Transcript
Please note this transcript is an automatically generated summary and may contain inaccuracies.
**James Modley:** Thanks for joining us, and welcome to our first-ever episode of Higgs in conversation with. This podcast is designed to dive into the minds of some of the most successful individuals in senior positions within leading businesses in the UK and aims to provide a peek into their lives, both personally and professionally. My name is James Modley, and I will be your host.
I'm a partner in the Commercial Dispute Resolution Team at Higgs LLP. Today's guest and our first guest is going to be fascinating. I am delighted to welcome Vicky Gaunt, Head of Legal Services at Marston's PLC, the UK's leading independent brewing and pub retailing business. Vicky, welcome.
**Vicky Gaunt:** Hi, thank you, James. So happy to be here.
About Vicky and her role at Marston's
**James Modley:** Thank you for joining us. So Vicky, tell us about who you are, your job role, what you do on a daily basis and the team that you work with.
**Vicky Gaunt:** Sure, happy to. As you've said, I'm Head of Legal at Marston's and the role is varied. That's what I will say to headline that. It can be anything from contract negotiation and approval to intellectual property, disputes. We do a lot of support for our estates team and also our pub partners. So we have a real mixed estate. We have pub partners that work with us and we give them a lot of support in terms of legal compliance.
**James Modley:** Okay, so literally no two days are ever the same for you.
**Vicky Gaunt:** No, you know that as well as I do as a lawyer. No two days in the law are ever the same.
About Marston's
**James Modley:** I do, I do. So you've touched on it briefly, but just tell us about Marston's and what do Marston's do.
**Vicky Gaunt:** Marston's are one of the UK's leading pub companies. We have a mixed estate of around 1,300 pubs. We sold our stake in CNBC in 2024, so we're now a pure play pub company, just focused on running great pubs for our local communities. I touched on this having a mix, I think it's one of our great strengths is we have a real mixed estate. So we have managed pubs and we have our partner pubs which essentially you think about those like a franchise and then our pure traditional tenant and leased properties. And we're up and down the country and we have some sites in Scotland, about 15 sites in Scotland, England and Wales. And yeah, we don't have city centre pubs, we have your suburban heart of the community pubs. And that's who we are.
A typical day for Vicky
**James Modley:** I must say, my local pub is a Marston's pub and I think it's one of the best pubs, but I know I'm a bit biased. So what's your typical day? What time do you start? What time do you finish? I know that you've talked about the varied workload that you do, but just on a typical day, just give us a snapshot of what that is.
**Vicky Gaunt:** Yeah, well I'm an early riser, some people work better in the morning, some people work better in the evening, I am definitely not a night owl, I'm an early riser, so I'll typically start work around seven, if I'm feeling particularly motivated maybe a little bit before, but particularly around seven, I'll quickly check through my emails, check the diary of what's going on for the day, and then it's really a check back, a quick check back to see what's on my to-do list for the week, what are the priorities for today, and then trying to kind of block the time during the day or during the week to get various tasks done, you know, depending on their urgency, risk profile, time that it's going to take to do the task. I do try to time block so that I know what's happening during the week and I can set aside time for real deep thinking and those long documents that you need to read but sometimes it doesn't work out that way.
The legal team at Marston's PLC
**James Modley:** Okay, and then tell me Vicky, so there's yourself, but who else is in your team?
**Vicky Gaunt:** Yeah, so we've got a great team. We're small but perfectly formed. So there's five of us. There's myself that heads up the team. We then have our legal services team coordinator who predominantly looks after everything that we do with our pub partners. There's a lot of work that goes on with our pub partners. We've got about 800 retail sites where we have pub partners coming in and out all the time and there's a lot of legal compliance that goes around that. So essentially the other people in my team are focused solely on that. It's a lot of process work and it's got to be done right first time. It's got to be done efficiently, quickly to meet the needs of the business. You know, we're a fast-paced business and we need a team that can respond to that as and when they need to. So yes, we are a small but perfectly formed team.
