Rain, rain, go away

And, much to my surprise, it really has.  I felt thoroughly confused yesterday evening, staring at the BBC weather forecast for the area.  The summary made it absolutely clear that there would be torrential rain, yet the neat animated map showing the movement of cloud and rain over the area that the BBC kindly provides showed no clouds in sight.

Well, as we opened Living Crafts for Christmas this morning, there was a sprinkling of rain which quickly disappeared to be replaced by the kind of glorious sunshine which makes all the colours of the countryside light up in an almost-neon fashion.  I love this place – why did I ever work at Canary Wharf? Great people, but London never shone like this.

This was a point not lost on a visitor today – John Lovell from the Lovell Partnership.  John is a magical combination of property surveyor and tax accountant and knows more about capital allowances than, well, anyone I can imagine.  There is probably someone at HMRC who may disagree with that statement but he knows enough for me. We spent an enjoyable hour or two inspecting the wonderful Sawmills development which impresses me more each time I see it.  It fits its spot so well and looks, well, attractive.  Thankfully it is heading towards being fully let at last.  Anyway, John moved from Oxford to Islington but you could see the wistful look in his eyes as we came over the crest of the park and caught the kaleidoscopic radiance of park and palace stretched out before us.

On the other side of the world, Antonia (from our education team) is still teaching at Future Hope School in Kalkota. Having escaped the heat for a day, trading the orphanage for a luxury hotel, she was looking forward to G&Ts at the side of a luxury swimming pool.  Sadly the rain arrived a couple of months early and quickly put paid to that too. Just over a week to go and she’ll be back with us.

Back here, Roger (Property director) took advantage of the boss’s absence to have a look around the decorated palace and the nearly-ready Living Crafts for Christmas event.  The theme in the palace this year was toys and nostalgia and there is some wonderful old stuff in there.  Most people are attracted by the giant metal toys and antique teddy bears but I just love the meccano and lego. We couldn’t suppress our smiles though on hearing the saga of the lego castle.  It had lain, fully built, at the bottom of the wardrobe of the son of our Head of Education , Karen Wiseman, and was brought in carefully and treated with kid gloves.  Until, that is, Heather “unflappable” Carter laid her mitts on it.  Most of us would know, of course, that you can’t pick up a lego model from the top…

Google is a great tool and it was quickly put to use as, needless to say, the instructions were long gone.  Having come up trumps, poor Andy Frost from our Palace team found himself up to 1am rebuilding the thing.  Go and see his handiwork at the end of the Long Library.  I get the impression that the last two weeks has seen a lot of Palace staff keeping quite about their childhood hobbies (Heather: did you have a model railway when you were young; Andre: yes; Heather [big smile thrusting a large railway box without instructions towards him] All staff= lesson learned)

The weather looks great for the rest of the weekend with Living Crafts for Christmas.  It is a great show, not a traders’ fair but full of real craftspeople. The Palace looks great too. Do come and join us and make sure you see the Palace too and GET YOUR ANNUAL PASS!

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The Joy of Marketing part II

Some naughty and troublesome souls have suggested that my last post presented marketing people in a very bad light.

It is further insinuated that I then paid a gratuitous compliment to our own marketing team in a desperate attempt to claw back the lost goodwill.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Our team are consummate professionals and always willing to get into the spirit of any occasion,witch often involves dressing up.

If you want to see more, head for Blenheim Palace tomorrow for Ghosts in the Gardens….

Scary…

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The joy of marketing

What is the right collective noun for a group of marketing people?

I pose the question having spent an enjoyable day with ALVA (the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions) at their annual conference, a gathering mostly comprised of representatives of the marketing teams of the afore-mentioned venues.

Collective nouns fascinate me – my favourite examples include:

• A corps of anatomists
• A conjunction of grammarians
• A clique of photographers
• An aggregate of geologists
• A brace of orthodontists
• etc

So, what is the bond that binds marketing people? Does it give me a clue for their rightful collective noun? They are certainly an extremely positive bunch.  That is pretty much a requirement of the job.  In that respect, they represent a complete opposite to my own profession, in which appreciation of risk (ok, outright pessimism) is an invaluable attribute. So it is probably natural that I would feel slightly bemused having spent significant time in their company.

