LOOKING AFTER TOMORROW.

Under CEO and Catey Special Award winner Anne Pierce MBE’s steadfast watch, Springboard has become one of the hospitality industry’s favourite and most effective causes as it strives to raise the status of the industry as a great place to work. This year, it is the official charity of the Profile Sailing Cup. Anne reveals the origins of a dynamic charity and the ethos that keeps it going.

They all said it was a high-risk strategy. In 1997, when I agreed to take over Springboard, it was a small, London-based careers company that had managed to invent a lot of wonderful things to attract young people into the hospitality industry. That is, until the really bad recession of the early 90’s hit, turning it into just another well-meaning but under-resourced organisation.

Yet here I was giving up a prestigious Director’s job elsewhere to lead an enterprise that was, with the best will in the world, in no position to meet the demands of a hospitality industry now thirsting for skills, talent and yes, respect as it sprinted towards a new era of growth.

History on our side

Today, times are tough once more, but history clearly shows that ours is an imaginative and resilient industry. Back then, coming out of a recession at a fair rate of knots meant that hotels, restaurants, contract caterers and even pubs and bars were suddenly in the grip of a massive skills and labour shortage. In a tight employment market, the majority of hospitality businesses in the UK simply could not find the staff they needed. Maybe it was a case of attitude, aptitude or misplaced ambition – perhaps a combination of all three – but the fact was that most people, especially school leavers, did not find the idea of a hospitality job, much less a career, attractive.

So there was definitely a big role for a company like Springboard. I knew that from the start, even while I sat on the advisory board of the old Springboard. Here was a tiny organisation, struggling to survive, but that somehow held some of the answers. It had created truly wonderful models, including skills challenges and storyboards, to promote our industry to young people. We just had to find the resources to drag it into the 21st century and to meet head-on the challenge we faced.

Promoting a first class industry

The challenge itself was two-fold. One, we had to transform Springboard into a national, high-profile organisation that made a difference to the opportunities and lives of young and unemployed disadvantaged people. Two, we needed to use Springboard as a channel to improve the perception of hospitality among the general public – school kids, school leavers, their teachers, parents and other influencers -- so they saw it as a top-notch industry, a first-class career, a hub of talent and a good employer.

In fact, the leading hospitality companies had always done great things as employers. They trained, offered career progression, and constantly raised the quality of their customer offer. It is manifest and you can see it. The problem is that not everyone knows this. So from the onset what a careers organisation like Springboard needed to do was to communicate that message of quality, excellence and high expectations to the future workforce of an industry that traditionally relies heavily on youth. But looming on the horizon too is the ‘demographic time bomb’. With less young people entering the labour market year on year, now more than ever it is also important to capture the interest and talent of older workers.

Getting started

The first thing we did to support Springboard’s revival and expansion was tap into some national government funds. I’d learned a lot about effective bid-writing from one of my earliest mentors, the late Duncan Rutter OBE, who was a Parliamentary Private Secretary before becoming the Director of the Hotel & Catering Training Board (later the Hospitality Training Foundation), where I’d been in charge of labour market intelligence. With the help of some very talented colleagues, we were able to draw down £450,000 from the then Department of Trade and Industry. We also managed to find another £250,000 of public money. Now all we had to do to claim the money was match all that with contributions from industry.

Luckily, through the years I’d developed a huge list of close industry contacts. As every good networker knows, contacts breed contacts. I just picked them off one by one, talked about the industry’s perception and recruitment issues and offered to help. I knew it wouldn’t be an afternoon stroll, and anyway that’s not my way. We’d said Springboard was going to make a difference, that we were going to go national and we were going to do it with no time to waste. It was hard work, but pretty soon, companies were committing anything from £5,000 to £20,000 over a three year period. We had our start-up funds.

A national presence

This investment helped us to get our message to market quickly, in that crucial, high-profile way that you launch any major brand. Businesses came on board that understood what we were trying to do at Springboard and that were willing to stand up in public, make financial pledges and commit to working with us. Three hundred supporters attended our launch in Claridges in London. Not long after that we opened our centre in Scotland with an event at The Balmoral in Edinburgh, following a hospitality discovery trail activity involving fifty kids from local schools.

We very soon opened Springboard Wales, North and the Midlands, working with local businesses, schools, stakeholders and other partnerships. We worked a hundred miles an hour to get it all off the ground and within a three year period, we’d set up five centres. At one time in Springboard’s history we had 18 regional centres, but that all changed with the erosion of public funding sources.