Optimal performance in a legal team
**James Modley:** Okay, I know that you're, let's say, very humble and that's downplaying it, but obviously to get to where you've got to, you've had to work hard. I would imagine there's been a lot of hours that you've had to put in to get there. And I would imagine that you have made sacrifices along the way. Maybe we'll come on to that a little bit later on. But just for the people that are listening, what do you class as optimal performance for someone within your role within a legal team, leading a legal team?
**Vicky Gaunt:** Optimal versus not always getting there, but I would say there's probably three things that I would think of when you're thinking about optimal performance, particularly in-house, and that would be efficiency, stakeholder satisfaction, and strategic alignment. As an in-house lawyer, it's a completely different world to working in private practice. It really is focused much more on the commercial aspect of the business. It's great, know, I absolutely love it. Having that alignment to strategy and alignment to the business is brilliant. But I would say, for optimal performance, those three things, efficiency, stakeholder satisfaction and strategic alignment.
Defining efficiency in legal
**James Modley:** I'm just interested actually, just on all of those points I was thinking about too, but actually all of them. So efficiency. What do you mean by efficiency?
**Vicky Gaunt:** I think, so in a private practice, you know, the work that you do is costed and you charge somebody for that work and they pay your bill. In-house, that doesn't happen. So you can't be seen as a drain on resources or a cost center that isn't actually enabling the business to move forward. We need to be somebody or a team that is really valuable to the business and that we are, you know, they're right-hand man for any questions, queries, whether that be big or small. So one part of efficiency being that cost center. The other side of efficiency is that I found it can be very easy to get drawn into some maybe more administrative tasks or tasks that really don't sit within legal because if you're a good legal team you become quite a popular team. People will use your kind of resource to get things moving forward which is absolutely brilliant and I love it but if you're not careful you can find yourself becoming quite inefficient by taking on things which either don't really sit in your world or could be done in a more automated way. So there's two aspects in there to efficiency.
Stakeholder satisfaction and alignment
**James Modley:** Again, so just touching on a point that you've said, I think people have a perception and I think it's built into particularly lawyers that everything we do needs to be perfect, that everything we do needs to be 100% in the weeds and definitive decisions need to be made to perfection, almost like a Rolls Royce service. But actually you and I both know that on occasions we can't do that for various reasons, whether it's the risk profile of the business or the client saying that they want to take a riskier approach, therefore they want a high level view, or sometimes there's cost constraints. And I think for individuals particularly not as experienced, that's quite hard to grapple with because you never want to let yourself down and all the business and all the client down, or yourself down, but equally there may be a cost prohibitor or a time prohibitor where you just cannot do 100% job. So I'm glad you said that because I think the people listening will be quite interested in that aspect. And then just briefly touching on the two, and I think they do tell quite nicely, the stakeholder and the alignment within a business your size, that has got to be a considerable challenge.
**Vicky Gaunt:** It is a challenge. It is a challenge. It's a challenge to find the right person. It's the challenge to hold on to the right person when you've got them. So, you know, we employ 1200 people and about 400 of those people sit within, we don't call it our headquarters, we call it our pub support centre because we truly believe that's what we are. We're a support centre to our pubs. So, yeah, definitely difficult sometimes to always be able to find the right person and be doing the right thing all of the time. You touched on it before, we've looked a lot in our team about what is the thing that is going to get us most satisfaction, what's the thing that gets us most kind of traction with our stakeholders. We've got loads and we can't do everything for everybody all of the time, so you've got to pick those key stakeholders, make sure that what you're doing is aligned into strategy and then you will find the right person and do the job for that person. Some of the things may have to wait and that, you know, we've done a lot of work in the team about time management and prioritising and so that we get that outcome of, you know, great satisfaction from our stakeholders.