I am probably not on my own – I can fully understand Sir Alan Sugar’s perspective on marketing (“I've written books on advertising... cheque books”).  Yet, before I choose a collective noun, I have to accept that this is a year in which “they” have been right and I have been completely wrong.

I thought, given the economic backdrop, that 2009 would be a year of retreat for visitor attractions. Short term, it clearly wasn’t so.  More than 3/4 of ALVA members reported growth in 2009 and almost all of that was done with reduced marketing budgets.  The only significant falls come from known external factors – some Liverpool attractions have seen falls from a 2008 high driven by their status as European City of Culture.  “Stay-cation” was one of the buzzwords though, as Alan Love from BDRC pointed out, it has been less a question of people cancelling treks abroad and booking weeks in Scarborough, and more a question of people not holidaying at all – instead taking more local days out. I didn’t expect that so, there it is, I was wrong. I am one of a “sum” of accountants (not a “snooze” of accountants, as one unkind soul suggested…) who were too pessimistic.

To a last man/woman, our marketing rivals see only a possibility of growth next year. Can this be true? I would estimate that the average impact of stay-cation has been +15% this year. That seems to be a fair consensus and means that, if an attraction did less than that, they underperformed.  The marketing team for anyone who did more than that deserves credit.

But will stay-cation endure? There seem to be three possibilities:

1. life gets worse.  People stop going out.  Stay-cation dies.
2. life gets better.  People go to find the sun.  Stay-cation dies. (but we may make up some visitors elsewhere)
3. life stays where it is. People do the same things.  Stay-cation lives.  Hurray! (but no further growth)

I could bore you all (unless you are part of the snooze) on the reasons why things might well get worse out there in the greater economy.  But, you’re lucky – I don’t have to. I only have to point out that, as with 2009, there is a measurable risk of either points 1 or 2 happening. If either one happens, we have to brace ourselves for a dramatic downturn in visitor numbers and any marketing plans (indeed any expenditure plans) should be built to recognise that possibility. 

Listening to the folks at the ALVA conference, this was clearly not the case, with the exception of the publicly-funded museums where the economic dynamic is different (free entry for all but the prospect of the government axe falling on their expenditure budgets means that they have to contemplate what they would do with cuts of 10% or more).

So, should my chosen collective noun for marketing people recognise “short-sightedness”? (A blur of marketers?)Well, that would be a bit daft of me given my predictive accuracy of the last year.    People in glass houses etc.

It was notable that the biggest murmur of appreciation came when the National Trust’s  successful decision to ramp up marketing spend in 2009 was highlighted as if it was the model for all of us. Get real! They have a very different attitude to risk from the rest of us for very good reason.  A single bad decision on marketing (or anything frankly) is not going to bankrupt NT.  Or result in enforced redundancies.  That simply isn’t the case for the rest of us. They will have been incredibly rigorous in their decision-making process but their risk profile is just different.

There was clearly a yearning to follow NT’s path, balanced by a knowledge that it probably wasn’t going to happen.

Realism? Well, maybe.  No-one was really going to change their marketing strategy (ourselves included) for next year – there was a feeling that “it” had worked very well. But what if the year’s success really did come down to a stay-cation phenomenon? In that sense, we have not been successful at all.  It is one thing to take share from a static market (good marketing); it is another to simply drift up in a growing market (wasted marketing).

No-one wanted to talk about this.  Like I said, everyone sees only growth next year. So, optimism does seem to be the enduring trait amongst marketing people.

As, I have to say, is talking.  A “gaggle” maybe?

Having said that, looking at our own excellent team (Hannah Payne, Victoria Bellamy and Ulrika Ericson who have achieved 50% growth this year!!! Eat that, NT) are a distinctly sociable bunch so perhaps I should settle on a “bevy” of marketers. That would apply quite fairly to the lovely bunch at ALVA, who in the tradition of all marketers enjoyed the celebratory wine put out for lunch at the conference….. Tell me you didn’t see that pun coming.

