There aren’t many managing directors who would take to the stage of their company’s annual conference wearing a classic green Adidas tracksuit with gold stripes on the arms and matching green trainers.
But, then again, William Lees-Jones is not your typical leader of a £100m turnover business.
He also wore a T-shirt with the JW Lees name emblazoned across the front and white tennis trousers.
All that was missing was a bucket hat and he wouldn’t have looked out of a place at one of the Oasis concerts at Heaton Park.
The Greatest Showman
Lees-Jones is The Manchester Maverick with a slice of The Greatest Showman thrown in.
“My kids are probably going to give me a really hard time about my Adidas tracksuit top,” he admitted. “They’re going to say ‘Dad, you’re 60, you need to stop doing that’.”
One journalist once described Lees-Jones as ‘groovy’ and while he’s happy to laugh at himself, he’s no-one’s fool.
He’s become a vocal critic of the Labour’s inheritance tax reforms, using his growing social media profile to call on the government to protect family-run businesses and the hospitality sector.
However, behind the green Adidas tracksuit and bonhomie, is a hard-nosed businessman – evidenced by their record-breaking results.
The brewer reported record sales of £99.9m for the year ended March 23, 2025, but has estimated that increases in employers’ National Insurance contributions and the impact of the National Living Wage rates will increase their cost base by £2m per year.
Lees-Jones is fundamentally a brilliant communicator, underlined by his performance on the stage at Manchester’s Albert Hall for the company’s 2025 conference.
There was a Thunderbirds theme to last Friday’s conference – referenced by a slide saying ‘JW Lees are go’.
The MD’s son Louis is the first of the seventh generation to join the near 198-year-old family firm, while his daughter Athena formed part of the 320-strong audience.
Family is clearly important to the father-of-four. “My harshest critics are probably my kids,” he said. “There’s a great expression that ‘we don’t inherit the business from our parents, we borrow it from our children’.”
He used the stage to reveal the big news that JW Lees is going to distribute Boddington’s Cask Ale under license from Budweiser Brewing Group.
The Boddington deal was only signed at 11pm the previous night. “You can’t beat a deadline,” smiled Lees-Jones.
JW Lees might be nearly 200 years old but it’s a modern company, illustrated by their considerable investment in their annual conference.
William Lees-Jones, MD of JW Lees, takes centre stage
“I see part of my job to be disruptive,” he explained. “To say to everybody ‘you’re not working on a Friday’ is massively disruptive to the business but you have to work around it.
“When you sit down with colleagues and say ‘what’s special about working at JW Lees?’ they go ‘we love the brewery conferences’.
“We see our roots as being deeply Manchester. We’re just having a big night out in Manchester with some business stuff at the beginning.”
The audience was deliberately not exclusively made up of managers. It consisted of the company’s brewery staff – including the celebrated cleaners – and the general managers, assistant managers and head chefs from their portfolio of pubs.
Explaining his approach to leadership, Lees-Jones said: “Every time I walk into a pub I walk in with some empty glasses.
“It’s not a criticism of the fact that those glasses are sitting on the tables outside, it’s probably that they’ve been too busy to clear them. For me leadership is never being too big to do the most important tasks.
“If the leader of the council didn’t turn up for work for a month you probably wouldn’t notice but if the binmen don’t come for a week you start to notice.”
If a business doesn’t make a profit, it doesn’t exist
Lees-Jones is unashamedly driven by making a profit – “If a business doesn’t make a profit, it doesn’t exist,” he explained – but also making a positive difference.
During the conference a giant cheque for £21,688.10p was handed over to their chosen charity The Christie.
Lees-Jones might have the touch of the flamboyant about him but there was a real tender moment when he remembered his brother Simon, who died last year of cancer at the age of 58.
A slide appeared on the giant screen of a book Simon gave his sibling – ‘The Little Book of Management Bollocks’ by Alistair Beaton – and everyone laughed.
Lees-Jones has now clocked up a remarkable 22 years as managing director.
I first interviewed him at JW Lees & Co’s Greengate Brewery in Manchester in 2012.
Lees-Jones became a trainee account executive and ended up running an advertising agency in London before joining the family business at the age of 28.
He became joint managing director for two-and-a-half years before taking sole charge in 2003, overseeing a range of challenges including the 2007 smoking ban and Covid in 2020.
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JW Lees is already making plans for the firm’s 200th anniversary celebrations in 2028 and it’s obvious Lees-Jones still loves what he does.
“It’s like anything, there’s a time when you have to give up,” admitted the keen Manchester United fan. “You like a good football analogy and it’s sad that Eric Cantona and George Best gave up football when they were still in their prime.”