70 years in work

At 85-years-old, Malcolm Weaving has spent the majority of his life working. The current owner of Skipton’s Rendezvous Hotel, Weaving has a simple approach to running a property, and a philosophy on how he has remained in the hospitality industry for 35 years. SHEKINA TUAHENE sat down with him to find out more

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Malcolm Weaving purchased the Rendezvous Hotel from Hanover International in 2004, after seeing the hotel in what he describes as a “sorry state.” Retiring at the early age of 70 just two years prior to the acquisiotn, Weaving decided to go back to work after being in a state of boredom. “I was dying. I was doing nothing. I had a very bad hip, I couldn’t do a lot of walking and I needed something to keep me going.” Considering Weaving has been in work since the tender age of 15, it is no surprise that the businessman saw an opportunity for development with the Rendezvous Hotel, saying it gave him “something to get up for.”

Along with his wife Karen, Weaving worked hard to “pull [the hotel] up by its laces” originally turning the 75-room property into an 80-room one in 2016 before increasing the room count with a further 16 suites through the conversion of squash courts and other parts of the property. There is also an on-site apartment with two rooms that is available to let bringing the number of sellable rooms up to 98. As well as that, Weaving is never too far away from work as he and his wife live in the three-bedroom penthouse, which was once a loft at the hotel.

But this is no problem for the Yorkshire native, as he is a man for detail, a practice to which he heavily attributes his longevity in business. He did not come out of retirement only to manage from afar, he has a very hands-on role at the hotel. Knowing exactly when and where money is coming in and out, Weaving looks at departmental contributions each day to make sure there are no surprises. He never misses a beat. Not in the possession of a laptop himself, Weaving relies on his five senior managers to assist him in the meticulous day-to-day, paper-reliant running of the hotel.

“I get daily, weekly [and] monthly financial reports – full reports, quarterly and annual reports. Nothing creeps up on me at the end of the year,” he says. Separating each department and considering them as separate entities has its benefits for the 85-year-old as he is able to spot a problem and nip it in the bud before it becomes a real issue.

Weaving would not have it any other way as he states that he prefers to keep busy. “I sit in here [the office] every day, seven days a week, except holidays – of which I have plenty! I do the paperwork, I get reports from every department every day. I get 18 sheets of foolscap under my door every morning from the previous activity in the different departments. I like it that way.”

Despite joining the hotel industry at a later stage of life, Weaving believes that his lengthy career in textiles and previous endeavours are massive factors as to how he has managed to stay working – successfully – for so long, even after the retirement age. Weaving ran a successful textiles business which employed 200 people before going into voluntary liquidation in 1984 due to the takeover of technology – which ironically, Weaving still manages to not use when he runs the Rendezvous Hotel.

Four years into his second marriage and with his then two-year-old son Charlie to look after, Weaving drew on his liking of cooking in the Boy Scouts and his national service in the Catering Corps to persuade a building society to help him purchase his first hotel, a 17-room guest house in the Isle of Arran. Wife Karen, who had worked as a secretary at global company Amoco, also found she enjoyed the hospitality aspect of her role and decided to transfer that into the couple’s new venture.

However, the isolation of their first property led Karen to feel claustrophobic, so after five years of ownership, the two sold the property for £180,000 – a profit of £100,000 – and bought a six-room inn in Perth. The smaller hotel was highly food orientated, allowing Weaving to further use his cooking experience as and when it was needed. “I knew about cooking so no chef could pull the wool over my eyes. If I complained to the chefs and said ‘this isn’t right’, it was a case of where the chef would say, ‘well do it yourself’ and I was capable of doing it. Nobody could hold me to ransom and that is a major part of the success of being a hotelier that a chef can’t hold you to ransom because the buggers do if you cross them.” The Weavings later set their sights on the Stirk House country house hotel in Gisburn, a larger property with 40 rooms which they owned and enjoyed for seven years before deciding to go into retirement. As Weaving says: “At that point I didn’t expect to have another 15 years or more work in my tank.”

Their current property stands as their most profitable, as they bought it when it had gone into liquidation, Weaving says: “We built that up from scratch because nobody else wanted to buy it. It was exactly the same scenario as Stirk House.”

Being the largest hotel in the area has worked in the Weaving’s favour, as the five-storey property sits along a towpath on the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, which leads into the centre of Skipton finds itself in constant use by the locals. With clients ranging from commercials to conferences to dance groups, the hotel’s ballroom is “virtually full for the rest of 2017”. And while Weaving admits it is not the most modern looking building, he takes pride in the fact that it reflects his and his wife’s personalities. However, this doesn’t mean the hotel is short of facilities as it has a swimming pool, Jacuzzi and steam room, as well as a gym, used by members of our private leisure club as well as residents.  

Promising to remain working at the hotel until he is carried out, Weaving simply believes that as long as you are hospitable and put guests first, and have some of the most welcoming and pleasant staff in the country, everything else in business will fall into place. “I have breakfast with my customers every morning. Our motto, on our business cards and all around the hotel is, ‘if you see someone without a smile give them one of yours’.” Boasting rave reviews about the staff’s warmth on Tripadvisor, Weaving suggests that simply having manners is why he has an estimate of 85% repeat customers. “You’ll see that the people are saying how pleasant the staff are, that they’re the best staff in Britain. You might see them say ‘the smart dressed old geezer that comes talking at breakfast and at dinner’ – well that happens to be me.”

This hospitable attitude of the Rendezvous staff may also explain the hotel’s popularity, as its occupancy for the next 12 months currently stands at 45%. With only 96 rooms in total to offer, Weaving explains, “I’ve 15,807 rooms booked between now and this time next year, and I’ve 7,673 booked from May 2018 onwards.”

It is not only within the walls of the Rendezvous Hotel that the Weavings are well liked, as their work for the community has given them a certain level of importance in their local area. Karen was made a fellow of Cancer Research UK in 2016 and with the help of the property, and a small committee, raised £1.3million for the charity. Malcolm is a director of Skipton’s ‘Business Improvement District’ (BID) and was the key player in the town being awarded ‘Top Town for Courtesy 2016’ by the UK-wide National Campaign for Courtesy.

Being a hotelier has not always been success after success for Weaving as he once tried to expand into the pub sector, when he leased the property next door. “I couldn’t get that to work at all, it was a bit of a disaster really, we couldn’t get it off the ground. I then I made it into a Greek restaurant and that didn’t work. It’s now an Indian restaurant.” As a more mature owner in the industry who joined the business relatively late, Weaving claims that in the 31 years he has been a hotel owner, not much has changed about the way it works.

“It’s always been hospitality first, and the rest is just like any other business.” His advice is also as simple as his approach to the industry, as he plainly states that keeping one’s finger on the pulse is all it takes to be successful. “Anyone who says that they need to take a certain amount of income to break even and the rest is profit, is for the birds. The key for me is the contribution each department makes to our overheads, and a strict control on those overheads.”