Still, I’ve learnt my lesson from last year and from now on I refuse to be too negative:

All copyrights acknowledged and please do go to the Dilbert website for more of these!

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Water, water, everywhere

On Wednesday, I circumnavigated the M25. I’m told that, when it opened, people used to try to complete the circuit in an hour.  I would judge that rather more difficult today.  Anyway, my Honda which passed its 100,000 miles minutes after my last blog is now well past its 101,000 miles.

(I know the above is a rubbish picture but the key point here is that, after complaining two weeks ago about my inability to position pictures using the blogger.com interface anywhere but at the top of the post, I thendiscovered Microsoft Live Writer.  This is a free application which is part of Windows Live and can easily be downloaded from http://download.live.com/writer.  It is a cut-down word processor especially designed for blogging (offline!) but it links easily to your blogging account so that you can easily preview and play with layout just as if you were in something like Word.  Anyway, the above picture is not at the top of the post and nor will the next one be!)

What drove me to such levels of tedium?  (I refer to the M25, not to the geek-speak in the last paragraph. But I understand the possible confusion.)

Well…. for that, I need to tell you a story!

Blenheim Palace Natural Mineral Water is an important business for us.  The water course runs under the Palace and then flows across the estate towards Combe and beyond.  There are actually two water courses (deep down and about 10m apart) under the park.  We use the deeper one as it has a more distinctive taste – the higher one apparently tasted like Hildon!  It is a very stable supply, allowing us to claim the hallowed status of Natural Mineral Water.

The first bottling plant was actually at the Palace.  A wise veteran of the water industry (John Odell) had uncovered the water course and arranged to test it.  He and the Duke quickly went into a partnership which runs to this day.  Initially sold locally, the demand for the  water quickly outstripped the capacity of the plant, so the decision was made to follow the path of the water course and build a better water plant down at Park Farm, in the heart of Blenheim Park.  There, a much larger plant was built to fill glass bottles, and a second line was added to fill the large 19 litre bottles you see on top of commercial water coolers.

With the prestigious bottled water mainly sold into high end hotels and restaurants in London, the business has grown to a much larger size, selling over 2.5 million bottles a year. The local market has grown recently too, as Oxfordshire hotels and restaurants have become more sensitive to the environmental implications of shipping water from Scotland – or even, Lord help us, Fiji!

Blenheim Palace Natural Mineral Water drank in Oxford will not have moved more than ten miles in its life – and unlike mains water, it won’t have been through the human body seven times either. Go to our website for details of suppliers. PLEASE!!

Anyway, when I was appointed as Finance Director back in 2003, John (our CEO) thought it would be very funny to put me in charge of the water business (“oh, don’t worry, you’ll enjoy the P&L responsibility.” Ha!). In the run up to a trustees’ meeting, I have little time to spend on that business so I tend to over-react afterwards and run around to see customers etc.

Now, bear in mind that I am a simple Northern boy.  In the North, cities have a centre.  They’re not too big.  You can get around them fairly easily.

Bear something else in mind.  My knowledge of London is pretty lousy too. I may have worked there for six years but that only taught me where Canary Wharf, Oxford Street, Paddington and Marylebone are. I still think London is laid out exactly like a tube map.  And (fatally in this context) I have no idea where London starts and stops.

My plan was to visit two very important London business partners for our water business.  The first was Casa Julia, a wonderful Italian wholesaler which distributes a lot of our water into London.  The second was Love Water, a water cooler company supplying cooler water into London and the Southern Home Counties.

How hard could it be to visit two customers in London in one day.  Hell, I’d be back in time to do some work in the afternoon.

It was only as I checked my routes on Google Maps that I began to see the problem.  It turns out that the London which Casa Julia is based in is Braintree, Essex.  And it further turned out that the London Love Water was based in was…wait for it… London Gatwick.

It turns out that these two Londons are not exactly close to each other….

Come to think of it, they are not exactly near London either.

