Neil Goulden, the affable Chief Executive of tenpin-bowling and cue-sports giant Allied Leisure, has a bizarre notion of how best to spend a week’s holiday – he takes his kids bowling and conducts trade magazine interviews over the ‘phone!

One might expect a vacationing Goulden to prefer country lanes to bowling lanes, given that the few weeks prior to our chat have been some of the busiest in the history of the company. With the major job of integrating the Superbowl-branded family entertainment centres, acquired from First Leisure, with Allied’s own Megabowl chain just completed, Goulden and his team launched themselves headlong into the acquisition that had become almost a given – the £45m take-over of Martin Callan’s Waterfall Holdings.

Clearly a man not to begrudge the opposition a little pin-money, Goulden’s three daughters, aged 12, 9 and 3, were duly carted off to the local FirstBowl in his Berkshire home town, rather than to any of his own units. Had he decided instead to check half-term business at an Allied venue, the girls could have taken their pick from 60 bowling centres, 35 Burger Kings, a hotchpotch of 14 or so unloved and up-for-sale bars and discos and a snooker and pool estate that, with the former Waterfall venues, has now risen to number an impressive but workable 150.

Hong Kong-born 46 year-old Goulden studied law at Southampton University. “I was training to be a barrister, but I hated it” he says. “I had worked in a Ladbrokes betting-office during my university vacations, so I joined them in 1975 to train as a manager. I much preferred a betting shop to a law court!” He stayed with the company, working his way up to Operations Controller, until 1983 when he joined Chef and Brewer, then a part of the sprawling Grand Metropolitan empire, as Regional Director for the Midlands.

The lure of the gaming industry got the better of Goulden and in 1985 he re-joined Ladbrokes as Business Development Director for the company’s international division, based in Brussels. A year later, the now peripatetic Goulden found himself in Holland, heading up the Dutch equivalent of the Tote. In 1989, he returned to the UK, and spent 6 years at contract caterers Leatherby and Christopher, now part of Compass, looking after such prestige accounts as the Grand National, Wembley and Royal Ascot.

In late 1994, Goulden received an approach from Allied Leisure’s Chairman, respected “company doctor” Ken Scobie. “Allied was a basket-case” Goulden says. “Ken was brought in to stabilise the business and took me on as his Managing Director to get to work on the operational side while he sorted out the finances.”

With Scobie now the semi-retired non-exec Chairman and Goulden as CEO, the company has come a long way from the days of 16 bowls and 5 nightclubs producing a turnover of £20m and a £30m loss! There is a slight tremor of what I assume to be pride in Goulden’s measured tones as he recalls that “in the first year of recovery, we made £1.5m! Today, we have 8,000 employees, turnover is £300m, we have a market capitalisation of about £80m and the City is currently forecasting a £14.5m profit next year.” Goulden’s quick response when I call this a “hell of a success story” is to suggest I relay that post-haste to the institutional shareholders who whinge about leisure companies!

Current trading, too, threatens to exceed expectations, with Goulden hailing this year as providing the company with its best April ever. “Everyone was worried that the late Easter could mean warm weather and therefore bad trading, but luckily it was wet and miserable!” he says. “The cue-sports clubs had a double-whammy, with the World Championships at the same time, bowling was up 8% and the Burger Kings were roaring away – we had an exclusive promotion with the Pokémon movie.”

On the day we speak, with the chalk-dust only just blown off the tip of the Waterfall deal, Goulden feels “quietly satisfied that the strategy I put together in November 1998 has finally been delivered.” The messily depressing hostilities between Waterfall and the former European Leisure - when the latter acquired First Leisure’s 25% stake in the former – had previously scuppered Goulden’s plans for a tripartition between the companies.

As one of two industry principals who had been vociferous about the need for consolidation amongst the smaller leisure companies – the other being Luminar CEO Steve Thomas – Goulden has strong views on the past. “When European’s Ian Rock was buying the stake in Waterfall, he should have gone hostile and bid for them” is Goulden’s view. “The fact was, he sat back and dilly-dallied – the City lost a lot of confidence. But it did open the door for us.”

Allied, when they subsequently acquired European Leisure for £34m in June 1999, had stated to the Takeover Panel that they would not go hostile on Waterfall, which precluded an unwelcome approach for six months. Goulden met with Waterfall Chairman, former top Rank-er John Garrett, their discussions interrupted only briefly by an approach to Waterfall by another potential suitor - widely believed to be the eminently-unsuitable Wembley PLC. “We let the dust settle” says Goulden “and I went back to John in January this year. The time was right. We’re pleased and happy, and confident about the future.”