Fortunately, the internet explosion happened at about the same time. When Springboard first started as a national organisation, the emphasis was on drop-in centres, because people had to come to you to get information. Now you no longer needed that because you could send and receive information through the internet, using it smartly. But nothing does away with the face-to-face contact especially in a people industry, so we still place great emphasis on work experience and linking with partners.

And just what was Springboard going to do to make that difference and return the trust and investment of industry? While our aim on setting up was to raise the profile of the industry, we had to do it in a memorable, positive, interactive way. The emphasis was always going to be ‘have a go, and do it a bit differently’. School kids do loads of things throughout the year, but we wanted their Springboard activity to be the one thing they truly remembered. They would recall the tasters, skills challenges as positive and exciting experiences. The same would be true for the long-term unemployed or those returning to work. Constantly trying to be innovative and do something a bit different still runs through everything we do.

Where we stand today: Springboard Charitable Trust and Springboard UK

So if you now look at our business offering, there are basically two parts of Springboard. There’s the charity, the Springboard Charitable Trust, and its trading subsidiary, Springboard UK.

The Trust’s main purpose is to genuinely help unemployed and disadvantaged people improve their prospects in life through a sustainable career in the industry. We help young people to achieve their potential whether they’re disadvantaged or gifted and talented. We help unemployed people get off the register and into work. We help disadvantaged people if they wish to develop and find an appropriate job and become more economically independent.

It may seem ambitious, but there are some unemployed people who just haven’t had the opportunity, the right guidance or direction, or any useful pre-employment and post-employment training and that’s where Springboard’s activity can make a very real difference. Disadvantage covers a very broad church. It encompasses lone parents and people with a form of disability who want to do something but experience prejudice because of their disability. I’'ve always believed that with the right kind of help and guidance they can find somewhere in the industry that suits them and Springboard works to help them achieve this through the services we offer and the activities and programmes we run.

Our trading subsidiary, Springboard UK, raises funds to pay for the charity activities. In essence, the trading subsidiary works with the industry for the industry, promoting it as a great place to work. Here we work with our individual investors and business partners to help them effectively and directly address their HR priorities. We now have a solid track record and can clearly demonstrate to our partners that this is what we will achieve for them if they invest in us.

Tangible deliverables

In terms of tangibles, Springboard delivers plenty. We provide specialist advice and guidance under the CareerScope brand. We respond to careers enquiries and produce careers materials. We publish magazines, CD-Roms and DVDs alongside our web presence. Our goal is to be the first port of call for specialist advice and guidance in the UK hospitality, leisure, travel and tourism sector. Last year we responded to 49,000 career enquiries. We provide a free of charge service to potential recruits; this fulfils our charitable objective to help the disadvantaged as well as our industry promise to promote the industry in an objective but positive way. We use case study examples from our business partners, for example, the Churchill Hotel, to deliver that message.
Then we have our Ambassadors Programme, where industry practitioners and professionals, from chefs to directors to heads of department to customer-facing managers and staff all devote time out of their busy lives to help to spread the word about our delightful industry, in the name of Springboard.

We also deliver an Education Programme. Industry is probably least aware of this part of our work but it has significant impact. We are highly regarded in schools and colleges for the resources that we provide to help teachers deliver vocational courses more effectively, particularly at GCSE, AS and A level or their equivalent and hence we remain very strongly involved in the development of the new hospitality diplomas. Our resources and activities embody the original Springboard ethos for interactive, hands-on, up to the minute information about the industry.

Last year, our industry-focused teaching resources reached more than 2,000 teachers and 30,000 students. Nearly 1,500 teachers and 34,000 students have been involved in Teacher Training Days. Over 350 16-19 year-olds took part in the Summer School and Young Manager programmes, and more than 30,000 individuals received specialist careers advice. Future Chef, part of our national schools programme, has been running for nine years and is a nationwide competition designed to help young people aged 12-16 learn how to cook. Over 34,000 students have taken part.

Industry firewall

So if you now look at the position we’re in, I believe that very few business partners will feel the need to withdraw their support from Springboard during this recession. Springboard offers them a really sound business proposition. Remember, in every big recession, there are always opportunities. We’re now talking to business partners who know that in a recession they cannot just tighten their belts and forget about the future. Companies have to build for the future. If they’re currently making redundancies and retrenching they cannot honestly say one day ‘We’re fantastic, come and work for us’ – they need to keep up the communication.

