At the time of the announcement to award the games to London I was absolutely delighted. I remember watching it on the big screen in Victoria Square, Birmingham.

I wouldn’t go as far as saying I wish we hadn’t got the games but there are certain consequences of being host nation that do concern me, aside from the ticketing debacle.

Most of the issues stem from the ‘need’ to enter athletes and teams in sports as host nation. This seems to have led to a plethora of inconsistencies about selection.

As I understand it the BOA seem to have insisted we take up places in most sports, thus we have a scratch Handball team and the ongoing farce over the ‘GB’ (i.e. England U 23′s cum not good enough to play internationals) football team.

Contrast these nebulous Olympic participants with the experience of the GB Rhythmic Gymnastics team who I saw compete at the Gymnastics ‘London Prepares’ test event at the O2, Greenwich this week. This group of girls has self funded themselves over the last couple of years. British Gymnnastics set a  self – imposed Olympic qualifying benchmark which the team failed to meet by just 0.273 of  a mark in the group all-round competition at the gymnastics test event on Tuesday, only to beat the score 24 hours later.

‘You can’t go to the Olympics’ say British Gymnastics, yet sport is littered with governing bodies who allow athletes months to reach qualifying standards. It seems so arbitrary not to allow this group of committed young women to compete, given they have in fact achieved what was asked of them, albeit a day after the event targeted. 

So we have the unedifying prospect of multi millionaire David Beckham being an Olympian whereas a group of young people, prepared to make huge sacrifices to be in London won’t be allowed to. Well done the sporting authorities; you must be very proud.

On reflection perhaps my stint as a business development manager was at least in part about bid management. I managed bid writing processes but had some contact with the client and used strategic sales techniques such as Miller Heiman, hence the ‘business development’ tag.

In my present role as a bid manager there is a definite distinction between the two roles. Business development is entirely client facing whilst bid management is all about marshalling internal resource to produce an effective bid, including writing material that goes into the bid and co-ordinating the quality of the bid ‘solution’ as a whole. From  this distinction it follows that business development occurs much earlier in the bidding cycle, with managers unearthing opportunities via relationships with clients. Bid Management, in its purest sense only kicks in once a business development manager presents the opportunity (usually a Request to Participate or Invitation to Tender) for a bid manager to do his/her stuff.

Simplistically, but also often accurately ‘business development’ is about sales, client relationships and account management. ‘Bid Management’ is a set of skills based around effective writing and project management.

Having done both of the roles I am not convinced that the distinction needs to be as marked or delineated as often is the case. A good bid manager would surely only benefit from exposure to the client and thus better understanding of what the written response should be. A business development manager having experience of bid writing is again, only a good thing. Awareness of deadline driven bid management work will allow a ‘BDM’ to work effectively in tandem with the bid manager.

I understand why the distinction is made. A certain subject or domain specialism is often an imperative and thus those with knowledge of an industry develop the business and take lead in client facing activity. ‘Bid Management’ is quite a fledgling profession and it is in the interests of such as the APMP and those advocating use of Shipley principles that bid management is seen as a real specialism.

I just feel that demarcating the roles to the fullest extent does neither job holder a good service. Effective partnership between BDM and bid manager has to be the best way forward. Without such partnership bids may be submitted without understanding client needs and opportunities may be passed to bid managers which organisations have little chance of winning.

What do others think? Do you wear ‘bid manager’ as a badge of honour or do you see merit in dipping in and out of ‘business development’? As a BDM do you recognise that without some exposure to effective bid writing techniques your sales armoury is severely depleted? 

I think there are two sides of the equation here. An organisation has to understand both aspects to be effective.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,400 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 40 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

The 4.45 a.m. alarm call on a Monday signifies the start of my working week. So its down to Sutton via the M40/M25/M3 and back home to Halesowen for about 8 on a Friday night. Actually I have managed to get back on a Thursday once and not gone down until Tuesday night on another occasion.

Aside from the obvious difficulty about being away from the family what am I learning so far?