Dispelling the myth of the "no" department
**James Modley:** And actually I think it's probably an apt time to just dispel a myth that I speak to a lot of people within businesses, whether that is a small business or a large business like yourself. And most of them say, and I'll say most, not all, most of them say or view in-house legal as a no department. So I think it's fair to say that a lot of the business sectors view you as have we got to go to legal because they're just going to say no. That couldn't be further from the truth, could it?
**Vicky Gaunt:** Not at all and particularly at Marston's I've worked hard over the past couple of years to really try and turn that mindset. You know we are not people that are here to say no, we're here to be enablers, we want to enable the business to do what it wants to do in the best possible way, to serve our guests the best way that we possibly can but being mindful of hidden risks that come that come with anything that we do, you know, that could be a marketing campaign, that could be the type of pub format that we want to roll out to, you know, you have situations such as whistleblowing, etc. and speak up lines. So, you know, there's a whole wide variety of things that we do want to do, and or, you know, our regulators ask us to do. And what we want to do as a team is be that enabler to say, do you know what, yes, you can do that, might have to tweak it a little bit but yes you can do that we'll always find a way through it's very very very rare that you will ever hear just a blank no come out of my mouth
Defining success
**James Modley:** What are your three non-negotiables for success? And then I think just to add on to that, how do you measure success? What is success in your eyes, in the business's eyes?
**Vicky Gaunt:** I think the first question or the first part of the question I reflected on and I think for me and it will be personal to everybody but for me self motivation, tenacity and being people focused for me that is what drives, has driven success for me will continue to drive success for me will be what I will embed in the team so that the team can be successful. Second part of your question, suppose measurement of success, taking it away from the business for a moment in measure of success. It's a feeling for me, you know, we can have all of the KPIs and don't get me wrong, I like being performance driven and I like a KPI to work too. But for me, real success is how I feel, you know. And it doesn't happen all the time, but there's sometimes when I'm driving to work or from work and I think, you know what? Yeah, we're doing really well here. The team's flying. From a professional point of view, I'm feeling like I'm in a good place. And you can't measure that on a spreadsheet. can't put it on a tracker. It's just how you feel. And the converse is true. You know when things are slipping. And so you measure that success from where you were to where you are.
The importance of people
**James Modley:** Yeah, I think that's just life, right? So take it out of the business perspective. You know when things are going well, you know when things are going bad, you know everything in between. But you saying that, again, you touch upon people. People are the lifeblood of any organisation and it's really important. And this is a challenge for any business, ours included.
**Vicky Gaunt:** Yeah.
**James Modley:** It's really important to get the right people in the right role.
**Vicky Gaunt:** Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. We've, we have got a great mix of people in our team, my team and then our wider legal risk and company Secretariat team. We've got a great mix of experience, knowledge, past employment history, a multitude of different large and small companies that people have worked in, so they'll have all different experience. Within my team, we've got people that are motivated to progress in their career, which is absolutely fantastic. The conversion is also true. I have a wonderful lady in my team who is absolutely fantastic at her job, nails it every single day, any objective, any KPI you put in front of her, nails it. She doesn't want to progress in her career, she wants to do what she's doing now really, really well. And I love that. So we have such a mixed bag and you're so right to get the right people in the right roles is key. You can't be successful, I don't think, without being people focused.
Shaping culture at Marston's
**James Modley:** And what people won't know is that you are heavily involved in trying to shape that culture at Marston's. Do you want to speak a little bit about that and just explain what you're doing internally?
**Vicky Gaunt:** Yeah, sure. So alongside my role as head of legal, I also chair our what we call our balance network. So that focuses on our employees well-being. So we really focus on what what additional support can we give to people alongside what their line manager will give them and the support they will have within their team. Various resources that they can go to for support should they require any of that kind wellbeing support. We think that's really, really important. And if you support people in that way, I really do believe that people will continue to give back to your business and you will drive those behaviours of commitment and loyalty. People that are really motivated will buy into your values and that's what we're aiming to do here. We want people to really buy into the Marston's values because we're a big family and we're all here for the same reason, to serve our guests.