But it was a great trip nonetheless.  Casa Julia was a fascinating visit, which I undertook with our sales manager Bernie Drewell.  Enzo, who runs it, is a giant of a man who has patiently built up a wonderful operation over 30+ years.  Their site has a slight mirage quality to it, rising up beautifully out of an industrial estate

 

Yes this really is their warehouse! And they have built a mirror image opposite.  They are growing very quickly and working very hard to grow our business too, for which we are very grateful.  Their reputation among London hotels is very strong and they are treasured partners.  More than that, they insisted we join them for a light lunch and managed to produce delicious gluten free bread for sandwiches. I think I love them!

Love Water is a water cooler company in which we have made a sizeable investment, backing Nick Swan who we have known (and traded with) for many years.  He does not have beautiful offices but he does have a superb track record and, like the Casa Julia team, possesses great integrity – not always a given in any industry.

Thanks to guys like these, we will continue to grow this important business which is led by the completely inimitable Trevor Rawden. There are many photos which I could publish of this colourful man.  But don’t worry, Trevor, your secrets are safe with me (well, and everybody else too). I will confine myself to this showing Trevor and some of his team celebrating a recent contract win…… Luckily, we just happened to have a camera to hand to capture this spontaneous moment.

Our sales effort is led by Bernie Drewell and Alan Smith, an unstoppable combination who could write the manual on selling.  Where they get their stamina from I do not know but they keep Trevor and his team very busy!

We are very blessed in this business with the quality of partners we have and, as with all of our businesses, we try always to be great partners too. We know that, wherever our water goes, there also goes our name and reputation.  That is something we feel very relaxed about, due to the quality of our team, our product and our partners.

And that is why I was still smiling as I completed my circumnavigation (well, that plus the fact that United had just taken the lead against CSKA Moscow…..).

PS my challenge for next time is to work out how to wrap text around the photos :)

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I've just realised - I'm a FAT accountant

LORRY HITS PALACE SCANDAL - see end of blog for the exclusive story

Fairly disastrous meeting with my GP today. Apparently the reason I have chronic indigestion isn't anything external and dramatic like an ulcer, or even my blatant disregard of my gluten intolerance (how was I supposed to know that pizza had gluten, anyway?).

Oh no. Much, much worse.

According to HIM, I am overweight. Yes, this discomfort may in fact be MY OWN FAULT.

I am pretty sure that I was not overweight after doing the Blenheim Triathlon. In fact, without wishing to blow my own trumpet, I think I was in pretty good shape. I almost had a six-pack (I have one now, but without the plastic thingy that holds it all together). My tummy didn't flop over my trousers when I sat in the car. (Ooh, we'll come back to my car later.) I even ate healthy salads from Hampers pretty much every day, in a virtuous "my body is my temple" kind of way. And, of course, running and cycling everyday covers a whole lot of dietary sins.

Like before, I emerged from my early June triathlon determined to maintain this healthy state. Five seconds later, I decided to modify it slightly. After all, I had been good and trained every night for several months. Really, I deserved a treat, and what harm could a few evenings in front of the TV eating some cake do? Besides, training every night was very mean to my wife.

Roll on four months. Oh dear, I have adopted some very bad habits. I came slightly unstuck four weeks ago. I had been dropping my daughter off at school then heading to Starbuck's in Summertown and having a quick breakfast of coffee and a gluten-free chocolate brownie. You see, in my mind, "gluten free" equals "healthy". I had neatly screened out that fact that this gluten-free chocolate brownie was not actually sugar-free. Or chocolate free.

Anyway, by chance my wife and I had headed into Summertown at the weekend. She fancied a latte and a break so in we went. The girl at the counter smiled.

"Black decaf Americano to drink in, is it?" she said. Cue poisonous look from She Who Must Be Obeyed as realisation slowly dawned on her that this may not be my first visit...

That is, of course, the heart of all the problems. I have equated "gluten-free" with "healthy" for the last four months. e.g. Cadbury's Dairy Milk is in fact gluten free. Therefore, it is healthy.

Therefore, whenever I eat I now get chronic indigestion (except, annoyingly, when I eat either salad or, yes, you guessed it, Starbuck's gluten-free chocolate brownie). This biological ignorance is mainly due to my very poor science education - I didn't go much beyond the amoeba and do not have a clue what a protein is. Yes, Mr Potter, are you reading this? Are you proud?