1. Bid Management inside a corporate employer is a lot different from bid management consultancy as a freelancer or interim. It may be just the type of bids I am working on but the basic differences are a) the deadlines come thick and fast and b) corporate governance and process is far more important ‘within the company’ as opposed to as ‘advisor to the company’. The 2/3 week windows you have to complete bids in are actually quite liberating as (to date) you don’t have the sleepless nights associated with long-term complex bids and projects. The flipside is that perhaps as an individual you don’t get to iinfluence the bid content or perhaps more accurately strategy compared with when you are engaged as an advisor or consultant.

2. I can cook for myself (by ‘cook’ I mean place large quantities of pasta and accompanying ingredients and/or tomato based sauce, chicken, chili and herbs and place in a wok prior to freezing for future use)

3. Having time to blog/Tweet and update LinkedIn status is a challenge. Actually much of the stuff I am now working on is confidential in nature. After years of needing to promote myself and engage with folks on social media I suddenly find it difficult to say much about work.

4…so being in a large company whilst attractive in many ways does present challenges. I need to find a balance between doing the job well and not completely disengaging from past associates and colleagues. In the present climate I think everyone has to carry on networking, even if 9as for me at present) working relationships are primarily internal ones.

5. Southerners are surprisngly friendly. Actually I knew this already from a previous stint associated with Tribal in Stratford, East London. Mind you they are still clueless about travel outside of the M25 and good beer is an alien concept to them! I do hope to educate them in the coming months.

6. Being away from the public sector is at this time at least a very good thing. Whilst some of the bids I will be working on will be for public sector clients, the culture and client base is overridingly private sector. I am not one to believe that private is good, and public is bad…however when you spend much of your working life surrounded by people with their chins on the floor well, so you end up like that too. The public sector does feel besieged at the moment. For all the pressures of the private sector I am happy to be there.

As trailed in previous blog entries I have now started my new job as a bid manager.

To say this is a challenging time and one of some significant change is perhaps an understatement:

• I am living away from home Mon-Fri.
• I have started a job in an organisation that employs 20,000+ in the UK; rather than being self-employed.
• The bids I am managing are in an industry I have relatively little prior experience in.

So…new job, new(ish) profession, new industry sector and new temporary home are quite enough to be going along with.

I am working in Sutton, South London and living in Epsom, Surrey. Having been at work and in that area for three weeks now I can certainly say that it is a long way from the West Midlands, geographically and culturally. I will say more about the work challenges and my observations on the minutiae of the Monday-Friday career ‘tourist’ life in future blog entries.

All I will say on that score is the sign on the front of a bus in Ewell Village on Thursday night read ’I am awfully sorry but I am out of service.’ You don’t get that in Dudley!

Early days. Being away from the family is a wrench. My first bid went in without alarm this week and I am learning a lot which will stand me in good stead in the future I am sure. 

My cooking is going okay. My running seems a lot easier down South than up here.

Anyway the 4.45 a.m. alarm beckons tomorrow. Good night.

Given that 15,000 runners will be lining up it seems reasonable that acquaintances who know I run have been asking if I am doing it. The answer is ‘no, I am not’. Instead I am toeing the line tomorrow in the Midlands Counties Cross Country Relays. I have been selected for the heady heights of Halesowen ‘C’ and will be slogging around 6k of grass, mud and woodland on Saturday as opposed to 13.1 miles of tarmac on Sunday.

Earlier this month I took part in the Worcestershire County 10k Championships at Stourport which was was run as part of the ‘Stourport Shuttle 10k’ race open to all-comers including ‘fun runners’ and joggers. Back in March I was fortunate enough to be part of the Gold Medal team in the Worcestershire Half Marathon Championships. Again this was run as part of a race open to all as the ‘Droitwich Half Marathon’.

At the two Championship races open to all, my club fielded 4 athletes in the first race and 2 in the 10k (not even enough for a team) In events such as the aforementioned Midland Counties relay and the Birmingham Cross Country League we regularly see 15/20 of our athletes turn up.

