Group Venue Manager

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society was founded in Edinburgh in 1983 by a small group of friends who thought whisky deserved better than a standard 40% dram and a distillery name on the label. Over 40 years on, we're the world's original single cask whisky club – unconventional, adventurous, and still a lot of fun. We bottle exceptional and rare single casks from over 150 distilleries in more than 20 countries, always at cask strength, never chill-filtered, and named for how they taste rather than where they're from – because every cask is one of a kind, and the flavour is the hero. Our Members join a global community, not a shop: alongside our monthly Outturns, they get access to our Members' Rooms in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, a network of Partner Bars around the world, and a packed calendar of tastings and events.

Our Members' Rooms are where the Society comes to life — where people taste flavours they've never met before, swap stories over a dram, and feel like they belong to something a little different. The Group Venue Manager owns that experience on the ground: making sure every venue is safe, welcoming, commercially healthy, and unmistakably SMWS.

What you'll be doing

• Oversee day-to-day venue operations so our Members' Rooms are safe, welcoming, commercially effective, well presented, and true to the Society's standards and personality.
• Set and monitor service standards to ensure a high-quality experience at every Member touchpoint.
• Use Member feedback, venue insight, booking patterns, sales data, event performance and team knowledge to keep improving service and profitability.
• Work closely with the Marketing team so communications reaching Members are high quality and drive spend and visits to our venues.
• Line manage, train and develop your 5 direct reports (4 Venue Managers and Group Head Chef).
• Lead training and development planning for a team of 50+ across all venues.
• Handle HR and people management across the department, including disciplinaries and people challenges.
• Act as H&S lead for the department, often extending improvements (such as new accident-reporting processes) to the wider business.
• Manage department finances day to day, including tracking KPIs and performance against budget.
• Monitor and approve spend across the department.
• Own outturn planning, allocation requests and stock ordering for all venues.
• Set and adjust pricing strategy for group products, such as dram bands.
• Ensure every venue is legally compliant inc. health & safety, food safety, licensing and beyond.
• Oversee and renegotiate group contracts (waste management, security, H&S, utilities and similar).
• If required, lead operational execution of new venues, refurbishments and major changes to physical spaces.
• Oversee ongoing maintenance and renovation of venues, and work with internal teams (e.g. Finance, Tech) to improve venue-facing processes, such as till implementations.

What success looks like

• Consistently positive Member feedback on in-person experiences.
• Budget achieved for both revenue and EBITDA across the group of venues.
• Your team feels supported, engaged, and receives regular, useful feedback on their performance.
• Visible improvement, internally and externally — your team notice processes getting easier, and Members notice a sharper events and service offering.
• You're a clear, reliable point of contact so the right information flows from head office to the Member-facing team.

About you

• Proven experience managing multi-site hospitality, retail or leisure venues, ideally with a premium, member-led or brand-driven feel.
• A strong track record of leading, developing and genuinely supporting managers and front-line teams, including through high-pressure periods.
• Comfortable with financial management and reporting — building budgets, tracking P&Ls, and helping your managers get more confident with numbers too.
• Practical experience of H&S and licensing compliance across multiple venues.
• Able to lead a project (a refurbishment, a systems change, a new venue) from planning through to delivery.
• Resilient and adaptable — this role is reactive at times, with workload that varies from very manageable to genuinely full-on, and you'll need to juggle competing demands with a level head.
• A natural fit with the Society's tone: unconventional, warm and knowledgeable.

Good to know

This is a role in transition: the previous Head of Venues and Member Engagement combined this venue-facing leadership with wider departmental strategy and EMT oversight, which is now being separated out. That means you're joining at a settled, stable point for the venue teams, we have the right managers in place, the team has become more self-sufficient over the last year, and there are no major capital projects underway, giving a new Group Venue Manager room to get to know the business before the next big one comes along. An early, high-value project on offer is picking up the staff training pathway work already underway with the People team.