Adrian Bridge strides with the military bearing one would expect for a graduate of the Royal Military at Sandhurst and he is constantly looking at the bigger picture – especially when it comes to business.
The CEO of Fladgate Partnership, a Porto-based holding company that owns some of Portugal’s best known brands including Taylor’s, Croft and Fonseca, Bridge cut his teeth not so much on the Sword of Honor he was awarded from Sandhurst or from serving as a UN peacekeeper in Cyprus in the mid-80s, but from investment banking.
“Plenty of bankers buy wineries after they retire. I like to think I just did it a bit sooner than the rest,” he said. He married into the Port business and only became managing director in 1998. Like others in the sector, he battled a steady decline in Port sales during the first decade or so of this century, by expanding the companies reach to more than 70 countries and snaring several other Port houses. Leslie Gevirtz caught up with him.
What do you consider your biggest business success?
Not Port oddly enough. It’s the creation of the Yeatman hotel. The Yeatman is right in the heart of the historic district of Porto. That was the first really, truly luxury hotel and it’s helped to put the city of Porto on the map.
And I think in the long term that benefits Port consumption because people come they fall in love with the city. They stay at this extraordinary hotel. There’s lots of different Ports there and table wines. There’s a Michelin-starred restaurant and, of course, they go back and they talk about it and it’s the old social media.”
What was your biggest failure?
Failure is, ahem, are always kind of interesting. Sometimes you look at what opportunities you missed, rather than necessarily failures. By the very nature of failure - you tend to keep the very tough ones - private. I’ve been lucky in my life not to necessarily have any catastrophic failures, but I’ve certainly had lessons that I’ve learned. Maybe from opportunities or deals or things that I wanted to achieve that didn’t happen and they passed you by. So possibly, if I look at missed opportunities where we could have done something and we didn’t - we missed it. There have been a few of those.
What have you learned?
Well I think I’ve been very much involved in helping to consolidate the Port industry and we’ve done a lot of purchases of other Port companies. And what you learn I think is that everyone will tell you, ‘This is the last opportunity. The once in a lifetime, you know, never to be repeated.’ And they are repeated.
Life does happen. So in a sense you get that fever that says I must do the deal, I must get this done. I must get that done. And, in fact, you need to be able to walk away from things. … it won’t be the last time that it ever happens. That once in a life-time never really turn out to be once in a life-time. There are other opportunities that come down the line.
What is the next company you want to put out of business?
(He chuckles.) I don’t want to put anyone out of business.
I think that what we’ve been able to do is to celebrate through our consolidation give life back to a lot of companies that were probably under investing in their businesses and were partially losing their way. And we’ve been able to bring them back and to make the most of them.
Croft is a very good example of this. Croft was a first growth in the Port industry. It lost its way partially through under-investment and we’ve come back from that. Eighty-two people who worked there have a job with us today because we bought that company. And so I don’t want to put anyone out of business. What I want to do is celebrate the best of what the Port industry can do and the Douro valley.
I have a slightly different take on this. I think we all win if we broaden the market. Again, I feel one of my great achievements was the Yeatman. I went out and didn’t promote the hotel. I went out and did active PR in about nine different countries to grow the market for the city of Porto on the basis that we would get, the Yeatman would get, our slice of that.
If we buy a company, we go out and celebrate. We bought Wiese & Krohn recently (June 2015) we went and took 1863 to the market. Extraordinary wine. We took it to all corners of the world. Now that has gone on to spur interest in port.
It’s good for us. It’s good for our competitors. If everybody is winning, we’re all growing. Business is good. I’m not there to fight and deal with the scraps that are left over. I’m there to invest in how to grow this overall market.
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
Probably in 10 years time I’ll be retired. I’m getting to that stage in my life, I’m 52 right now, and I’ve done a lot - and there’s a lot of fantastic young talent that’s coming up through our company. You move away from doing the deals and getting everything ready…
Where do you see your company?
I think we will continue to grow. I think wine tourism will grow and we’ll be very active in generating that. But the thought process behind wine tourism is the ability to be able to share this extraordinary corner of the world that we have that is called Porto with people who come to see it. You can give them a very authentic experience and share our enthusiasm for what we do with them so that they take their message on to their communities and to their friends and their families - and if we can do that we can be truly successful.
Adrian Bridge will be appearing at Wine Vision in Bilbao, Spain from 9-11 December. Meininger's Wine Business International is a media partner.
