Running a Pub: Tips From 15 Years in the Trade

Last updated: 10 April 2026

Most new pub owners think the hard part is getting the keys. It isn’t. The hard part starts the morning after opening, when you realise that running a pub isn’t about hospitality—it’s about controlling four variables that bleed cash if you don’t watch them like a hawk: labour, stock, cash flow, and margins. I’ve spent the last 15 years at The Teal Farm learning which of these kill pubs fastest, and which ones, when tightened, transform a struggling pub into a reliably profitable one. This guide covers the practical, unglamorous tips that actually work—not the Instagram-friendly stuff, but the mechanics that keep your doors open when things get tight.

Why Labour Costs Will Kill You (And How to Control Them)

Labour is the single biggest controllable cost in any pub. At The Teal Farm, it accounts for roughly 28-32% of turnover, and that’s when it’s tight. Most pubs I’ve consulted run at 35-40% because they’re not actually tracking what they’re paying for—they just know a wage hit the bank account. The most effective way to control labour costs is to measure them weekly, not monthly, because by the time you see a wage bill problem in month-end accounts, you’ve already overpaid by thousands.

Here’s what I mean. If you have four staff members on a shift, and one of them regularly works 30 minutes longer than you authorised, that’s 2.5 hours per week you didn’t account for. Over 52 weeks, that’s 130 hours of unplanned labour—probably £1,500 to £2,000 in wage cost you didn’t budget for. Most pub owners don’t spot this until they see the annual accounts, and by then it’s gone.

The fix:

• Clock in and out daily. No estimates, no “we’ll remember.” Digital clocking removes the guesswork. Whoever you’re paying for should be clocked in during that time.
• Review hours against the rota every Friday. If someone worked 27 hours and the rota said 25, you know immediately. You can adjust next week instead of discovering a £10,000 overpayment in March.
• Benchmark your labour percentage monthly. Calculate labour cost ÷ sales for the week. Track it. When it drifts above your target (usually 28-32% for a pub), you know something’s wrong before it compounds.
• Schedule conservatively. It’s tempting to over-staff on quiet nights “just in case.” Don’t. If you’re quiet, you send someone home early. If you’re rammed, you ask someone to stay. You’ll lose fewer customers to slow service than you’ll gain in margin by not paying for phantom busy nights.

At The Teal Farm, tracking staffing costs alone saved me nearly £3,000 in the first month just by spotting that we had one team member on a rate we’d forgotten about—not malicious, just administrative drift. When you have five or six staff, that drift adds up.

Cash Flow: The Silent Killer Every Pub Owner Misses

You can be profitable and still go broke. This isn’t dramatic—it’s maths. If you buy £5,000 of stock on 30-day terms but only sell £4,000 this month, you’ve made a profit on the P&L but you don’t have the cash to pay your suppliers. Now you’re late, they raise your terms or drop you, and you lose your ability to buy at cost. One late payment becomes two, and suddenly you’re three months behind and your credit’s shot.

Cash flow forecasting prevents VAT surprises, wage shortfalls, and supplier payment failures—three events that close more pubs than actual losses. Most pub owners don’t forecast beyond “do I have enough in the bank this Friday?”—which works until it doesn’t.

What you need:

• A 13-week rolling cash forecast. Every Monday, you should know: cash in, cash out, net position for the next 13 weeks. This isn’t complicated—it’s just: sales (realistic estimate), purchases (check your supplier invoices), wages (fixed cost), overheads (rent, rates, utilities), and tax (VAT due, PAYE). If you see a negative position in week 8, you adjust now—not in week 8 when you’re scrambling.
• Separate out VAT. VAT is not your money, but most pub owners treat it as float. You sell £10,000, charge VAT, bank £12,000, and think you’re £12,000 up. You’re not. You owe HMRC £2,000 of that in three months. If you don’t separate it, you’ll be short. Cash flow forecasting specifically built for pubs accounts for VAT automatically.
• Track supplier terms. If you have £20,000 stock tied up and it’s all on 7-day terms, you’re managing on a knife edge. Negotiate 30-day terms where possible. It gives you breathing room.
• Know your busy and quiet cycles. If you’re quieter in January and February, forecast for lower sales. Don’t assume every month is the same. Build in the dips so you’re not surprised when cash dips with them.