Anyway, I haven't been back to Starbuck's recently.

I have had no sympathy whatsoever from the accounts team downstairs or the rest of the Estate Office. At least the team in Hampers have taken to waving salad boxes at me as I go in to dissuade me from choosing worse options.

Our property director has suggested regular runs around the lake which is more useful. Not as nice as chocolate, though. And, to be fair, he did egg me on to buy two meals from the chip shop yesterday, so he is probably feeling EXTREMELY GUILTY now he realises the pain I endured on his behalf.

My recovery, once I have let go of my GP's throat, will clearly have to be exercise-led since I lack will-power. Which means more Blenheim staff laughing at me as I run around the lake. I'm told I run like a girl, anyway.

Drifting on - mention of lake made me think of the Dam repairs up at the cascades - but our wonderful Dam repair people have managed to plant 35,986 bulbs around the top of the Dam. They are so cost-conscious that someone actually counted. Marvellous work but I am puzzled at how they did it. I only mention it because it seemed like a good idea two weeks ago to buy a bag of 200 mixed bulbs from Homebase. I have a fancy bulb-planter (a bit like a spade but it cuts a circular divot and pulls it out so that you can drop a bulb in the bottom then drop the divot on the top). The ground outside my house was so hard that I could not get a single bulb in. I accept that one reason I chose accountancy was my extreme physical incompetence in other areas but that was not the only reason for my failure. The ground was ludicrously hard. So I clearly need to find out how they did it before taking on the job again. Maybe the rain over the last few days has softened things a bit.

Anyway, I am stopping this blog now because my excellent never-goes-wrong car - a nine-year-old Honda Accord with a strangely-bent aerial - has reached 99991 miles. I am determined to be watching the dashboard as it flicks over to 100,000. Obviously watching the magic moment would be a bit dangerous on the A34 so I am going off now to drive around the Estate very slowly. It would be extra magic to photograph the moment although that would probably be impossible.

However hard you try, you could never catch that kind of moment. Although, one poor delivery driver driving through our main Hensington Gate in a large lorry might beg to differ. We got a report that a lorry (unknown) had managed to come through the gate so close to the big stone pillar that he had caught the "sticky-out" stone that caps the top. That's probably not the right name for it but I bet that is what the 18th century builders called it. Anyway, he was asked if it was him "wot did it". Believing he was on safe ground denying liability (and probably feeling a bit of a fool for aiming so badly), he proclaimed his innocence.

I mean, who would be so lucky as to take a photo at that exact moment? What would the odds of that be?

If I was any good at this, I would say the answer is at the foot of the page. But as I can't seem to put the photo at the bottom, the answer strangely enough is at the top of the page.

Yes the white thing to the right is a large piece of gate column obeying the laws of gravity.

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Jeri's baby

We were delighted to launch a new book at the Woodstock Literary Festival, our first book dedicated to the history and development of the gardens at Blenheim Palace. Jeri Bapasola has spent many many months researching new material for The Finest View in England: The Landscape and Gardens of Blenheim Palace - now out in hardback! While many of us know the broad brush-strokes of the big players (Henry Wise, "Capability" Brown and Achille Duchenne), Jeri has unearthed - mild pun intended - a wonderful wealth of detail on many other important contributors, not least several Dukes and many wonderful head gardeners.

Jeri has been one of the jewels of our business - an inspired researcher with a deep love of Blenheim Palace - who has produced a series of popular Blenheim Palace books (my favourite is Household Matters about the lives of the servants of the Palace) but this new book is her biggest opus yet. Watching her labour over the book is a little like watching someone go through pregnancy and labour (well, the view from outside the birth suite anyway - I'd probably be better to limit this particular metaphor). Yet she does it by choice and without getting a penny in royalties - simply happy to research the subject she loves and leave behind her a wealth of publications recording for posterity the stories she has uncovered and told.

