The Artisanal Spirits Company
Group Venue Manager
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Who we are
The Scotch Malt Whisky Society was founded in Edinburgh in 1983 by a small group of friends who thought whisky deserved better than a standard 40% dram and a distillery name on the label. Over 40 years on, we're the world's original single cask whisky club — unconventional, adventurous, and still a lot of fun.
We bottle exceptional and rare single casks from over 150 distilleries in more than 20 countries, always at cask strength, never chill-filtered, and named for how they taste rather than where they're from — because every cask is one of a kind, and the flavour is the hero. Our Members join a global community, not a shop: alongside our monthly Outturns, they get access to our Members' Rooms in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, a network of Partner Bars around the world, and a packed calendar of tastings and events.
SMWS is the founding and flagship brand of The Artisanal Spirits Company (AIM: ART), alongside Artisan Casks, J.G. Thomson and Single Cask Nation. Most of our Members are outside the UK, and this is a genuinely international, direct-to-Member business — which makes the experience we deliver in our physical venues, and the relationships our teams build with Members who visit them, more important than ever.
The role
Our Members' Rooms are where the Society comes to life — where people taste flavours they've never met before, swap stories over a dram, and feel like they belong to something a little different. The Group Venue Manager owns that experience on the ground: making sure every venue is safe, welcoming, commercially healthy, and unmistakably SMWS.
This is a newly-shaped role, focused squarely on running our venues and people brilliantly, rather than also carrying wider departmental strategy. You'll lead the Venue Managers and our Group Head Chef — around 50 people in total — and you'll be the person who keeps standards, budgets and morale all moving in the right direction at once. It's a role for someone who genuinely enjoys developing people, who's as comfortable in a P&L as they are on the floor of a busy Members' Room, and who can hold their nerve when the job gets reactive (because at times, it will).
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What you'll be doing
Venues, standards and Member experience
- Oversee day-to-day venue operations so our Members' Rooms are safe, welcoming, commercially effective, well presented, and true to the Society's standards and personality.
- Set and monitor service standards to ensure a high-quality experience at every Member touchpoint.
- Use Member feedback, venue insight, booking patterns, sales data, event performance and team knowledge to keep improving service and profitability.
- Work closely with the Marketing team so communications reaching Members are high quality and drive spend and visits to our venues.
Team leadership and people
- Line manage, train and develop your 5 direct reports (4 Venue Managers and Group Head Chef).
- Lead training and development planning for a team of 50+ across all venues.
- Handle HR and people management across the department, including disciplinaries and people challenges.
- Act as H&S lead for the department, often extending improvements (such as new accident-reporting processes) to the wider business.
Financial and commercial management
- Manage department finances day to day, including tracking KPIs and performance against budget.
- Monitor and approve spend across the department.
- Own outturn planning, allocation requests and stock ordering for all venues.
- Set and adjust pricing strategy for group products, such as dram bands.
Compliance, contracts and projects
- Ensure every venue is legally compliant inc. health & safety, food safety, licensing and beyond.
- Oversee and renegotiate group contracts (waste management, security, H&S, utilities and similar).
- If required, lead operational execution of new venues, refurbishments and major changes to physical spaces.
- Oversee ongoing maintenance and renovation of venues, and work with internal teams (e.g. Finance, Tech) to improve venue-facing processes, such as till implementations.
What success looks like
- Consistently positive Member feedback on in-person experiences.
- Budget achieved for both revenue and EBITDA across the group of venues.
- Your team feels supported, engaged, and receives regular, useful feedback on their performance.
- Visible improvement, internally and externally — your team notice processes getting easier, and Members notice a sharper events and service offering.
- You're a clear, reliable point of contact so the right information flows from head office to the Member-facing team.
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About you
This role has been shaped around what's made the biggest difference to the department historically, and above all, that's good people management. You'll likely recognise yourself in most of this:
- Proven experience managing multi-site hospitality, retail or leisure venues, ideally with a premium, member-led or brand-driven feel.
- A strong track record of leading, developing and genuinely supporting managers and front-line teams, including through high-pressure periods.
- Comfortable with financial management and reporting — building budgets, tracking P&Ls, and helping your managers get more confident with numbers too.
- Practical experience of H&S and licensing compliance across multiple venues.
- Able to lead a project (a refurbishment, a systems change, a new venue) from planning through to delivery.
- Resilient and adaptable — this role is reactive at times, with workload that varies from very manageable to genuinely full-on, and you'll need to juggle competing demands with a level head.
- A natural fit with the Society's tone: unconventional, warm and knowledgeable
Good to know
This is a role in transition: the previous Head of Venues and Member Engagement combined this venue-facing leadership with wider departmental strategy and EMT oversight, which is now being separated out. That means you're joining at a settled, stable point for the venue teams, we have the right managers in place, the team has become more self-sufficient over the last year, and there are no major capital projects underway, giving a new Group Venue Manager room to get to know the business before the next big one comes along. An early, high-value project on offer is picking up the staff training pathway work already underway with the People team.
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