The reason most pub owners skip this is that it feels like extra admin. It isn’t. Once a forecast is built, updating it takes 15 minutes per week. The alternative is panicking because you’ve discovered on a Thursday that you’re £5,000 short for Friday’s wage bill.

Stock Management Without the Spreadsheet Nightmare

Stock is your second largest controllable cost after labour. At The Teal Farm, it’s about 28-30% of sales, and if you’re not measuring it, you’re probably at 35%. The missing 5-7% is either waste, spillage, free pours, or theft—usually a mix of all four.

Most pubs manage stock on a spreadsheet: someone walks around with a notepad, counts bottles and pumps, enters numbers into a spreadsheet, and three days later you know what you have. By then, you’ve sold more, bought more, and the numbers are already old. Plus, spreadsheets don’t tell you anything actionable—just “we have 47 Stellas left.”

What matters:

• Weekly stock takes, not monthly. A monthly stock take is useful for year-end accounts. A weekly stock take is useful for controlling cost. You only need count-down (what did we sell, what did we lose). Count down against purchases and sales to find the gap.
• Measure stock cost as a percentage of sales. If you sold £3,000 this week and your stock cost (purchases minus closing stock) was £850, your stock cost % is 28.3%. Track this weekly. If it’s usually 28% and suddenly it’s 31%, you know something’s wrong—overpour, waste, or short measures—and you can fix it this week, not discover it in next month’s accounts.
• Focus on high-margin lines. You don’t need to count cans of Carlsberg to the unit. They have a 2% margin. Count your craft ales, wines, and spirits—those have 40-50% margins. If you’re losing £50 of Stella (18% margin), that’s annoying. If you’re losing £50 of Hendricks (52% margin), that’s £100 of forgone profit. Audit what matters.
• Check pour costs on your spirits. One over-generous measure on a busy night is the difference between 20% and 22% pour cost. Train your team on what a standard pour looks like. Use jiggers. Spot-check regularly.

When I first started measuring stock weekly at The Teal Farm, I discovered we were losing about 4% of stock value to unmeasured variance. Four percent. That’s £150-£200 per week, or roughly £8,000 a year. Once we tightened our stock process and trained the team on accuracy, we got it down to 1.2%. That’s a £6,000+ swing in margin, and all it cost was 20 minutes per week in discipline.

Getting Your Pricing and Margins Right

Pricing is where most pub owners leave money on the table. They set a price based on what they think the market will bear, or what a competitor charges, without doing the maths on what they actually need to make to survive. Then they wonder why they’re not profitable.

Your pub’s pricing must account for your cost of goods, labour, rent, rates, utilities, and profit target—not just “what feels right.” Most pubs price on a gut feeling and then complain that profit margins are tight. They’re tight because the pricing was never based on economics, it was based on psychology.

Here’s the framework:

• Know your blended cost of goods. A pint of lager costs you roughly 32-35% of what you sell it for (depending on volume). A glass of wine costs roughly 25-30%. A spirit and mixer costs roughly 18-20%. These are guidelines—your actual numbers depend on your supplier terms and your pour sizes. Calculate your actual blended cost across your menu.
• Add labour, overhead, and tax. Labour is 28-32%, overheads (rent, rates, utilities, insurance) are typically 12-16% of sales. Tax (assuming roughly 20% of profit goes to tax and reinvestment) is another 3-4%. That’s roughly 75-80% of revenue accounted for. Your profit margin should be 20-25% on a healthy pub.
• Price to margin, not to cost. If your cost of goods is 30% and you want 50% gross margin on a pint, you price it so that your cost is 30% of the selling price, not 30% markup on cost. These are different numbers. If a pint costs you £1.50 and you add 50% markup, you sell it for £2.25. If you want 50% gross margin, you sell it for £3.00 (£1.50 ÷ 0.50). The latter is correct.
• Review pricing quarterly. When your supplier costs go up, your prices should follow within a quarter, not a year. If lager suppliers increase their cost by 8%, your pint price should increase proportionally. Most pub owners are slow to raise prices and lose margin as a result.

