French and sawdust?

When World Cup fever hits Paris this summer, Paul Chantler and Thor Gudmundsson will be laughing. They know their English pubs, Frog & Rosbif and Frog & Princess, one each side of the river, will be bursting at the seams with fans - tourists and Parisians alike - all wanting to celebrate or commiserate with a pint or two.

In anticipation of the fans' thirst, the two pubs, which trade under the Paris Real Ale Brewery, are gearing themselves up to sell 5,000 pints a week each, mostof which will be brewed on site.

Before setting up the pubs, Chantler and Gudmundsson had no experienceof the hospitality industry - they worked for ICI and Nomura respectively. While completing a 10-month MBA in Paris, however, they worked on a piece of course work together which involved compiling a business plan for a new venture.

"We researched why you could not get a good pint of bitter in Paris and why there were so few interesting bars," says Chantler.

After presenting the project to a panel of tutors and experienced business people who were enthusiastic about it, the pair decided it was a challenge they had to take up.

Chantler and Gudmundsson have spent the past four years building up a customer base of local French business people, who lunch at the Frog & Rosbif three times a week, and a mixed bunch of Parisians, tourists and English people studying or working in France who drink there the rest of the time.

The Frog & Princess, which opened 18 months ago, is slightly more upmarket. It attracts students (French, English and American) because of the nearby colleges, as well as people who are out shopping in the St Germain des Prés area.

In a normal week the pubs would sell roughly 3,000 pints each but this is boosted by events such as the World Cup and the Five Nations, when customers congregate to support their teams.

One of the biggest problems Chantler and Gudmundsson have had to confront, however, is how to get French people interested in the English pub culture of drinking pints. In France they don't drink the quantities of beer people do in the UK.

"There's no reflex here to go to the pub," says Chantler. "Although the French are big consumers of alcohol, almost all of it is around meals in the home."

Another reason for the difference in volume is that many French women don't drink and so Chantler and Gudmundsson have half the target audience they would have in the UK. The volume is reduced even further because the people who do drink spend a long time nursing a half, despite encouragement from staff at the pubs to upgrade to a pint.

In the four years since the Frog & Rosbif opened, Chantler and Gudmundsson have had to employ some clever tactics to push their customers into drinking more.

"We make fun of them, but in the right way," says Gudmundsson.

"When they ask for a half pint, we say: ‘So that's for your mother, now what are you having?' But you have to get the tone right. It's quite easy to misjudge a situation, especially with the language," adds Chantler.

Joking aside, because they know the market and have realised that people aren't necessarily coming in to drink, Chantler and Gudmundsson target them by making the experience more fun. They have found that discounting doesn't necessarily increase volume. When they offered customers a pint for the price of a half, most people refused. When they introduced four-pint jugs of beer, they had groups of people asking for 12 glasses.

"That means 12 people in your pub for an hour who have spent almost nothing," says Chantler.

Instead, once a month they hold a themed evening and decorate the pubs. Beach parties, a heaven and hell night and blond night have already proved popular. There's also a pub quiz every Sunday and the customers take it in turn to write the questions.

None of this would seem out of the ordinary to an English pub-goer but it needs explaining to French customers to whom ale or bitter might be totally alien. Staff have to be prepared to spend time with customers to lead them through the experience from the on-site brewery to the food which, as a concession to the French, is bistro-style with table service.

The menu at the Frog & Rosbif, which is available only at lunch, changes every 10 days and is a mixture of classic dishes such as steak and some English favouritessuch as bangers, beans, mash and onion gravy. Average spend is roughly Ffr70 (£7). At the Frog & Princess spend is slightly higher at Ffr80 (£8) and the menu is more extensive, with bar snacks - including nachos and hot spicy chicken wings - as well as main dishes.

The downside of running a food operation at both pubs is the impact on staff costs - already substantially higher across the Channel than in this country. In addition, Chantler and Gudmundsson have to employ more managers to cover the pubs' trading hours, which are from noon to 2am. This leads to further training and administrative costs.

"With more managers you need to have meetings. It all becomes a much bigger issue and over a year it makes a big difference to staff costs," says Chantler.

His staff wages work out at 35% of the Ffr7.5m (£753,000) annual turnover at the Frog & Rosbif, which is high compared with wage bills in the UK, and this dissuades a lot of people from starting a business in France. Of the 35%, staff pocket 20% and the remainder goes to the government in national insurance.

"The opening hours, training and table service together account for 40% of the difference. You have to be more brutal about the whole thing. We scrutinise the rotas to see if we really need all the people here at different times and to see if we can make do with fewer, but this has an impact on customer service," Chantler explains.

It has taken the business partnership a long time to get this far. When they started out they predicted it would take three months to find a site and arrange finance. It took a total of nine months. Licensing was also a problem because there are no licensing courts, so anyone who wants to open a bar must buy an existing licence.

"We had to try to seem credible to banks and landlords with nothing behind us. We saw 50 banks and most of them were very brief conversations," says Chantler.

France does not have a small business culture like the UK. None of the bank officials the partners met were authorised to make a decision to lend them money. They could only fill out forms which then went to a credit committee. When their proposals were rejected, Chantler and Gudmundsson were not given any feedback and could only go away, redo their figures and try again.

Many of the officials refused to forward their revised business plan to the committee a second time, however, thinking that if it was rejected again it would reflect badly on them. In addition, starting a business in France requires minimum capital of £35,000, so it's not simply a question of registering a new company.

On the verge of giving up, Chantler and Gudmundsson found a site and things began to fall into place.

"We'd run out of money and excuses to give our friends as to why we could only go out for a coffee instead of a meal. It was demotivating but the site set it in motion," says Chantler.

By this time the partners had also had time to rewrite their business plan and find enough investors, including two former college tutors and one of the banks.

That was more than four years ago, and they have now put all the bureaucratic nightmares behind them. With two pubs trading well, they are also looking at further expansion. A third pub is due to open in Toulouse in April.