As the dust has fully settled on 2023, I am now able to give you a full report. Before starting this note I had a read through the last couple of years updates, and in many ways this update is very similar.
Ultimately there has been a lot to be proud about, we have achieved some great things, but the market conditions have continued to be incredibly tough throughout all of 2023. Once again we have made a profit - and I mean a real number profit, after tax, interest and depreciation - but it's not where we need it to be. For a business our size we have to be retaining a minimum of 2-4% (I would love to be looking at 6-10%) of our revenue as our Net Profit number.
As the saying goes, Expectation Is The Thief of Joy, and we expected more last year, but we won't let this slow us down. Once again, if you look across the industry, so many good businesses have collapsed, been bought out of administration, or worse still limping on making large losses along the way. So in a nutshell we are grateful the hard work from all our team has enabled us to keep on the right side of the red line.
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For highlights I will pick out Beer52, for our March Box takeover. Never has Beer52 trusted one company to produce a whole box, however, we convinced them that for our 10th Anniversary we could put together a great theme for them. 16 beers, nearly 1 million cans and a bunch of collabs later, and we had our biggest ever single order go out over 8 weeks. It was a taxing project but we loved it, and learnt a lot from it too. Amongst other key highlights were our 10th anniversary celebrations - along with celebrating at Craft Beer Co in Clerkenwell , where it all started, we had a well attended party at the brewery in March.
On-trade has been great in some areas, and tough in others. Competition is rife, and we are trying to pick our way through the melee without killing our margins and following a route to the lowest price. We have had a good year with Fuller’s, listing Soundwave and/or Lumina in over 70 sites permanently, and have made good strides across our local and south coast business routes.
For supermarkets, we have continued to perform really well in Asda this year, with them now taking 6 SKUs, and a new exciting format to hit their shelves soon. Morrisons has performed well with Soundwave 4 packs and an exciting choice of 440mls. Towards the end of the year, we hit Waitrose shelves again with a mixed case 4 pack, with Lumina, Soundwave, Mesmerist and Yu Lu which is well worth seeking out, alongside Broken Dream Nitro.
Our Tap Yard has really developed this year, under the stewardship of Jon Tebbs, and we are developing the experience there all the time. Overall our direct-to-consumer offering is showing good growth.
The George & Dragon has had a tough year, we are so pleased with the huge kitchen refurb we went through the previous year, but have since had a number of challenges with staffing it well. We have a new team in place, putting out some fantastic food, and this year are planning on a number of refurbishments to liven the experience up a notch or 3.
In other areas for 2023 - we raised over £19K for charity through several campaigns, including our £10K #LuminaHour. We hosted the beer tent at Endure24 and funded JD, one of our team, on a solo 24 hour running race. You can find out more about our community work on the website
For those interested in seeing the numbers in detail, I have attached the last 5 years P & L for you to look through. The first thing that you will notice is that we have achieved top line growth, but the margin has been impacted heavily. Part of this is due to the large contract for Beer52 which is at a lower margin point, but once again throughout the year we have and continue to experience severe cost pressures on all parts of our business. Everything from fuel for the boiler, to cans, cardboard, hops and malt all experienced pretty chunky price rises.
We have been very hard on ourselves from a cost cutting perspective, and have an ongoing project where we have identified over 30 ways to save money and are reviewing progress during our monthly Senior Leadership meeting. We are confident that these savings will help counteract the investments we have made in adding to our sales and marketing team, which will grow our top line over the next few years.
On a slightly different subject, we felt that after 10 years of growth and change it would be a good idea to codify the Siren values. This was not an easy task, and I feel there is a little change left to come through on it, but if you would like to read a bit more on our values, what they mean to us and why they are important, feel free to read here.
I like to think of our values as to what we strive to be, and what we do when we perform at our best. It doesn’t mean that’s what everyone does all the time, but by having a common language we can all hold ourselves to a higher standard more often.
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Siren Reading, Ebb Building, off Friar Street, Reading. Internal illustrative view. Credit: Intervention Architecture.
As for 2024 I see it being a tough year again, but one in which we will have built that next platform to grow the business in a sustainable way. We are really excited to be finally launching our flagship Reading Bar, and the effort (and not inconsiderable investment) will make this a fabulous extension of the Siren experience.
Once again, thanks for all your support, we are very grateful for your continuous cheering from the sidelines. Please keep telling your friends about us, tell them to look out for us in their favourite bars, or aisles of the grocers.
I hope to see you at one of the events we will host this year.
Kind Regards
Darron