For those of you who missed her launch and talk at the Woodstock Literary Festival (at which she was regaled by those Spencer-Churchills present), we will endeavour to persuade her to do some themed talks for our Annual Pass holders..... In the meantime, you will have to buy the book!

These books are all published by us rather than a third party, which means we take on the financial risk of printing everything up front - quite a commitment. But it was a relatively easy decision for a book filling a clear gap in our portfolio. As we stared at the main publishing business models, a friend pointed out that there was an older approach - publication by subscription. In older times, the first edition of a book would not be printed until a group of subscribers had been found to cover the cost of that first edition. the author would go to friends and sponsors, explain what the book was about and persuade 200 of them to pre-buy first editions in return for being named as a subscriber. If it then proved popular, the profits from the first edition would be reinvested in a second edition, which would be printed speculatively and so on.

Well, being a prudent (or mean, depending on your perspective) finance director, I persuaded Jeri and Odette Christie de Rivas (in our retail team) that this was the way to go. Did it work? Well, partly. We ended up with about 100 subscribers - whose names are beautifully printed in the front of the book - which both paid for a reasonable % of the print costs and also gave us confidence that the book would sell.

However, finding the subscribers was very hard work. Interestingly, writing to some of our Annual Pass holders produced slightly disappointing results, and an email shot to the rest of the database was even more disappointing. However, a Friends of Blenheim Palace cocktail party listened to a speech from our Chief Executive about news from Blenheim, in which he highlighted the subscription opportunity - and this speech triggered a rush of people into the arms of our waiting retail team and author and a lot of subscriptions. Obvious in retrospect, but not at the time, the vast majority of subscriptions were gifts to other people.

I suspect we will try this route again, applying our learnings from first time around. It was an interesting exercise which produced interesting insights into the level of engagement wanted by our visitors.

For those who did subscribe (including She Who Must Be Obeyed), they have the pleasure of both a very good book but also the knowledge that they have left their permanent mark of support on what will always be the definitive account of the gardens here at Blenheim Palace.

So, to Jeri, Odette, our retail team and all our subscribers - a big thank you!

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Autumn Fun

Had a lovely trip up to our friends at Harewood House on Friday, having a look at how they run their membership scheme. Their members are a much bigger part of their total business and they have been doing memberships for a long time so we are trying to learn as much as possible from people like them before we head into next year. If you do get up that way (they are just above Leeds) then I would definitely recommend a visit - this year the price includes a planetarium visit too! In Friday's balmy sunshine (Elaine tells me the sun always shines in Yorkshire), the Courtyard was a lovely relaxed lunch setting, with a side view of the penguins. Yes, really...

Our revised retail team lineup is taking shape, with Lucy heading off to Canada and Shelley Days has taken up a permanent contract with us. (And I do mean permanent, when you are a 300 year estate you do have a different sense of perspective from other enterprises - Shelley, did you really read the indefinite servitude clause?) The team had a superb stand at the very successful Blenheim Palace International Horse Trials and scored their highest ever sales at the event. The event itself was very well managed and enjoyed by a very large crowd - congratulations to Mandy Hervieu and her team for taking this event to another level.

And to my Spurs-supporting Chief Executive and Property Director, I have just two things to say to you. "Three" and "One". Sadly, Spurs title dreams evaporating appears to coincide with the melting away of the best of the Summer weather but do keep coming, we have so much more to offer you through the Autumn. Look out for Bike Blenheim Palace , The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival and Living Crafts for Christmas as well as our lowest ever priced Sunday Lunch in the Orangery!

Have a good week.

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Just stuff...

Wow, what an August we have had! OK, the weather was frustrating at times but we grew visitors by 50% in the month. One of the great things about Blenheim Palace is that we can, on the whole, grow visitor numbers without feeling particularly crowded so our visitors still get a great experience.

But it's back to school time now and that means the grown ups can come out to play. September is one of the best months to visit Blenheim Palace, with a glorious Indian Summer lighting the Palace and park landscape. I cannot let the moment pass without pointing out that if you have an Annual Pass (and why wouldn't you?) then you can come in and enjoy a briefer visit at no cost! I would particularly recommend a walk with a friend around Queen's Pool after the kids have gone to school....

