These 3 publicans are building the country’s next hotel empires

Now Piper is spending up, splashing out up to $100 million a year to expand his empire, which includes The Beach Hotel in Merewether, Newcastle, the Commodore Hotel just north of the Harbour Bridge, and the Bermagui Beach Hotel in the seaside town on the road from Sydney to Melbourne.

It’s a long way from Piper’s off-the-plan investing start. The publican, now 38, would make good money as the director of Meridian Property Research snapping up yet-to-be-built developments and selling them before they were even finished, he told The Australian Financial Review in 2011.

Now he is one of the emerging young gun publicans expanding rapidly, building major hotel businesses like billionaire industry veterans from the Laundys to the Mathiesons and the Hemmes in years gone by.

“Their proactive approach attracts an element of invulnerability; and consequently, the basis upon which to both see and then close out opportunities quickly,” says HTL Property managing director Andrew Jolliffe, a long-time pub broker who has sold venues to Piper.

“It held personal meaning, and when the opportunity came up, it felt like the perfect intersection of property and community,” Piper says of the Harbord Hotel, which he purchased with a syndicate for $30 million.

“Reimagining the Harbord Hotel – and later the other venues in the portfolio – has been one of the most rewarding chapters of my career. I was more enthused than anything else. I uncovered a passion I never realised I had.”

Clearly, Piper is attracted to beachside hotels. Epochal Hotels, the business he started last year to hold the pubs in his portfolio, owns a number of properties in seaside towns including the Scarborough Hotel in Illawarra, once owned by billionaire media mogul Bruce Gordon.

More recently, Piper has added the Bermagui Beach Hotel and the neighbouring Beachview Motel for about $20 million. “I hadn’t actually been to Bermagui beforehand, so it was the pub that brought me down, and just fell in love with the beautiful coastal environment,” he says, adding that the town, population 1536, had become a holiday destination for his family.

“At Harbord, we restored the original heritage staircase, revealing glass bricks and timber hidden for nearly a century. We found old newspaper clippings and signage – relics that reminded us who came before,” he says.

“At the Beach Hotel, we named the fish and chip shop Larrie’s, only to later discover the name Larry etched into the concrete by a local legend known for his love of a yarn and a beer – a total coincidence, but it felt like a sign.”

It hasn’t exactly been a smooth rise. Almost immediately after buying the Harbord Hotel – now refurbished with its newest bar, the rooftop surf-themed Bombies opening this year – the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. The next two years were difficult, to say the least, as Sydney went in and out of lockdown and venues were forced to operate under strict conditions.

“Navigating the ever-changing social distancing rules was a daily challenge – it tested resilience across the industry,” Piper says of operating hotels in that time. “But challenges also bring clarity. They force you to lead with intention, double down on values, and think creatively.”

While Glenn Piper is a relatively new addition to the country’s ranks of publicans, Matt McGuire is the opposite. The 44-year-old comes from one of Queensland’s oldest hotel-owning families, with title deeds stretching back more than a century. Before Brisbane’s City Hall was even built, the McGuires were opening the Newmarket Hotel. That pub is no longer there, but an old photo hangs in McGuire’s office.

The family business is McGuire’s Hotels, and the fourth-generation McGuire now runs it with his cousin, Damian. In all there are 11 venues in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, the latest being the Yarrabilba Hotel, in the city’s rapidly expanding southwestern suburbs. The family snapped up the land before the pandemic, building a new pub and opening it two years ago.

McGuire says he is always looking at the parts of Queensland where the population is booming. He’s more wary of seaside towns, remembering something he was told by Dick McGuire, his grandfather. “It’s great to be on the beach sometimes, but also you lose half of your customers because the sea is on the other side of the pub,” he says.

He has plenty of memories growing up around pubs. The opening of the Alexandria Hills Hotel in southern Brisbane is one. McGuire was eight.

