Author name: David Parkin

IT is quite some time since I got told off by someone’s parents for keeping their child out too late. I’d say about 40 years. Until last night. I wouldn’t mind, but it wasn’t like I was leading a teeny tearaway astray. I was scolded for keeping a 27-year-old boxer out late. The day began […]

WHEN it comes to the worlds of business and sport, there is an old saying: “Never go back”. The received wisdom is that if the chief executive or chairman of a company or the manager or player of a top team has enjoyed great success in a role, then the odds of doing that again

LONDON, Paris, New York, Sydney, Las Vegas. Legendary singing star Tony “(Is This The Way To) Amarillo” Christie has performed in iconic venues across the world during his six decade career. And now he can add Rotherham to that starry list. Thanks to me. Well, not really, but I did have a role in putting

IT takes a lot of talent to run a Michelin star restaurant. It takes another set of skills entirely to run a restaurant that collapses with debts of £1m. Michael O’Hare has done both. The acclaimed chef who won a Michelin star for The Man Behind The Curtain restaurant in Leeds and appeared as a

I’M not the quickest to respond to invitations to connect on Linkedin, mainly because when I do I get a message trying to sell me some random marketing service that is going to generate so much new business that it will transform my enterprise into a FTSE-100 company overnight. But when I received an invitation

THERE are fewer and fewer places you can go these days and feel entirely at home wearing a suit. I once went into the notorious Leeds pub the Admiral Duncan as a bet and, the drinkers seeing me and a colleague wearing suits, cleared the bar thinking we were Special Branch. When a bloke with

AS the warm, orange-gold sun rose over the towering Humber Bridge just before 8am last Friday morning, it was hard to comprehend that less than two hours before I had been scraping ice off my windscreen. That, combined with a broken boiler which had meant I had to endure an ice-cold shower (it reminded me

IT seemed a good idea at the time. When I met Jamie Roberts, chairman of the Yorkshire Dales Rivers Trust, at the West Park Hotel in Harrogate in the summer, he enthusiastically told me about his daily ‘wild swim’ in the waters on his family’s estate. As I sipped my coffee and looked out at

WHEN was the last time you got in a lift and started talking to a stranger? Other than to say: “Which floor are you going to?” I can’t remember when I randomly chatted to someone on a lift journey. The ‘Elevator Pitch’ is a concept that your initial business pitch should be short enough to

“ARE you causing trouble again?” I’m used to this kind of question just before I’m asked to leave a social occasion, but not when I’ve just arrived. Given the person asking the question is a senior Labour peer and member of the House of Lords, then perhaps I do need to think about a reputational