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TWST: Perhaps we could start with just a brief introduction to the company, a little overview, some corporate milestones?

Mr. Hill: The company has been in existence for some 16 years. It was founded from a greenfield start-up with GBP5 million equity raised under the Business Expansion Scheme. The original intention was to develop on a property basis and focus on property opportunities that existed pre-1990s in the pub sector. Moving on we evolved into a trading operation, because some of the developments that we undertook in the early years touched industry changes that were taking place at that time, with the development of a new style, much larger trading outlets. The emergence of these became known later as superpubs. People like Whitbread, Bass and Wetherspoons were leading the way, but as a minnow we made a positive contribution.

TWST: What about acquisitions; what's your strategy there?

Mr. Hill: The two core brands are very different, and they work because they can operate in key centres. The reality is that not every town, not every location across the country is equally appropriate or likely to be profitable in providing a basis for leisure business and there are some parts of the country, some major areas where you wouldn't want to spend a million pounds to fit out one of these very large units. The two core brands have enabled us to be highly selective with choice of location because you need to be in the major conurbation's which are attracting in particular the increasing leisure evening spend. You need to be in the best location in those areas. So we've been able to have two bites of the property cherry, and that clearly has given us a good deal of flexibility. The UK leisure industry is a GBP20 billion plus market, so we're small fry. But the size of this market means that if you are going to become a serious player then you've got to have the ability to compete in the key areas in a way that will give you a worthwhile market share in those areas. However, in order to get a competitive market share, you are going to need more than two retail formats. So we recognised that we needed a third core brand. Earlier on I said that we had been looking at and testing alternative branded concepts, but it was very clear that we needed something to compete in the general area of All Bar One, Slug and Lettuce and Pitcher and Piano. That explains the move in addition to organic growth, which had been exclusively fuelling our expansion, to two acquisitions last year. The first was from Capital Radio, where we bought six units that operated under three different names but had a common characteristic of Latin-style bars, the second was Slug and Lettuce. The logic was that Slug and Lettuce was established as a brand. It had a reasonable degree of consumer awareness, exposure, and brand identity down in London and the south of England although it had had a pretty poor experience in trying to roll out up north. Certainly with 34 outlets it was an established operation and it was more sensible to acquire it rather than to continue the process of creating or inventing something that was inevitably going to end up looking very much like it. Additionally, of course it took another chunk of competition out of the marketplace.