Despite the busy Summer, our staff have grabbed the chance for holidays far and wide and have come back revitalised, just in time to relieve our wonderful seasonal staff who drive us through the Summer. Many of those are university students who come back to help us year after year - these are now heading back in waves to university. Well, except Emily File in our retail team whose term does not start until 8 OCTOBER. As her dad pointed out, more time for her to earn money.

One person sadly is going further and wider - we also say goodbye to popular retail assistant manager Lucy Tarrant who for some reason has decided to flee to Canada for a year. Was it something we said? Good luck Lucy, you'll be missed... hope you come back to us soon (with a Mountie in tow as discussed).

For myself, I did not go far (or indeed anywhere) but I did take a week to experience Oxford, with walks around the colleges, punting, Shakespeare on the roof of the Said Business School and, yes, a trip on an open-roofed double decker tourist bus! All great fun and very refreshing.

While we are generally staffing down, it is not a one-way process and we are looking to welcome two key members of new staff. Hopefully today we will confirm the appointment of a new retail supervisor to help replace Lucy. We are also about to start interviewing for a new role - Head of Membership. Yes, there are so many Annual Pass members out there (73,000 and counting) that we have decided to appoint someone very special to look after you all properly. We have had a great response to the advert and hope to make an announcement soon. This important role underlines our commitment to the Annual Pass scheme for the future.

Have a great weekend.

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What really matters when the world is on fire?

Sorry I fell out of the blogosphere for a while. We had a dramatic personnel issue which both sucked time and also preoccupied me (in the sense that every time I sat down to blog, all I could think about was this particular issue - which I was well aware I could not speak/write about).

When you are badly let down by someone you trust completely in a work environment, it is highly disruptive. I have spent a lot of time re-examining every aspect of that relationship and many aspects of that person's work. But, more insidiously, I ended up challenging the very notion of workplace trust - and that is a very dangerous path down which to go. Trust and confidence are very much the cornerstones of a functioning business and it is truly unfair on other colleagues when I start to treat them in a way which implies that I do not fully trust them (or feel that I need to corroborate things that they tell me).

On the other hand, those people who trust me to do my job effectively and protect their interests are entitled to expect that I will not make the same kind of mistake twice. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice.....

So, I don't know what path to walk at this point but I'd better work it out very soon. Oddly there does not appear to be much advice out there. I know my personal credibility has taken a hit with this incident so I need a strategy to rebuild that, if possible. Suggestions on a postcard please.

On a positive note, my mood was lifted recently by the visit of an good friend and someone whose business acumen I greatly admire - Simon McCrum from Darbys Solicitors. Simon cut his spurs in my old stamping ground (North West) at Pannones - a firm which took off in a very distinctive direction and grew quickly, not so much by rewriting the rulebook as simply cheerfully writing a new one. Now he and his partners at Darbys are seeking to break new ground by redefining the normal relationship between the public and lawyers with their Blue and Purple schemes. Simon is a fascinating guy who never loses sight of where he is going and knows how to rate and value his people. Writing a new business model once is impressive; if he can pull it off a second time, that will be a spectacular achievement.

As he recounted his story, one point that came across clearly (a point made in "The Upside of the Downturn" by Geoff Colvin) was the importance of "setting fire to the platform on which you are standing" i.e. it is difficult to convince a management team of the need for violent change if things are going reasonably well. Simon clearly set out his vision of impending crisis in the legal profession so that his partners would see why he was going to take the firm in a whole new direction. Having shared that vision, they committed to leaving "the burning platform" as soon as possible. Colvin uses this image to explain why recession is actually a great time to creatively rebuild a business - i.e. it is not hard to convince people that there is a need to change when the economy is on the rocks anyway. Buy One Day, Get 12 Months Free is our response to the burning platform and we intend to evolve it into a new relationship with local people.

Are we still on a burning platform? FTSE at a relative high. France and Germany have announced the end of their technical recessions. Bernanke has been given an early second term endorsement at the Fed and a bounce in all the Business Confidence surveys has been widely reported.