And Springboard can do that, as a spokesperson for the industry. Day in and day out, we undertake our charity work, visiting schools, colleges, universities and job centres to provide objective information about career opportunities and the prospects you can have in the hospitality industry. We’re a well-respected organisation, with an objective platform and a wealth of material. With these, we can help companies to keep their brand, their reputation and their potential as future employers alive for that forthcoming labour market. In 2009, no one will deny there is unemployment but when we do come out of this recession – and we will – the industry cannot afford to find itself in the same situation we were in back in 1997.

There is another thing Springboard can certainly do now for the industry, owing to our having developed a lot of information and done substantial research, and having worked hand in hand with business. We can provide support in the delivery of some of the essential services companies need to guarantee their future workforce. We can help them to develop future graduate programmes, or if they want to develop a future workforce using student placements without a scheme in place, we can help them with that too. We can manage that process for them and promote it, instead of their having their own staff go out to universities on milk-rounds. It’s something worth thinking about in terms of cost-effective delivery.

Material support

We have a fixed income stream, but at Springboard we have to rely heavily on sponsorships, business partnerships, donations and charitable giving and public funding to keep up the good work. We also depend on the sales of our products and services.

Companies may wish to sponsor particular products, activities or events that we offer. So we have sponsorships available for awards, for Future Chef, for the magazines, resources and so on. Our sponsors are often, but not exclusively, suppliers. Our Business Partners are the operators in industry. We have what we call a Business Partnership Agreement with them which works almost like a membership in which they receive services for their membership fee, but the amount they pay depends on what their agreement covers. Within that agreement we would offer them a range of benefits including brand awareness in the labour market; promoting their USPs as an employer; more bespoke activities built around delivering their HR priorities more effectively; and helping them to achieve their corporate social responsibility or CSR aims. It’s very much a two-way partnership and not simply about writing a cheque; it’s about how we develop that partnership for the good of their business.

We generate revenue through sales of our own range of products and services. For teachers we produce an offering including consultancy services and careers packs. We have the Ambassadors Programme that companies pay for. And we also sell tickets to our events and raffles. Public funding, a crucial but diminishing stream, can be national, regional, local or European.

Charitable Giving is when we get rich people to give us money! We have an annual, big fund-raising event. Our target then is to raise about £70,000 net; we had one in the Savoy in 2007 and during Christmas 2008 it was at the Cafe Royale. We probably run about five or six events each year that have a charitable fund-raising remit to them.

I am absolutely thrilled that Springboard was chosen to be the 2009 Profile Sailing Cup’s official charity. To do the event and Profile justice, we’ve set ourselves a pretty high target in the present economic climate of £25,000. If we can get as many teams as possible to take part, we should achieve that.

Donations come from grant-giving charitable foundations such as the Savoy Educational Trust or the industry livery company, the Worshipful Company of Innholders, and American Express Philanthropic Foundation. These donations largely fund our education programme.

Then we have schemes like our Individual and Corporate Patrons, which respectively, target high net-worth individuals who’ve done well out of the industry and want to give something back through us, and suppliers who contribute financially or on a substantial in-kind basis that enables us to offset costs. For example, Jane Sunley’s Learn Purple gave us their Talent Toolbox. In return, patrons get listed on our website and letterhead, and we’ve developed a Corporate Patron’s logo that they can display.

The generosity of all our supporters has been priceless, but we do still fight for every penny we get. But then we’ve moved on from an annual turnover of £70,000 in 1997 to £1.7 million in ten years.

A solution

Springboard is better known in the industry today than we ever hoped to be, and there is clear evidence to show that we are making a real difference to people’s lives and to perceptions of the hospitality, leisure, travel and tourism industries.

Springboard’s friends, partners and onlookers have taken to calling me passionate, energetic and driven but it’s not just me, it’s my whole fantastic team, some of whom have been with the company from day one. I think all of us believe that you can get anywhere you like if you just work hard and that short-term, achievable stepping stones are the key to long-term success.

Personally, I’ve been guided by many inspirational and supportive figures through the years, men such as Peter Lederer of Gleneagles, Stephen Moss of Springboard, not to mention my husband. I’ve also been fortunate to work with strong, intuitive women like Jane Sunley and Linda Halliday of BaxterStorey. We don’t exist in a vacuum. And Springboard is the better for it.

I firmly believe that Springboard is the solution to some real industry issues, now and in the future. This is why we’re always moving -- forward, sideways, vigilant, keeping track, wondering whether we can offer something new and different, something more. Like our industry, it’s a great place to be!

To find out more about how you can get involved with Springboard, visit www.springboarduk.org.uk .