Following a conversation I recently had with a club mate it seems to me that the ‘fun runner’ and the ‘club runner’ inhabit completely different worlds.

The former enters primarily road races, seeks personal best opportunities and cherishes the myriad of medals and cotton t-shirts that appear in ‘goody bags’.

The latter runs for his/her team in league races over cross country courses and has no expectation of medals, though my experience tells me they sometimes wear race t-shirts 20 years after the event!

Club runners to some extent (and I am one of them) look down on mass participation races and refer to them as ‘commercial races’ and it has to be said that the entry fees are sometimes eye wateringly high (c.£30 for the Great Birmingham run) as opposed to free races or £5/6 for races affiliated to the local county association or league.

It just strikes me that the current situation does neither camp any favours. The club runner misses the chance to be part of a team in road races whilst the ‘fun’ runner is probably blissfully unaware of the chance to compete on the country or in smaller races.

Of course there are clubs that don’t adhere to the ‘Harrier tradition’ and styled as running clubs as opposed to athletics clubs they tend to compete in these commercial races but don’t emphasise cross country races.

I understand that governing bodies and county associations in athletics sit on rather big bank balances. Putting some of this into initiatives that bring together runners would be a very good idea.

I’s to be dotted and T’s to be crossed aside, at the end of October I am taking a new job in the field of Bid Management in a sector that has nothing whatsoever to do with evaluations, community renewal, enterprise, feasibility studies or stakeholder consultation. It is not a case of being ecstatic at doing something else but I have to say that the writing has been on the wall for regeneration consultancy for quite a while, both personally and as an industry.

Here are my reflections on regeneration and self-employment.

1. Personally its not been all bad news. I suppose my confidence professionally must have taken a knock. I was made redundant in both 2009 and 2010. Within this context I am quite proud that I have done rather better than scratch around for a living since starting my own business in August 2010. I have managed  to gain a number of paid clients and have manged to pay myself as well.

2. It’s a strange thing to do as a sole trader though, regeneration. Whether in my bid writing, social media or ‘straight’ consultancy guises I have done my best to ‘network’. The thing is though that at networking events for self-employed people and small businesses you tend to meet other self-employed people. Frankly how many one (wo)man bands need a quick evaluation or LinkedIn training session knocked up? Not many I can see. So the regen practitioner really needs to be networking with the public sector, professions and larger private sector businesses which isn’t so easy.

3. We are engaged in a race to the bottom. From 2000-2009 I reckon I worked on something like 75 assignments. Day rates went progressively up and at my peak at the most senior non-directorial level in small/medium consultancies I was charged out at a rate of £850 and clients didn’t blink twice at this. In  2011 in terms of both consultancy and interim management I have failed to win work as day rates of less than £200 have won the day.

4. It’s only going to get worse. Number 3 is being exacerbated by the entry into the jobs and consultancy market of masses of RDA, Business Link and other public sector redundant workers. This is a problem. I already know that people armed with pay-offs are offering to do work for virtually nothing to establish consultancy track record and ‘to tide me over until I retire’. Regardless of the merits of these people as consultants as opposed to managers (and my experience tells me that some people will make excellent consultants but many more won’t) they are likely in the short term to do okay as their contact lists of public sector commissioners will be far more up to date than someone like me who has been in the public sector facing but private sector environment for 10 years plus.

5. And once the short-term price advantages of competitors come to an end what then? Fundamentally regeneration is now a supply side industry. There are hundreds of us out there, whether we call ourselves regeneration consultants, business advisers, economic development advisers or community workers many, many people will have relied on the public sector to fund their business activity. Frankly, the public sector buyer no longer exists in sufficient numbers. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that regeneration is a bit like coal mining in 1985…in its last throes, at least as a paid profession.