Goulden and Thomas practised what they preached when Luminar bought 27 of Allied’s nightclub businesses for £34.5m in November 1999. The next month saw the sale of Allied’s bowls for £45m to a joint-venture formed with Duke Street Capital, their 50% stake in the new Megabowl Group costing them just £27.8m. Financial journal-of-note Investors Chronicle commented recently “Through a series of shrewd deals, Allied Leisure has transformed itself in the last year. [Their] businesses look set to deliver a significant increase in profits…offering investors a good buying opportunity.”

At the operational end, the business of integrating the Waterfall businesses has begun in earnest. Goulden says a decision has not yet been taken on whether to brand the Waterfall cue-sports units with Allied’s well-known Riley(s) name. “We will probably end up trading under three brand-names” Goulden says, “with one for the traditional, snooker-led clubs with little or no American pool, one for the ‘modern-all-singing-all-dancing-big-screen-lively-bar-lots-of-American-pool’ members’ clubs and one for the pool bars that are open to the public.” He confesses to liking one of the names used for the latter by Waterfall – Q.b@r, which has one branded unit open, in Leicester.

Waterfall will continue to trade from its Aldershot, Hampshire headquarters, under its own name, for three months, with Allied’s personable and dexterous cue-sports MD Peter Searle at the helm. Following Waterfall’s delisting from the Stock Exchange at Allied’s year-end in September 2000, the name will become industry history. A decision will then be taken whether to run cue-sports’ finances from Aldershot or from Allied’s existing accounting centre in Poole, Dorset.

“Leisure companies have to get bigger if they are going to have any relevance to institutional shareholders” is Goulden’s averred view and he supports the branding of leisure venues. “We’re in the same position that the food industry was – there was no truly branded food until McDonalds came along, now nearly all food outlets are branded.”

With 10% of the cue-sports market and no other company with more than 1%, 25% of the country’s tenpin bowls and holding the position of Burger King’s biggest high-street franchisee, Allied is now more of a market-maker than market-leader, but the company’s development plans are still all-embracing. Strategic disposals are of equal importance, with a sale of the Snowdome indoor real-snow ski centre in Tamworth, Staffordshire imminent.

Goulden sees Allied as the natural buyer when Duke Street chooses to exit from the Megabowl joint-venture and he is concentrating on enhancing the value of the division. “We’ll continue to open large, state-of-the-art Megabowls on an opportunistic basis, plus we are looking at smaller town-centres that could benefit from a 10-, 12- or 14-lane unit” Goulden says, while also admitting a desire to expand the bowling product into mainland Europe.

“The UK leisure property market has become overcrowded” he says “and in any other industry, the major powers go global. But in UK leisure, everyone stays as a domestic player! Look at Whitbread’s and Bass’s pure leisure operations – almost 100% domestic. We don’t see cue-sports has having a relevance for Europe, but tenpin bowling is an American product with world-wide awareness. Anyone in America looking to invest over here wants European businesses, not UK ones.”

Goulden sees the hoary subject of liquor licensing deregulation as something of a non-event. “It won’t give us any particular competitive advantage, as we have a number of late licences already” he says. “The licensing benches know that change is coming and they’re being a lot more flexible.” He does, however, see major benefits for Allied’s private members’ clubs, of which as many as 40 are currently open 24/7. “They have a strong business after the pubs and clubs close, particularly with students, taxi drivers and night workers. The law will demand that, to have a 24-hour licence, you must have a controlled environment - and we have the ultimate one, a members-only club, so there is no reason to refuse us a licence.”

With video-games machines playing such a vital role in the bowling division’s well-being, Goulden is a tad concerned about the lack of new games consoles entering the market “Big boxes are on the way out and PC-based games are taking over” he remarks. Allied already has a networked computer-games operation, known as LAN-Arena, in its FEC in Nottingham and has inherited Waterfall’s involvement with the UK’s number one operator The Playing Fields to create the not dissimilar Cyb@rgames area in the Susy Q’s pool and snooker unit close to London’s Victoria station.

Snooker-club jackpot machines suffer from a maximum prize fixed at £250, as against the £500 permitted in bingo clubs and £1,000 top payout in casinos. "What we're hoping to do in the next review is to persuade the authorities that proprietary clubs should be classified the same as bingo clubs.” says Goulden.

An hour has passed swiftly and productively, as Goulden lets me know that it’s time he returned to his week off. The two qualities that strike one most are the clarity of his business vision and his self-confident determination to succeed. And the ability to combine family quality time with work by taking his kids on opposition visits may just be one of the reasons why Neil Goulden could soon become the leisure guru that both the industry and the City so desperately needs.

Ian Freeman of C2U is a freelance journalist and communications consultant

Sidebar – What chalks Neil Goulden’s cue?

Book: Anything by John Grisham

Food: Italian

Car: Jaguar XK8

Place to visit overseas: Hong Kong

Hobby: Cricket, rugby – and my daughters!

Movie: “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”

TV programme: “Casualty”

Stage production: “Barnum” with Michael Crawford