WILD GEESE: EMIGRANT BUSINESS LEADERS ON OPPORTUNITIES ABROAD: Nigel Lambe - Owner, WJ King Brewery, West Sussex, England
“I GO INTO the roastery every morning at six, we sit down and have a cup of coffee; that’s our board meeting,” says entrepreneur Nigel Lambe of his burgeoning coffee business.
Although opening his fifth Small Batch Coffee shop in Britain the day before we meet, coffee is just one string to the Dubliner’s bow. The owner of boutique brewery WJ King and a greengrocers, the UCD commerce graduate admits he gets bored easily.
Lambe wasn’t always his own boss, though. Graduating in 1994, he bagged a place on the Smurfit graduate programme, working for 18 months across the company’s Dublin-based print, magazine and box making businesses.
When, aged 24, he was asked to move to a Smurfit facility in Manchester, the home bird initially wasn’t keen. The job was for a month but it quickly became six and soon he was put in charge of selling a Smurfit packaging solution to the likes of Coca Cola and Pepsi.
When Lambe answered “no” to a head- hunter’s question as to whether he knew anything about supply chain and logistics, he was told his answer qualified him perfectly for a vacancy a Pepsi. “They had always had people from the industry before and they all kind of did the same thing as last year but 2 per cent better. They just wanted someone with a fresh pair of eyes to come and look at it.”
Reconfiguring PepsiCo’s supply chain across Europe was like “trying to negotiate the euro”. “Most of the issues were cultural, trying to understand how to operate in different environments was a big learning curve.”
After four years with Pepsi, then a brief stint with a dotcom and with his first child on the way, Lambe accepted a role with Grampian Foods, which had a chicken manufacturing plant in Sussex.
As managing director of a plant with 800 staff at the age of 32, he took on a business that was “significantly loss making” and was a “huge challenge”. “In my second week, a new [group] chief executive walked in and said: ‘I’ll give you a couple of weeks and then I’ll close this place’. So I had to find a way to turn the business around incredibly fast and keep it alive, which we managed to do for another four years and actually made it profitable.”
In 2005, Lambe took three months off to travel with his family, a break that included a month in New Zealand in a camper van. Joining IT services company Capita on his return, his role was to get underperforming parts of the business into shape. So was he becoming known as a bit of a fixer?
“It did tend to work that way,” he says. “I don’t like the status quo . . . in a crisis or turnaround situation, you don’t have the time or the resources, you have to create a lot of energy and change with very limited resources, and that’s what I enjoy.”
Following a brief stint restructuring logistics company eCourier, which was then sold to Dutch postal operator TNT “just as the recession was hitting”, Lambe decided to go solo. An advertisement for a brewery for sale piqued his interest.
A chance meeting with a master brewer, Ian Burgess, who was also keen to go out on his own, went so well that the two men bought the WJ King brewery in June 2010.
“We’ve launched about eight new beers in the last year,” says Lambe of their range. “Our biggest seller is Brighton Best. We also have Brighton Blonde, Kings Old Ale and Horsham Best Bitter – they are now available anywhere within 50 miles of Gatwick airport,” – an area that is the biggest ale market in the world.
Now with 10 staff, it produces 30,000 pints a week. Lambe’s wife Orla, a fellow UCD graduate, looks after the marketing. “People like beer and they like talking about beer, so we are trying to do lots of creative things on the marketing side.”
Lambe describes brewer Burgess as the company’s best salesperson. “When people talk to him, they tend to drink his beer for life. Our challenge was, how do we put Ian in every pub?” Their solution was to put a QR code on each pump clip. By pointing a smart phone at the code, customers see a YouTube clip of Ian in the brewery, talking about that beer and its ingredients.
With WJ King Brewery, Small Batch Coffee and now a Brighton local produce greengrocers and restaurant to contend with, “the fact that I run two or three businesses makes sure that I don’t get too bored too quickly”.
Of his defection from corporate life, he says: “I always saw my corporate career as learning my mistakes on someone else’s time before I made them on my own.”
On the emigrant experience that has brought him to the English south coast, he says: “We love where we live. We have three very red-headed children with very posh English accents for some reason which we haven’t yet figured out. I’d say to anyone to try it. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go back.”