6. …I am not entirely convinced that that is entirely a bad thing by the way.  Some people (Gentlemen ‘Amateurs’ community activists and politicians that tend to be very right or very left wing in perspective) have long held the view that regeneration isn’t or shouldn’t be an ‘industry’ and that self help and ‘bottom up’ renewal are the keys to effective regeneration. Perhaps these voices are right. Perhaps not. Certainly ‘content light’ but ‘peer help heavy’ models and initiatives such as Voluntary Mentoring and Start-Up Britain are building up a head of steam. I am not sure what they will achieve but a consequence is that there is less money being paid to erstwhile professional advisers.

7. I am looking forward to the next challenge. I certainly have 10 years plus as a regeneration consultant to thank for gaining my new position. The good news is that clearly some skills are very transferable, chiefly bid writing and bid management. In the final analysis perhaps spending your working life with people who either a) are worried about being made redundant or b) have lower budgets than before or c) want you to work for them for nothing rubs off on you and I really do think that most people in regen are walking around with their chins on the floor.

8. Straw does break the camel’s back. I was part of a consortium that ‘won’ some work two weeks ago only to be told three days later that the work would not be forthcoming as the organisation was having to make savings including job losses.

I just need a new environment. You struggle to get a sandwich provided by the public sector these days. I went to a conference with my soon to be colleagues on Thursday night where a sumptuous meal and unlimited beer and wine were free all night . I am beginning to see that although the economic picture is bad, some sectors and some individuals are carrying on their normal business without having to micro-analyse and worry about the latest crackpot initiative dreamt up by a politician.

Perhaps I may re-emerge as a voluntary board member of some regen initiative or other. Perhaps I may come back to regeneration consultancy in time. For now it is a case of ‘au revoir’.

My future blog entries will have more on my new role and probably a few more opinion pieces on the things that matter to me. The shackles are off I guess.

There was a Wolves specific reason for my non-renewal. In two words Glenn Hoddle. His stultifying boring football coupled with his lack of respect for the club and its supporters (not attending tribute dinners for ex-players etc) meant at that time as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t ‘Wolves’ at all I was watching. I guess there was also ‘context’ in that our one season at that time spent in The Premier League 2003/04 had seen us crash to earth with a big bang.

You see I went to my first Wolves match in 1976. That was just seventeen years since we had last been English Champions…think of that today Liverpool fans and how you must feel you have a right to be successful more than 20 years since your last Championship. So I was brought up fully expecting us to maintain our record of being one of the 10 most successful English clubs (check your stats up to 1980 ish) and to regularly challenge for league and cup honours. I could write off the Bhatti era and our extraordinary tumble from top league to Div Four as an extraordinary one off. The Steve Bull-inspired renaissance and the years of frustration  and stagnation under Sir Jack Hayward was merely and surely a hiatus before the mighty Wolves reclaimed their rightful place at the top of English football.

Then we got promoted in 2003.

It came as an absolute shock to realise that ‘smaller clubs’ such as Bolton, Middlesbro, Birmingham, Blackburn, Fulham, Reading et al were pretty much on a par with us and in some cases likely to be more successful in the medium term, given established Premier League status. What had happened you see was that Sky/Premier League came along just at the wrong time for Wolves. We were at a low ebb when the ‘EPL’ started in 1992 and thus our natural ‘place’, I think, is now somewhere between 15th and 30th in the English League rather than indisputably top 15 as it was for the first 100 years or so of the professional game. Clubs with longer Premier League membership have more money, can pay higher wages, and ergo are likely to be more successful.

So in essence I think football has lost some of its competitive bite. The economics of the game is such that finishng 11th in the Prem, I think, is broadly equivalent to winning the old Football League Championship for a traditional ‘big’ provincial team like Wolves (or Albion, or Forest, or Sheffield clubs, or Derby, or Sunderland, or Leeds, et al) If you can’t win the league is there any point competing or at least in avidly following your team?

