HOSTING an event for KPMG Enterprise this week gave me the opportunity to have a close up look at the impressive new home of the business advisory firm in Leeds.
The Sovereign Street building represents a big change from the firm’s previous home across the road.
Walking in you immediately see staff walking around the building. There is a welcoming cafe on the ground floor, complete with a jukebox.
I had a play on it and by accident put on Kylie’s greatest hits. I think it cleared the cafe for the next hour. I didn’t tell anyone I could do the dance to The Locomotion.
KPMG staff have been getting used to the concept of hotdesking – not having your own desk in the building – and they appear to have embraced it with gusto.
The meeting spaces are airy and welcoming and it all helped create a great atmosphere for the first KPMG Enterprise event to be held in the building.
I “facilitated” the event, which I explained to the audience was about them hearing less of me and more of a talented panel of business people and a guest speaker who revelled in the monicker “The Master Thief”.
Hamish Taylor trained in brand management at Proctor and Gamble, was head of brands at British Airways, CEO of Eurostar and Sainsbury’s Bank – all before the age of 40.
It makes you sick.
His talent was not being afraid to pinch ideas from others, hence the nickname. While at BA he decided the best people to design a new business class cabin were yacht designers, not aircraft engineers.
Then he brought Disney in to sort out BA’s queueing problems at Heathrow. The secret, he said was to put everyone into one queue rather than making them queue for each individual check-in desk and make the queue space narrower so everyone had to stand in single file.
He said that one of the most innovative things he brought in at BA was the result of a call from two elderly female staff at JFK Airport in New York.
“They said that rather than all the business and first class passengers just waiting in the lounge before the flight then perhaps they could be served a meal there and when they got on the aeroplane they could then sleep straightaway,” Hamish told the audience.
Simple stuff, but as he pointed out, British Airways dominated the transatlantic market during the 1990s because of it.
It would be interesting what advice he’d give to BA now.
The event featured a high level panel of entrepreneurs who all offered really honest advice to the audience based on their experiences in business.
Robert Barr is the chief executive of Arran Isle, an Elland-based £209m turnover distributor of branded building products, Lee Strafford founded Plusnet and is now putting together a major network of funds and venture capital to be invested across the UK, while Simon Tutt is the chief commercial officer at Xercise4Less, the fast-growing Leeds-based discount gym operator.
All three showed no ego and were more interested in passing on some of the lessons they have learned in business rather than profiling themselves.
It made for a really engaging event, complemented by observations from experts from KPMG.
What makes the KPMG Enterprise proposition so compelling is that it is being run by a team, led by Ian Beaumont, who love talking to and helping business people, but don’t try and hard sell what they do.
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DID you see Asda’s big announcement that it wasn’t going to get involved in Black Friday this year?
Black Friday, a bit like Halloween, is an American tradition, driven principally by retailers, to get consumers spending before Christmas, by offering big (I nearly said deep) discounts on everything from clothing to electrical goods on the day after Thanksgiving – which is today.
So fair play to Asda for not following the herd, but at the same time it was dismissing Black Friday, it was launching its earliest ever Christmas advertising campaign which began on November 1st, just as I was wiping the egg stains off my windows from the trick or treaters’ visit the night before.
And while Asda might not be doing Black Friday this year, it’s Christmas advertising campaign is a tacky tribute to the worst aspects of consumerism at Christmas.
The gist of it appears to be that people spend more money on doing silly things because it is the festive season.
So the Leeds-based chain’s TV adverts show people eating too much, drinking, dancing and partying like crazy and its billboards show a pet dog wearing furry reindeer antlers – all accompanied by the hashtag slogan #becauseitschristmas
It reminds me of a Harry Enfield sketch where a drunken man in a Christmas jumper staggers out of a festive party and throws up in a neighbour’s ornamental pond full of koi carp (they could have been shubunkins, I can’t remember).
The neighbour shouts at him: “What the hell do you think you are doing?”
He lifts his head from the edge of the pond, waves his beer can in the air and smiles widely, proclaiming: “Oh come on, it’s Christmas!”
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FORWARD Ladies held their annual awards bash in Leeds last week and awarded their Lifetime Achievement Award to Ultimo bra entrepreneur and the House of Lords’ newest member Michelle Mone.
I’ve made my views clear on Prime Minister David Cameron’s dodgy choice of business people to make peers before.
Michelle Mone wasn’t able to make it to Leeds for the awards ceremony but sent a video message of thanks.
What surprised me were the key achievements that were included in the video.
The main message, after loads of glamorous shots of her modelling and appearing on TV shows, was that she has been responsible for “£1bn worth of media coverage” and that she has lost eight stone.
I don’t know any entrepreneur that would calculate their success on how much media coverage they have had.
Anybody running a business would be much more focused on top and bottom line numbers and cashflow, not how many double page spreads they’ve had in the tabloids and ‘at home’ features in OK magazine.
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WHENEVER I host or compere an event I’m keen to make sure that I learn from the experience to help improve my approach for the future.
This week, hosting the event for KPMG Enterprise, I learned a very valuable lesson: Don’t take the mickey out of people from Huddersfield in this blog because they will get you back on Twitter later.
A couple of weeks ago I compared Approved Foods owner Andy Needham to Bungle from Rainbow while also highlighting the fact that several media outlets had confused Huddersfield Town’s commercial director Sean Jarvis with the club’s new German manager David Wagner.
Glancing at my Twitter feed after the successful event at KPMG this week, I noticed a photo of me accompanied by Andy Needham’s comment “Trying to stay awake, presenter David Parkin not helping.”
Then Sean chipped in with a photo of me at the lecturn, saying: “Probably needs a box to stand on.”
Charming.
My confidence could have taken a nasty knock.
But it’s a good job that when I look in the mirror I see a tall, handsome, interesting hunk.
Have a great weekend.