Can the Cross Guns be successful?

Can the Cross Guns be successful as a community-owned pub?

We certainly think the answer is Yes! There are many reasons why a Cross Guns in community-ownership could be more valuable to the local area than it has been recently.

These include increasing a sense of pride in the local community, keeping access to the car park for people collecting children from Bryn Offa, creating job and volunteering opportunities in the pub and ensuring we have a public space for locals to use and therefore reduce isolation and loneliness. No doubt we will discuss some of these in the future, but this post is about financial success.

People might say that if a massive private business couldn’t make the Cross Guns viable, how will a bunch of amateurs be more successful?

Perhaps, we should start with saying that as a community we have people with many skills and talents than can be called upon to help make the pub run successfully. Whether that’s in marketing, business management, website design, publicity, event management or customer service local villagers have these skills, not to mention the full range of trades that people supply, be that plumbing, electricians, gardening services and builders.

But now to the money side of things. Why would (could) a community-owned Cross Guns be more financially stable?

The two main factors, we believe are:

• cost savings
• loyalty

Cost Savings: If we own the pub, we will immediately be around £24,000 better off per year as we won’t need to pay rent to a pubco. As our drinks wouldn’t be tied to the pubco, we should be able to purchase local beer and other products at a better price too, thus increasing our margin.

Loyalty: We’d like to think that local people would be much more loyal to a pub that they own – after all it’s in their best interests to.

Over the years, some local people have got out of the habit of going to their local pub. By being much more than just a pub, we hope many of these people will come back.

Well-run community pubs can boost community loyalty

Just as the community Cross Guns would aim to be loyal to local producers, suppliers and tradespeople, so we hope that these people would become loyal supporters and customers of our pub.

There’s much more detail to be worked out, of course, before we can see the Cross Guns open as OUR pub but as the famous saying goes a journey of a thousand miles has to start with the first step…