Maybe my decision to stop having a season ticket does at least seem rational given the narrative above. The Premier League, is, essentially a ‘World League’ that happens to be in England. My hunch is that there are far more 5-0 drubbings in the top flight  than the other three divisions combined. I also think that Wolves beating Chelsea or Man U or Man C or Liverpool (as we did all of them last season) is probably more of a shock than Plymouth or Hereford beating Wolves, such is the gulf in resources amongst Premier League clubs.

I have only been to Wolves once this season, our abject defeat vs QPR. Aside from 2005/06 when I only visited Molineux twice I have got into the habit of going to 8-10 games a season, mostly at the ‘business end’ after Christmas. It is great to pick and choose games and I have started to play more sport and it is so much better for one’s mental health not to have to invest your emotions solely on how 11 footballers perform in determining whether you have a good weekend or not. Put it this way I used to envy the ‘I haven’t missed a game home or away for 10 years’ merchants; now I merely pity them.

This isn’t to say that I no longer have a deep emotional attachment to the Wolves. I do. After all Wolverhampton Wanderers are just about the only tangible connection I still have with my home town. I still feel this lump in the throat every time ‘me babbies’ emerge from the tunnel at Molineux and the insane pride I felt when my daughter was with me last year to see us beat Chelsea and Albion was well…insane.

So…given the history of Wolves which has basically been a 30 year period of decline and stagnation it really troubles me that fairly large factions of our support seem more than dissatisfied with simply the best thing to ever happen to Wolves in the 35 years I have supported them…Mick McCarthy. Those of you who follow the game will know that this guy came in to the club in 2006 and has dragged it up by its bootstraps from a threadbare squad predicted to be near the bottom of the Championship to a team playing its third straight season in the top flight…something Wolves last achieved more than 30 years ago.

Much of the dissatisfaction appears to stem from the fact that he is perceived to have favourites such as Karl Henry and will not play in-form players such as Adlene Guedioura and Adam Hammill. I wouldn’t argue that some of this criticism is justified. Funadamentally, my question to the ‘McCarthy Out’ lobby is what do you think the effect of playing different players would ultimately be? I think we might finish 12th or 13th rather than 15th or 16th. In other words it won’t make a great deal of difference. We have a fantastic manager, our players are never, ever associated with unsavoury off the field antics you read about amongst other clubs’ players and with the brief exception of the lower division teams under Graham Turner for the first time in 35 years I feel that the players care as much as I do. Bluntly if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

I really have enjoyed seeing this Wolves team take shape under Mick McCarthy. It would be lovely to think that football fans (not just Wolves supporters) could take a view that looks at the big picture rather than the most recent game. To Wolves fans in particular ‘what do you think changing the manager would actually achieve?’ Because if you think we are suddenly going to become a top half Prem team on a regular basis I am afraid that ship sailed in 1995 as soon as John ‘McGitley’ poleaxed David Kelly with his elbow and then went down the other end and scored the goal to put us out of the play-offs. Yes, I do have a long memory; it would serve all of us better if other people took a similar view.

Those readers with an interest in business support will recall that the StartUp Britain initiative caused something of a furore when it was launched in March this year. Many of the critics presumably had axes to grind as proponents of paid business support. Inevitably the PR/campaign tone of StartUp Britain would be anathema to many such individuals. Perhaps both the hardest hitting and in my view justifiable criticism was aired here: http://postdesk.com/blog/why-startup-britain-is-nothing-more-than-a-government-backed-link-farm

It is interesting to note that in the six months since it’s inception the critics of StartUp Britain have become far less vocal. A glance at the website shows a certain amount of cleaning since the start http://www.startupbritain.org/ now has a little less emphasis on the corporate sponsors, though personally the simplistic  4 ‘top tips’ approach to starting a business grates somewhat.

So how was the bus tour event and are we any nearer to understanding what StartUp Britain actually is and whether there is substance to it.

The good news was that both the event sponsors and the ‘experts’ to be found on the bus were primarily local and small. There is no way you can level the criticism that StartUP Britain is merely about corporates pushing business services to start-ups, well not at the Black Country event at least. I was also heartened to hear the ‘StartUp Black Country’ lead Gary Lennon say that business start-up is not for everyone.

