J D Wetherspoon

Our Motto--CBSM: Cleanliness, Beer, Service and Maintenance--is used as a benchmark of excellence throughout our company. JD Wetherspoon plc is one of the United Kingdom's largest and fastest growing chains of publican houses (pubs). Blending a unique formula of unconventional locations--including former automobile showrooms, theaters, banks, and grocery stores--low beer prices, all-day food service, non-smoking areas, and a strict ban on television and music, JD Wetherspoon operates more than 320 pubs in the United Kingdom. Moreover, with as many as 80 new pub openings a year, JD Wetherspoon is also one of the U.K.'s fastest growing companies. The company expects to run from 1,000 to perhaps 1,400 pubs or more, under such names as The Asparagus, The Spinning Mule, The Isaac Wilson (named after a local teetotaler!), and the Shakespeare's Head. The company is also eyeing plans to bring its successful formula to the European continent, starting with Paris. Wetherspoon is the brainchild of chairman Timothy Martin, age 44, who continues to hold 17 percent of the company and an iron rein on operations. Wetherspoon went public in 1979 and trades on the London Stock Exchange. In the meantime, Martin began a crash course in pub-tending. His first move was to rename the pub, choosing the name JD Wetherspoon after a schoolmaster in New Zealand. "The least likely person to control a pub because he could not control a class," Martin told the Independent . Yet Martin's first day as a pub owner proved inauspicious: "I couldn't unlock the doors to let the cleaner in," Martin explained to the Independent in 1996, "and by the time the locksmith had opened them it was 11 o'clock, customers were arriving and it was still a mess from the night before." Nonetheless, Martin's customers stayed--and soon the former betting shop, at 500 square feet only half the size of the usual pub, had become too small. Martin began looking for a new location; yet the country's pubs were more or less locked up by the national brewers, who were equally resistant to selling to the young Martin. Instead, Martin took his inspiration from his own pub, and began looking at other former retail locations for his next pub. In 1981, Martin opened his second pub in a former automobile showroom. Opening pubs in unlikely locations--with later pubs finding homes in former banks, grocery stores, and even well-known locations, such as the famed Marquee nightclub and the Half Moon theater--became a Wetherspoon hallmark. Throughout the 1980s, Martin continued to refine the Wetherspoon concept. He soon instituted a chainwide ban on music and television, as well as ridding his pubs of games, such as darts and pool tables, that were traditional facets of the English pub. The company would adopt a similar position with the karaoke and bingo nights that its competitors would adopt over the coming decade. Wetherspoon pubs, each with their own name, often taken from a local personality, became known as places were people could talk, and where they could find not only a wide selection of smaller, regional beer labels, but also cheap prices&mdash much as 50 pence less than competing houses. Wetherspoon was helped also by the Campaign for Real Ale movement, similar to the microbrewery trend in the United States in the 1990s, that encouraged people to buy the regional brands over the dominant national brands. By 1983 Wetherspoon, with four pubs, had become profitable, earning £180,000 in net profits. As Martin wrote in the Independent in 1996: "Had I stopped there I could have said this was a successful business. Instead, Wetherspoon went hell for leather for expansion, adding 40 to 50 percent to sales each year." In the summer of 1983, Wetherspoon doubled its number of pubs; from there the company began expanding beyond London. Finding locations continued to prove difficult, as the nation's pubs continued to be locked up by the national giants. Martin's choice of unlikely venues helped t