Before McGuire took over the family business, he spent time driving around with his father and brothers, visiting their pubs and discussing the week’s trade. At 14, he began stocking fridges during school holidays. After school, he spent time in Sydney on the Australian rowing team and studying human resources, but eventually was drawn back to the hospitality life.

“We were always made to start in the entry-level positions, which was fundamental in helping us learn the family business from the ground up,” he says. “I remember when I was 21, becoming a duty manager at the Colmslie Hotel. I was excited to be brought into the management team.”

There are still some long-term employees, though, who have worked for McGuire’s Hotels for decades, like their general manager, John Jeffs, who has been with the business for 53 years. Some of the fifth generation of the McGuire family are starting to work at the pubs as well.

“So the 120 years so far for McGuire’s Hotels looks to be stopping at no time in the near future,” McGuire says. “We are always looking for venues that ‘fit’ with our business. We see growing our base with more hotels will secure the family business for the fifth and future generations.”

“I get to see my uncles all the time. I get to work with my father. My dad obviously worked very closely with his father,” McGuire says. “It’s just fantastic having a successful business where everybody gets on because I know it doesn’t happen everywhere … that’s probably the best part of it.”

Milk bars, coffee shops, and then hotels. That’s how Tom Francis’ family came to pubs, first the Newport Social Club on the road from Melbourne’s CBD to Williamstown, then the Dorset Gardens, better known as the Dirty Dorset.

Francis, now 33, spent his 20s bouncing between working at supermarkets and pubs before he ended up at the Newport. “I grew that with one hand behind my back, and my old man’s like … let’s buy another one,” he says.

That second pub was the Kealba Hotel in Melbourne’s north-west, once owned by the Melbourne Storm. “Basically, the whole thing had a Band-Aid over it; it was poorly run. The food and beverage was atrocious,” Francis says. “It needed a lot of love, really. That was what the advantage was.”

The portfolio kept growing. Now there are 10 pubs including in Sydney where Francis snapped up the Kings Head Tavern in Hurstville, south of the city, last year and Wattle Grove Hotel, further west, about three months ago. But it was in the pandemic that Francis made his biggest move, splashing $100 million on four Victorian pubs owned by another family, the Zagames.

“I always looked at that group and those pubs as really clean and efficient and amazing operations,” Francis says. “To acquire them and take them over, obviously it was also daunting … because I was going from 90 staff at the time over two pubs to 400 to 500 [employees] at once.”

Even at 33, Francis says he has seen a lot of change in the industry. Younger customers don’t necessarily want a lager, and there’s the endless challenge of having the right menu – new but comforting. “We don’t sell a hell of a lot of beer any more. There’s a lot of ready-to-drink and all sorts of stuff that you would have never thought you would see on taps,” he says.

As for his own favourite, Francis says he can’t go past the Graham Hotel in Port Melbourne, not far from the Dirty Dorset. The pub is now owned by Turkish footballer Ersan Gulum and his wife, Emel, and Francis says it is “the pinnacle of how you treat your locals and customers really well”.

“The front bar is awesome … it kind of meets the new Australian, kind of modern bistro, where the food isn’t completely wanky but it’s not completely poor. It has a really good balance and it doesn’t take the piss in pricing,” he says. “The place is always packed, so you can see they get rewarded for it. [The] restaurant at the back isn’t massive, so you always get fantastic service. And, yeah, wine list isn’t overly expensive.”

Francis says he is thinking of the day when he can step away from the pub empire he is building and know that it will continue to run smoothly.

“It’s not like I’ve got to go pull beers every day, those days have definitely changed,” he says. “I wanted to make sure I could kind of create something that would keep going as a roller coaster, and if I disappeared tomorrow, I know everything’s fine. The key thing was just making sure you find the right people along the way to help you keep expanding.”

Ben McDonald is the head of pubs at JLL, one of the country’s biggest commercial realtors. He’s seen his fair share of publicans and hoteling families, and says he is pleased that there is a new generation of energetic owners and operators who are investing and trying to grow.