On the downside, the actual bus itself was full of display material for Barclays, Intuit, Paypal etc and frankly felt like a travelling advert rather than a resource to help a business to start and prosper. Emma Jones, CEO of StartUp Britain also stated that we should be encouraging everyone to start in business, which I think is entirely the wrong message to be giving to people.

So in essence we had 30 minutes of a quite informative spiel on the Black Country, its business performance and brief words from local sponsors and experts followed by the opportunity to talk to both local experts and the core corporate sponsors on and around the vicinity of the vehicle itself. You have to say that the attendance of c.100 people was pretty impressive and certainly far in excess of what your average Enterprise Agency and/or Business Link would attract to a ‘business awareness seminar’ or some such ilk. 

I think my view on StartUp Britain is quite ambivalent.

I don’t like the way the start-up message is being delivered via the initiative. Encouraging everyone to start in business is dangerous and misguided. Despite the welcome inclusion of local experts at the tour events it still feels like ‘big businesses doing things to small businesses’ when you look at the website.

I am also still unsure as to what StartUp Britain actually is.  Today, I gleaned that it is a campaign with a likely shelf life of 3 years. It also has a Chief Executive (can campaigns have staff?) despite not offering any business advice per se and a burgeoning network of local champions whose actual interest in/remuneration from StartUp Britain is less than clear. Bluntly I am not sure whether StartUp Britain is an actual entity or merely a promotional vehicle.

Yet in the final analysis I am not sure that my perception about lack of clarity actually matters that much. The fairly big caveat aside that I really don’t like the message of ‘anyone can be self-employed’ it has to be stated that if today is anything to go by the initiative is being successful at drawing in would-be starters and young businesses to talk to each other and provide peer-to-peer assistance.

A nagging thought occurs. I wish the government of the day and in particular the ‘celebrity’ entrepreneurs had put so much effort into banging the self-employment drum at a time when professional business support was widely available. What a powerful offer you would have with a national promotional campaign allied to free, impartial business advice. To coin a phrase that particular ‘bus has departed’.

Two cheers for StartUp Britain.

It was Autumn 2007 and if my memory serves me correctly it was the week of, or at least was very close to the time that there was a ‘run’ on Northern Rock. To me at least this was the first sense that something was about to go very wrong economically.

I was at the Regeneration & Renewal Awards on my first and thus far only visit to the exclusive Hurlingham in Fulham, West London. For any of you that are unfamiliar with the place it makes the All England Club and Queens Club look like municipal tennis courts. Famed as much for croquet these days it is an exclusive members club. We were royally entertained by comic Fred MacAuley, ate a hearty meal and no doubt looked very dapper in our DJs  (most of the attendees were men, of course)

I had some reservations about the event at the time. My erstwhile employer was treating it as a chance to network, meet potential clients and to some extent exchange notes with competitors. Nothing about the recipients of regeneration you notice and this ethos was certainly reflected in the awards categories with the physical and professional aspects of regeneration emphasised to a greater extent than the revenue or community aspects.

Fast forward four years and I note that the very same awards event is coming up; downmarket mind you, merely at a 4 star hotel overlooking Hyde Park so clearly the recession is biting. It is £190 to attend the event which given that regeneration is meant to be about assisting deprived areas makes it absolutely clear who the event is aimed at i.e. the ‘profession’ such as planners, architects and developers. No doubt terms like ‘mixed use development’ will feature highly.

There must be people willing and able to pay this as the event simply wouldn’t take place otherwise. My view is that ‘regeneration’ awards would be more appropriately held in a venue which may actually have been regenerated such as a community centre or somewhere similar. How about a ‘bring your own food and drink’ and ‘we will supply the cutlery and crockery’ do?. Latch on some study tours and get some local folks to talk. There you have it; a regeneration awards ‘do’ that sits comfortably with what the activity is meant to be about.

Did anyone just see that flying pig?