Marketing Mentor

A colleague has asked me to pose a question to businesses large and small.....

Do you know what role a mentor fulfils? Specifically would you consider using a marketing mentor to improve your organisational and personal business performance? Perhaps an expert who would come in each month to work with the MD/Chief Exec to progress strategic plans or perhaps work with an inexperienced marketing team to get them working more effectively?

Would their membership of the Chartered Institute of Marketing be important to you? Do you understand what membership means?

Any thoughts would be welcome including the price you would pay for such a service?

CEO's working together

It can be a lonely place being a CEO. That is why I’m writing this blog and have set up the South East Charity Forum ( See my article of the 13th May ). The SECF meetings are proving to be an excellent support network as well as brains trust. At the last meeting on the 18th the discussions around the recession and collaborative working where both informative and inspiring. I for one am delighted to see CEO openly sharing their expertise and concerns. SECF is a great example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. As the SECF grows I’m convinced we will be able to speak as one voice for charities in the region. That is a powerful incentive to be involved.

Numbers

With all this talk about our deficit and debut it is difficult to get your head around the vastness of the figures. From what I understand, people don't really understand exactly what a million is compared to a billion. Our brains just aren't wired to think in numbers that large. A million sounds a lot but how much can you visualise the difference between that and a billion? Well a million seconds equate to 12 days and a billion seconds equals 31 years!

Checking my maths;
60x60x24*12 = 1,036,800
Taking into consideration that a year would be 365.25 days because of leap years.
86400*365.25*31 = 978,285,600
(almost a billion. Rounding up is fine)

A billion is 1,000 times bigger than a million, but this doesn't impact our minds as much as we like to think it does. We still don't understand even what a million really is. To us it’s just a word. It’s not a number like 5, for instance, that we can visualise. We can hold our hand up with 5 fingers and count them, but try peaking at a crowd of a million people and accurately guessing how many are there!

However, the 12 days to 31 years really illustrates the difference for me. I’m prepared for some hard times ahead if we are to recover from our countries debt. A happy little thought for the end of a week!

South East Charity Forum

I have launched a new discussion forum to enable Chief Executives of charities in the South East to discuss ideas and share opinions on key topics and concerns in the sector. The South East Charity Forum builds on my vision and has been developed with the support of asb law and Kingston Smith LLP.
“The South East Charity Forum is all about CEOs coming together to assist each other and to share knowledge, experience and best practice with a view to developing stronger leadership and management in the region and the sector,” according to Margaret Craton, partner at asb law. “It also provides an opportunity for them to network with other charity heads, and support their peers at a local level.”
We held the inaugural meeting in January when Debra Allcock Tyler, chief executive of the Directory of Social Change and author of ‘It’s tough at the top’( which is also the tile of a course I run at the DSC ), gave a stimulating presentation to 25 chief executives on the issues currently facing the sector. Feedback from the delegates after the meeting was positive with comments such as “an excellent start”, “interesting and informative meeting” and “a good range of charities represented”.
David Montgomery, partner at Kingston Smith LLP, said: “The feedback from the first event proved its value. The members of the forum will decide on the subjects to be discussed in the future, and there’s no shortage of ideas. The next event will give charity chiefs the opportunity to discuss ways to ride out the current economic situation and prepare for the upturn when it does come, for while the recession may be officially over, we’re not out of the woods just yet.”
Membership of the South East Charity Forum is open to chief executives of charities in the region with an income in excess of £500,000 and by invitation only. In order to ensure diversity I have set up the forum to have a revolving chair. Diana Greenman of Music in Hospitals will chair the second event on 18th May at St Catherine’s Hospice, Crawley. The main discussion theme will be ‘The recession – how to ride the storm and use the opportunity to leverage change’

Election Comment

Following on from the election and my last blog with the manifesto for small charites it would seem on the face of it a hung parliament could have some positive outcomes for small charities. All three of the main parties have promised to improve things for small charities in one way or another. We hope that the parties who finally form the government work constructively together to achieve what is best for the sector. We would hope that working together to achieve consensus and compromise will result in a more rigorous approach that addresses the real concerns of small charities and will not result in delays and confusion.