I still smell flames. I reproduce here almost ALL the headlines from the first two pages of the Guardian's business section today:

1. Toyota ponders UK output cuts as sales slump
2. What next after the scrappage scheme is scrapped?
3. US hotels let the stars go out as luxury becomes...taboo
4. Global advertising slump cuts profits in half at Sorrell's WPP
5. Downturn leads to dive at Five with revenue plunging 35%
6. Fujitsu cuts 10% of British jobs as IT work dries up
7. One child in six at home with no working parent

I don't see enough people responding to this burning platform. Simon and Darbys are unusual in redefining parts of their business model, as are we.

So do as Simon Says (oh, tell me you didn't see that one coming!). Set fire to your own platform or expose the flames which are already burning - with your trusted team, stop pretending that you are doing OK to survive the crisis thus far (if nothing else, remind your colleagues that unemployment is forecast to remain at record highs for several years). One of the great benefits of this approach is you get to see who is creative, unflappable and trustworthy when the fire is lit - and who ought to be left behind. In truth, no single leader can transform an organisation - he can only be the driving catalyst and focus of a team effort. While Simon has the likeable self-belief of someone who believes he can change the world, he is the first to admit that taking the team with him was a vital pre-condition.

While we at Blenheim Palace are ahead of the curve in changing our business model in this turbulent environment, perhaps now is the right time to focus on the people who have made that journey with us, because in truth every last one of them has done a superb job. It turned out that when the fire was lit, we had an amazing team who focussed and delivered all the way.

And that probably neatly answers the question of trust I posed myself at the beginning. I would be doing a great disservice to everyone if I let one very bad apple distort my appreciation of the wonderful team we have here. The power of a trusted team unleashed far outweighs the damage caused by one errant individual.

Thanks for listening to this stream of consciousness - I feel better for letting it flow.

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Smell the roses

Ooh, after weeks of being terribly inconsistent in my blog, today I am doing one EARLY. I'm very proud of this fact although it probably is a prelude to grinding out the most tedious blog entry of my life, or even forgetting to publish it at the end.

Anyway, the dreaded VAT inspectors are out tomorrow (actually, to be totally fair, they are very nice people) which will probably stop me from blogging then. Tonight we have a Friends of Blenheim Palace cocktail party. Don't tell the Duke - who is opening a village hall somewhere - but we might even be noisy without paying extra. 150 guests are coming to what should be a lovely evening. I may even upload some photos if I can figure out the camera on my Blackberry. Usually when I attempt to take a photo I seem to set off the Sat Nav.

The Summer trustees meeting came and went without incident but with a very nice lunch. I am delighted to say that we are trading pretty well given this dreadful economic environment and we are determined to continue to invest in our people and our visitors.

Anita (head of finance) is back after being knocked off her bike last week - good thing too given the impending arrival of VATman. Chris Keeler (our Head of Maintenance) and Clive Wilkins (Head of Construction) both slaved away for several days and passed/repassed their CITB exams - a fantastic achievement. I wonder why Roger File (Property Director) didn't volunteer to take the exams? Roger?

Actually, I quite fancy some more studies. I remember when I left the City to work in Oxford I looked with delight at all the continuing education courses available in the evenings (Cosmology to Indian Head Massage, Haute Cuisine to Tai Chi, Car Mechanic to Middle East Politics) and I quite fancied the then new Said Business School. Six years on, I have done sod-all. IT WILL CHANGE... Have to see if anyone else around here fancies something similar. Always good to have moral support. Actually the cooking one sounds really tempting; or maybe I have been watching too much Masterchef.

Perhaps this is a big part of the strain on the further education system - not just new graduates wanting to stay on but a whole bunch of relics like me wanting to get more from life, just when it looks like we might all be getting something less from life for a while. It is even possible to discern this trend in the massive increase in local visitors here and across the National Trust (yawn, no, we are not National Trust but I think there is an offer on in the NT magazine to come here cheaply - sorry, we've had that question just a few times before). We are just starting to take an interest in the things around us, wanting to get more from each day, maybe forget our daily stresses a little bit.

Fancy that haute cuisine course, anyone?

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