At The Teal Farm, when we properly calculated our pricing a few years back, we realised we’d been underpricing by roughly 3-5% across the board. Small increases on every category—usually 10-20p per pint, 50p on a glass of wine—gave us back nearly £200 per week in margin without materially affecting trade. Customers noticed almost nothing. Our profit did.

Daily Operations: The Habits That Protect Your Margin

Margins don’t happen by accident. They happen because of daily habits that protect them. At The Teal Farm, we do the same things every single day, and those habits compound into thousands of pounds by year-end.

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The most important daily habits for pub profitability are cash reconciliation, waste auditing, and team communication about margin—three things that take 30 minutes per day and catch 90% of margin leaks before they become problems.

Specifically:

• Cash reconciliation every day. Bank what came in, count the till, account for discrepancies same-day, not next week. If you’re short £40 on a Tuesday, you know which team member was on the till and can ask them directly. If you discover a £40 shortfall in Friday’s reconciliation, you have no idea where it came from and can’t address it. Daily reconciliation also protects you against larger theft, because it surfaces patterns immediately.
• Waste log. Every shift, you should know: how many pints were spilled, how many glasses broke, how much stock was wasted due to poor storage or date expiry. This is one line per day. It takes 90 seconds. Over a year, it highlights where your waste is—if you’re losing £50 per week to breakage, you’re doing something wrong with your glassware or storage. If you’re losing £50 per week to pour waste, you have a training problem.
• Staff briefing on the target margin. Most staff don’t know that you need 50% gross margin to survive. Tell them. Tell them what accurate pours look like, why they matter, what happens if they drift. Make it part of culture, not punishment. Staff who understand why precision matters take it seriously. Staff who are just told “be careful” drift over time.

These three habits take roughly 20 minutes per day. Over a year, that’s 120 hours of work. That same work, if it saves 1% of margin (which it will), is worth £2,000-£5,000 depending on your turnover. The ROI on daily discipline is massive.

Why Proper Tracking Systems Matter More Than You Think

Manual spreadsheets for pub management are expensive. Not in terms of software cost—they’re free—but in terms of time. A pub owner using spreadsheets spends 15-20 hours per month updating stock counts, labour reports, reconciling profit and loss data, and chasing down numbers that don’t match. That’s 180-240 hours per year just entering data and fixing discrepancies.

That time has a cost. If you value your time at £25 per hour (and you should—it’s your business), that’s £4,500-£6,000 per year spent on admin that doesn’t directly protect margin. More importantly, by the time the data is in the spreadsheet, it’s old. You’re making decisions on last week’s numbers, not yesterday’s.

The alternative is a system that tracks four things in real time: sales (POS integration), labour (clocking system), stock (weekly audit), and cash (daily bank reconciliation). When these four are in one place, you see problems as they emerge, not weeks later. Pub Command Centre bundles all four, and because it’s designed specifically for pub economics, it calculates the metrics that matter—labour %, stock %, margin %—automatically.

Most pub owners I’ve worked with have said the same thing: “I didn’t realise how much time I was spending on data entry until I stopped doing it.” That freed-up time goes back into customer experience, staff training, or marketing. All of which protect and grow margin better than spreadsheets ever could.

The setup time for a proper system is about 30 minutes. The ROI is usually visible within a week—most pub owners find £1,000+ in hidden savings or leak in their first week just by seeing clearly what they’re actually buying versus what they thought they were buying. After month one, the time savings alone justify the cost.

Bringing It Together: A Working System

Running a profitable pub in 2026 doesn’t require innovation. It requires discipline on four fundamentals: labour tracking, cash flow visibility, stock precision, and pricing to economics rather than instinct.

If you do these four things:

• Track labour weekly and adjust immediately if your percentage drifts above target
• Forecast cash flow 13 weeks ahead so you’re never surprised by a shortage
• Count stock weekly and measure cost as a percentage of sales, not just a number
• Price every item to hit your target margin, not based on what feels right

…you will have a pub that is resilient, controllable, and profitable. Not every month will be a boom month. But slow months won’t threaten your survival because you’ll see the cash shortfall coming and can adjust.

Most pub owners do none of these things consistently. They do them when they remember, or when cash gets tight. That inconsistency is what costs them thousands. The pubs that thrive—including The Teal Farm—do these four things every single week, no exceptions. It’s boring. But boring is profitable.

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