By way of background, this is a family business Chris, one started by your father in the seventies.
Chris Feros: Dad came from a country town called Eurella [Queensland]. He came to Sydney, was working for someone else, didn’t want to be employed by someone else and ended up with a little dry-cleaning shop. We ended up with two or three of them and then he borrowed money off a family member and his own dad and got a lease on a little [pub] in Newtown and things grew from there.  

This is all you’ve really known, right, you’ve grown up in this world. Was there ever a desire to step outside and chase a different dream?
CF: I wasn’t great at school, I’ve got quite bad dyslexia. And I went to dad when I was 15 and said, ‘Look, I’m not going to go to uni and I’m not going to go well on my HSC, so why am I here [at school]?’ I thought I could be somewhere earning – and I love the pubs. I really do.  

Presumably you worked all aspects in making your way up from a young age?
CF: I started at 16 and my first job was as a kitchen hand at Hurstville Pub. I remember the first day the chef put a whole bunch of flour on the table and asked me to cut it up really finely. I couldn’t work out why everyone was walking past the kitchen laughing at me… Yeah, I worked my way through the business that way.  

It’s highly beneficial to know a business – all the corners and the shadows – through firsthand experience.
CF: It is. I went up to Kings Cross just before my 18th birthday – we had a pub there and I lived up there for ten years. You learn a lot – how to deal with people and conflict. I think in life you’ve got to crack on and survive; you’ve got to learn how to read situations and how to keep people on the right side and at the Cross, well, you really don’t have a choice.  Obviously, it was a very different place back then and it’s also where I started my relationship with the police.  

Could you expand on that relationship?
CF: Well, they’re really our governing authority, right? They’re the ones that keep us in check. They’re the ones with licencing and when everything else happens. If there’s dramas in the pubs, they’re the ones we rely on. So, I realised early that the police were a really important part of what we do as a business and formed very, very close relationships.  

There’s some arguable winds of change blowing around gaming at the moment – does that concern you?
CF: Gaming is a part of our profitability, there’s no question about that, but we consider ourselves to be F & B operators. We had a gaming pub at Hurstville, the one I was talking about earlier, and it’s been in the top five gaming pubs in the state [NSW]; a ridiculous amount of money goes through there. But we sold it because we felt that having one revenue stream that’s about 98% of your profit was dangerous. So, we focused very heavily on food. We sold that pub and bought this one and did food down here [Tarren Point] and food and beverage is a huge part of what we do now; what we build and design is all around food. So gaming is just under 20% [of the business].  

Fair to say food and beverage actually enables a stronger, deeper connection to the clientele?
CF: Absolutely. And the occasions that people come to pubs for has changed dramatically the last 25 years. Pubs have become, for many communities, the central meeting spot. And if you go into any of our venues on a weekend or a weeknight, you see such a diverse group of people – guys having after work drinks in the sports bar, tradies doing that in the early afternoon. You’ve got guys in suits who are finishing work at six o’clock and in there. But then you move into those areas where food’s the big driver and it’s families. So, pubs are huge gathering places for people from the age of five years up to 80 years. And pubs for us, genuinely, they’re community assets and they need to be treated as such.  

So how does that play out in the day-to-day?
CF: It means that when we look to do a venue, we look at it as, ‘will this be seen by those who live around it as an asset to the area?’ And if the answer to that question is ‘yes’, then great; if it’s ‘no’, then we won’t do it. And we look to leverage the offer in a different way [to the competition] so that we can constantly be positioning ourselves to be genuine…  

Presumably design plays into this?
CF: Your food and your fitout is your big differentiator. The way people feel when they come into the venue, the customer experience, you can really deliver that through the food offer and the service level of your staff. That’s what we do try and what sets us apart from our competition. And H&E get that – because they’re not just about, you know, ‘how are we going to make this place look beautiful?’ It’s, ‘how it this actually going to function? What are those little pinch points and how do we create that intimate feeling of belonging and being in the right spot while also making it really functional and durable.’ It’s also about doing spaces that are going to stand the test of time.  

A lot of H&E design for Feros Group is aimed directly at that sense of consumer experience.
CF: Our big thing, something we talk about a lot, is the experiences we give people in our venues – and it’s absolutely one of the main reasons I like working with H&E because they also see the importance of the experience. At the moment we’re getting our staff to do a task, to write down  every experience they see going on – you know, two mates catching up, people having dinners,  having functions. It’s all these cool experiences that bring people together and with us – this is what we do. This is what we love to do.  

What do you need to grow a business like yours? Because it’s not easy this this sector?
CF: You need the right people around you. I think it’s also about being true to who you are, and we’ve learnt that lesson the hard way as well. We tried to open a certain restaurant that didn’t go well. But we think we’ve matured enough now that we’ve got it right.  

Relationships and bonds appear central to Feros Group – staff remain with you a long time, that says a lot.  
SJ: I’ve been here 16 years now. I started working here at uni, I was literally working in the bottle shop and then became bottle shop manager. I went and spoke to Chris and said I’m finished. I was doing a double degree, I finished the commerce, started my next degree but I was pretty convinced I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I sort of said, well, I’m going to go out and look for a job. And at the time Chris was looking for a GM at Tarren Point and I became the general manager without having ever worked in a pub… I left the group for a couple of years and that was probably when Chris and I actually became really good mates, our wives are super close, our kids are very close too. We’re like family. And I came back and worked as a licensee, there was an opportunity to move into a part-time group ops role and it’s kind of just evolved from there.  
 
CF: We’ve got a lot of staff who’ve been with us for a long, long time – and we’re really proud of that. Because we like to look after our people as much as we can – because business is too hard otherwise. In this game it’s easier when you all get along and you genuinely share in what you’re doing.