Who is Mitchells & Butlers?


You already know Mitchells & Butlers, even if you don’t realise it! That’s because we run many of the UK’s most famous restaurant and pub brands, including All Bar One, Browns, Toby Carvery, Vintage Inns and Harvester, as well as some of the most beautiful, historic and iconic rural and city businesses in the country. We are the leading restaurant company in the UK, with over 1,600 businesses.

Our history
We’ve been at the forefront of the industry since 1898, and this extraordinary depth of experience has helped us become a highly successful company within the UK’s eating and drinking out market, which is worth some £70 billion. Our annual sales are close to £2 billion and we serve around 125 million meals a year, as well as some 435 million drinks.

So how did we get to be the biggest?
We've stayed at the industry's cutting edge by constantly innovating, ensuring that our business is always driven by new ideas. We've developed household names like All Bar One, Toby Carvery and Vintage Inns, and all our brands pride themselves on listening to their customers. In fact, we gather over a million pieces of customer feedback every year, which provide priceless insights for improving our products and our service.

Passion, pride and professionalism
Around 38,000 staff help us set the benchmark for the industry, so whichever of our 1,600 restaurants and pubs you visit, you’ll find a warm welcome, great service, outstanding quality and excellent value. We achieve this through providing award-winning training for all our staff, world-class supply chain management, innovative menu development and rigorous food safety practices.

Industry-leading performance
Each of our businesses takes an average of over £21,000 a week and makes an industry-leading £180,000 operating profit a year. Only five years ago, food accounted for just 31% of our sales. It now accounts for around 47%.

Growth Strategy
Our strategy is clear. We want to ensure customers keep coming back by keeping our brands fresh and building on their reputation for quality, choice, service and value. We want to use the strength of our brands to develop more sites, trading with recognisable and popular offers. With more sites and more customers, we can make the most of our scale in purchasing, marketing and more, and achieve even better returns on investment.  And we want to make sure we’ve got the right people in place, with the right training and motivation to ensure our customers always get excellent service.

We believe the strength of our brands, the quality of our property and the location of our restaurants and pubs, our great range of food and drink, and the friendly professionalism of our people mean that our business will thrive and successfully grow in the future.

If working in the non stop, ever changing, never a dull moment world of restaurants and pubs sets your pulse racing, we know how you feel and our Graduate Schemes will give you everything you need to succeed.

There are three ways to launch your Graduate career:

• Apply for our Corporate Graduate Scheme; work towards a senior Head Office job that will make the most of your skills.
• Apply for our Retail Graduate Scheme; you could be taking charge of a restaurant or pub within just 2 years.
• Apply for an Undergraduate Year; take a “year out” from studying and learn invaluable skills while you work.
• All schemes offer competitive salary and benefit packages, please refer to our website for more information at www.mbcareersandjobs.com.
   

Case Study 1

Finance
Faye Richardson
Finance Graduate

Having studied Genetics at university I made the decision to look for a graduate scheme in Finance but knew from the outset that a traditional accountancy-based scheme was not for me. I wanted to be working at the heart of a business that I had a genuine interest in and I wanted to learn the commercial aspects, not just be a number cruncher! The description of the Mitchells and Butlers’ Finance Graduate Programme seemed to tick all the boxes!

I have now completed the two year graduate scheme and I am a year into working in a permanent job role. At no point did the scheme fail to live up to my expectations. Upon joining, we had a one week induction which involved understanding the Mitchells & Butlers’ culture and structure, getting to know the other graduates and learning the brands which involved visiting a lot of pubs and restaurants! This was then followed by a 4 week pub placement, after that I started my function-specific business placements.

All of my business placements have been linked to Finance and therefore complemented my fully financially supported CIMA studies. Whilst I have spent time in the core Finance areas - Financial Accounting, Treasury, Management Accounting and Taxation, not all my placements have been your typical desk based finance roles. Other placements have included Food Development – working alongside chefs in the development of new menus, to Energy Management– learning about the company’s energy saving programme, conducting in site energy audits and learning how energy usage is captured and analysed centrally to save money and the environment!

My business placements have allowed me a unique opportunity to understand both the Finance department and its wider role in Mitchells and Butlers. Furthermore, they have been worked around the time I was given off to revise for my CIMA exams. Some specific placements have also been timed with my exams e.g. Treasury and Pensions helped me ‘revise on the job’

After 2 years on the graduate programme I had completed my CIMA exams and accepted a permanent role within Pricing and Insight – a team within the Marketing department. Over 9 months I was involved in Menu and Drinks Pricing and the design and evaluation of offers across the company’s brands.

More recently I have moved into an Operations Analyst role within the Finance Department. Here I am responsible for the management accounting of four brands within the company (circa 250 pubs). Within this role I look at not only sales but also monitor GPs, employment costs, utility spends and a wide range other factors that impact the sites and their profitability.

That’s the great thing about the Mitchells & Butlers graduate programme – even when you have completed the training, the learning and career development doesn’t just stop; there is continual scope and opportunities to ensure that your career ambitions are fulfilled.

Case Study 2

HR
Sara Watson
Corporate Graduate Scheme

I joined via the Corporate Graduate Scheme and my greatest achievement to date is being appointed to the HR Business Partner role after just over a year with the company.  As a Graduate, you’re given responsibility from day one and that’s been vitally important for my own personal development.  Working on real projects gives you the chance to demonstrate your skills, and the opportunity to progress quickly is a great feature of the Mitchells and Butlers Corporate Graduate Scheme

My role as a HR Business Partner is focused on the recruitment, training and development of our employees.  I have direct responsibility for one of our brands and am empowered to make the teams that work in that business as effective as possible. Mitchells & Butlers is particularly committed to developing training for our employees at all levels, so my role is much more interesting as a result.  Every week is different and there is a huge amount of variety in the tasks I complete day to day!

I have an exciting and challenging role which is varied and the people I work with make my job particularly enjoyable; having the support network of a fantastic team and being able to deliver real results that have my name on them makes everything worthwhile!

The Company is currently providing support for me to complete my CIPD qualification. On completion of my professional qualification, I will have the opportunity to develop my HR career within Mitchells & Butlers.