Michael Friend

  • Hall of Fame
  • 2011

In 1972 Michael was a pioneer in the first group of hotel management trainees recruited by New Zealand Breweries, now Lion Breweries. Over the 28 years that followed, Michael worked across a wide variety of managed, leased and franchised business units within that company both in New Zealand and in the eastern states of Australia. In addition, Michael was a board member of the Lion Foundation charitable gaming trust for 10 years.

Michael spent his early years learning the business in two of Wellington’s finest hotels of the day, the Hotel St George and The Waterloo Hotel.

His first trail-blazer role was in helping to build the Cobb & Co chain that introduced New Zealanders to affordable casual family restaurant dining. Michael opened the third and the largest Cobb & Co in Hamilton in 1975 and then became an integral part of the team that grew the chain to 28 restaurants making it the 35th largest restaurant chain in the world with revenues of $40million.

In 1981 Lion sent him to Australia to establish Cobb & Co in Sydney as a joint venture with Tooheys and Castlemaine Perkins. Two years later he came back across ‘The Ditch’ into a variety of hotel regional manager positions which led to his appointment first as General Manager for the nationwide Hancock chain of 60 managed hotels and later as General Manager of Lion’s 150 leased hotels.

The hotel business came to a shuddering stop with the 1989 Sale of Liquor Act. Faced with a deregulated market Lion now wanted out of the hotel and retail liquor businesses and Michael went from nurturing them to leading the sell down process.

In final days with Lion, Michael assisted Lion seize market share in Victoria, Australia as it set about acquiring pubs to grow market share of the beer brands acquired from the defunct Bond Brewing empire.

In 2001 he was appointed CEO of the once massively popular Loaded Hog brew pubs and the One Red Dog chain.

Michael served for a decade on the Hospitality Standards Institute, a standalone industry training organisation, and was its Chairman for six years. This was a decade when the organisation revolutionised industry training. It swept away hospitality training methods and concepts that were ‘so last century’ and replaced them with modern trends in the delivery of food, beverage and accommodation.