Charles Beer is the Senior Partner at Crown Partnership having started with Seasoned Events as Managing Director almost twenty years ago. Having spent 5 years as MD of Seasoned Events, Crown Partnership Chairman Russell Morgan invited Beer to head up Crown Partnership as Senior Partner, a role he has enjoyed to this day.
With more than four decades of business growth and experience behind it Crown Partnership is planning to increase turnover in 2020 by 50%, Beer explained to H&C News how that would be achieved.
Crown Partnership, Senior Partner, Charles BeerI have seen Crown Partnership grow and develop over the twenty years I have been with the business. My approach has been and will continue to be that one size doesn’t fit all and is led strategically by following the market, our clients and our customers.
Crown Partnership is an umbrella business with many component parts, each part is run separately as a standalone business with access to centralised functions and support. Central support can provide services that include; procurement, HR, legal, sales and marketing as well as general advice and guidance from senior members of the diverse team around the wider business.
We are entrepreneurial and like to bring people on through the business developing their role and input to the individual parts, and to the whole. We are very much a people business and that is the vital part of our culture, we value people. We listen carefully to people, colleagues, clients and customers.
We have an entrepreneurial history, our Chairman Russell Morgan was a chef by trade, developed a chef staffing agency and an events business that grew over the past 40 years to what Crown Partnership is today. We mix and match, we look for entrepreneurial opportunities and we adapt to them. Once they are realised, central support can be added as required to maximise each opportunity from its own individual requirements.
We are currently in the process of acquiring a new business that we hope to announce early in 2020. That came from recognising an opportunity, scrutinising the opportunity, identifying the team running the business have synergy with the Crown Partnership team, and have a shared vision of growth.
The recently completed acquisition of BIRD saw Crown Partnership enter the QSR high street business, Beer sees this as a market led opportunity. The high street is changing to meet challenges, this acquisition was led by the market as Beer explained.
Market reports show that QSR’s are moving to the established core item on the BIRD menu, chicken. We see beef and lamb reducing in popularity across the markets we operate in, and BIRD allows us to capitalise on this consumer move favouring our core product. We follow our customers and BIRD is sitting in a rising market, we have new BIRD openings in the pipeline to take maximum advantage of our high growth position.
BIRD adds to the diversity of Crown Partnership and that adds to our strength and resilience. We grow organically, we grow through acquisition, and we then grow our acquisitions organically.
The years ahead will offer challenges, and these include increases in the National Minimum Wage, staff shortages because of the new immigration regulations, and the costs and efforts we are putting into sustainability. Sustainability is key to our business and issues like taking plastics out of the supply chain is a priority.
Having spent a bit more than 5 minutes with Charles Beer and discussing all of the above in detail we will be following and reporting on progress at Crown partnership in 2020 with interest. We are quietly confident the news for Crown Partnership 2020 will make good reading, if you like good news.