Other projects at Marston's
**James Modley:** Okay, so you mentioned the Balance Network. What else are you involved in? What other projects are you involved in at Marston's?
**Vicky Gaunt:** So I am a trustee on our Pension Fund. So I've been doing that for about three years now. So that's really interesting because that's something I've never done before. It has absolutely nothing to do with law. It's very much around finance, investment strategy, but I've actually really enjoyed being part of that and learning a completely different skill set. I'm also one of our mental health first aiders within the business. We've got about 40 mental health first aiders and we come from different areas, so that people can go and speak to somebody that they feel comfortable with, should they need to talk to somebody. I think that's really important that as a business, we're offering that extra bit of support should people want to talk. You know, it's very much about being a listening ear rather than giving advice, but just being there to signpost people to the right place should they need that sign posting.
Vicky's advice to her younger self
**James Modley:** Shifting the focus slightly, if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?
**Vicky Gaunt:** Oh, good question. I think I would say don't be afraid to take a risk and step outside of your comfort zone. I've done that more recently in my career and I absolutely love it and I wish I'd done it earlier. I think I was always a little bit too risk averse when I was younger, both professionally and personally, but more recently I've taken a few risks and they've really paid off. So I would say to my younger self, don't be afraid to take that risk.
**James Modley:** That's really good advice. What is the biggest risk that you have ever taken?
**Vicky Gaunt:** Probably coming to Marston's. I'd worked in private practice all of my career and was very comfortable. I knew what I was doing. I knew how to do it. I knew how to build relationships, and I think moving in-house, completely different mindset, completely different way of working. And also moving to a very senior position. I'd not been in a senior leadership position before, and that was a risk. I didn't know whether I was going to be any good at it.
Relaxing and switching off
**James Modley:** What do you do to relax and switch off? Because obviously you are very busy both in your professional life and it seems in your personal life, so what do you do to switch off?
**Vicky Gaunt:** I love being outside, so I love to walk. I'm very fortunate to live in the countryside. So I walk the dogs, I go out running. I'm trying to get back into golf at the moment, which isn't going very well, but I'm trying. I like to spend time with my family, and I like to read, I'm in a book club. I'm not very good at reading the book before book club, but I do like to go to book club and have a glass of wine and pretend that I've read the book, but that's what I do to relax.
Maintaining work-life balance
**James Modley:** So leading on from that, how do you maintain a healthy work-life balance?
**Vicky Gaunt:** That is a very good question and something I am not always very good at. So one of the things I have started to do is diarise personal things in my work diary so that I can see it as and when I'm planning my week out. So, you know, that might be something as simple as a walk at lunchtime. It might be I'm going to finish at 5 o'clock on a Friday because I'm going out for tea with my mum. Something that just makes me really think about that as and when I'm planning my week out.
What's next?
**James Modley:** So what is next for you, Vicky? What do you want to achieve, both professionally and personally?
**Vicky Gaunt:** I suppose professionally, I'm really focused on the team at the moment and embedding the team, making sure that they feel supported, making sure that they feel that they can be the best that they can be, and that they're really happy at work. So I'm very much focused on that. Personally, I'm trying to learn to play the piano. I'm absolutely awful, but I'm trying, so that's what's next for me.
Advice for aspiring lawyers
**James Modley:** So finally, Vicky, what advice would you give to anyone who's thinking of pursuing a career in law?
**Vicky Gaunt:** I would say go for it. It's a fantastic career. It's challenging, but it's equally rewarding. Try and get as much work experience as you can, and then try and find the right route for you. So you might want to go down the solicitor route, you might want to go down the barrister route, you might want to go legal executive, but there's something for everybody, and it's a great career.
**James Modley:** Some really sound advice there. Vicky Gaunt, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you.
**Vicky Gaunt:** Thank you, James.
**James Modley:** And thank you for listening. Join us again for the next episode of Higgs in conversation with.
