The Interview|Mail13 April 2012

FOR someone who started two of the most successful restaurant brands of the past decade, Karen Jones's profile in the City has been pretty low key.

Jones made millions from Cafe Rouge and Dome, but still managed to stay out of the limelight. And that suited her. She has always maintained that she is 'not keen to just get up there and talk about nothing'.

But all this anonymity could not last. After quietly transforming pub group Spirit over the past three years, she is now firmly in the spotlight.

Private-equity backed Spirit recently beat off tough competition to pay £2.5 billion for Scottish & Newcastle's 1,450 pubs. The deal means that as chief executive, Jones, 46, is one of Britain's biggest landlords.

Her spectacular rise to the top of a traditionally male-dominated business is not bad for someone who fell into the leisure industry only during a bout of waitressing while waiting to start a 'proper' job. After gaining a first-class degree in English and American literature at the University of East Anglia, Jones spent a gap year in America before returning to the UK to work at an advertising agency. It did not take her long to realise that she would prefer to run her own show.

So when leisure entrepreneur Roger Myers, with whom she had worked at London restaurant Peppermint Park, asked her to join him, she took little persuasion. 'I loved the buzz, the people, everything,' she says.

It was a wise move. The pair built a chain of restaurants and pubs, including Dome, and floated on the Stock Exchange in 1985. The money they made helped them start Cafe Rouge, opening the first in Richmond, west London, in 1989.

Cafe Rouge expanded and Jones and Myers bought back Dome, revitalised it and added Cafe Pelican. They sold the whole outfit to Whitbread in 1996 for a whopping £133m - Whitbread subsequently sold on the Pelican chain in 2002 for just £25m.

After staying on to run Pelican for a couple of years, Jones joined Punch Taverns in 1999. This smartly dressed woman with a piercing stare obviously impressed Punch owner Hugh Osmond and she led a management buyout of its Bar Room Bar concept.

When Punch Taverns bought Allied Domecq's retail businesses in September 1999, she was brought back to run the 1,000-plus managed pubs, which later became Punch Retail and then Spirit at the end of 2001.

Her rapid rise has involved a great deal of hard work, but that is something Jones relishes. 'It's an incredibly interesting challenge building something up and getting people to understand the whole process,' she enthuses.

'We spent the first two years at Punch Retail getting the business sorted out. The first thing we had to do was work out what we had.'

What they had was a collection of concepts, rather than brand names, such as Mr Q's, Two For One and Bar Room Bar, and a huge layer of managers. Jones's first task was to get rid of a third of the pub managers and almost half the regional managers.

Jones appreciated the luxury of having backers such as US venture capital group Texas Pacific who let her get on with the task. Texas and other private equity outfits Blackstone and CVC backed her on the S&N deal.

However, Jones remains typically reticent about what she intends to do with the hundreds of pubs at her disposal. When the sale was announced, she refused to reveal which of the S&N brands she would keep.

But for a woman who said when she took over at Spirit: 'Now we're getting our act together...we want to go out and acquire pubs,' she has certainly lived up to her word. 'Lots of women become entrepreneurs,' she says, 'we like setting our own rules.'

Being married to investment analyst Hamish and mother to Rose, Max and Molly, means that 'work and life tend to flow together'.

Having a personal trainer visit her twice a week is a luxury for Jones, who gives the impression of being able to cram more than most into her day. 'It means lots of early starts,' she says. And this latest deal is likely to mean many more.

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