality and property operations. You will bring strategic vision, commercial focus and a strong understanding of how to create exceptional customer and guest experiences whilst also delivering sustainable financial performance. Leading across diverse business areas, you will work closely with departmental leaders to shape direction, improve operational performance and ensure our property portfolio of pubs, hotels, shops and Brewery, Distillery and Lighthouse experiences evolve in line with brand and long-term ambitions. You will be a visible, inspiring leader who builds capability, encourages collaboration and helps teams thrive through change, whilst also taking a hands-on approach and staying close to the detail where it matters most.

Key responsibilities will include:

• Maintaining Adnams’ premium standards across hospitality, retail and visitor experiences, including maintaining benchmark measures such as the Michelin Key and AA 4 red stars awards at The Swan, Harpers Independent wine rankings, and Tripadvisor Travellers’ Choice recognition for Tours and Experiences.
• Supporting pub tenants with their own business strategies, operational advice and influencing them to ensure Adnams brand values are upheld at all times by these independent partner businesses.
• Providing visible leadership across the business, building strong and capable teams, creating clarity and accountability, and taking a hands-on approach to support sites and colleagues in delivering operational and brand excellence.
• Championing your people and teams and building a strong employee brand. Leading with an approach that is empathetic, clear and supportive to teams at all levels.
• Driving operational efficiency through the effective use and development of systems and data, including labour efficiency on a site-by-site basis, food margin performance, revenue growth, cover numbers, occupancy and the use of seasonal and variable opening patterns to optimise monthly EBITDA.
• Improving return on capital employed across the hospitality estate, with clear year-on-year growth expectations and targeted performance improvement plans for priority sites.
• Identifying opportunities to reshape ways of working to better support operational efficiency and business performance.
• Planning and assessing the level of maintenance capital expenditure required across the estate to protect asset quality, trading operations and long-term value.
• Building and developing a pipeline of capital development projects, supported by recycled capital from lower-performing assets or central funding, with returns measured clearly on a project-by-project basis.
• Overseeing the retail proposition, including online, to improve overall performance and exploring opportunities for new formats and experimental.

What are we looking for?

To be successful in this role, you will be a strategic and commercially minded leader with a strong track record of delivering results across consumer-facing, multi-site operations. You will be confident leading through others, balancing long-term planning with day-to-day operational excellence, and bringing people with you on the journey.

• Extensive leadership experience across hospitality, retail, property or other multi-site consumer-facing operations.
• Strong commercial acumen, with experience of translating strategy into operational and financial performance.
• A proven ability to lead, coach and develop high-performing teams and partner businesses through change, creating clarity, accountability and engagement.
• The ability to oversee assets and operations with a strong focus on legal compliance, presentation standards, customer experience and long-term value.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills, with the confidence to build strong relationships across a wide range of internal and external stakeholders.

What’s in it for you?

A sense of pride that you are working for a business that cares about the important stuff and a lot of fun working with an amazing bunch of people. Enthusiastic and hard-working people who join Adnams tend to stay around so we must get quite a lot of things right. We really admire innovation and are not afraid to try something new, so you get to put new ideas into practice to deliver even better results for everyone. We are also committed to helping our people grow, develop and progress within Adnams, with ongoing training and development to support career goals across the wider business.