www.pmforumeurope.com/magazine/view_article.aspx?id=331 -
[Cached Version]
Last Visited: 2/16/2009
"We've been growing at between 10 to 20 per cent pa over the last couple of years," says business development director Clive Bawden (although the firm does not release its turnover figures)."We anticipate that continuing despite the downturn."
...
The arrival of chartered accountant and chartered marketer Clive Bawden three years ago to set up a marketing function developed the marketing approach that Currie and co had instinctively developed before then.
...
So Currie and Bawden expect to be focusing their efforts much more on communicating with buyers looking for opportunities - such as agile management teams who would like to buy out the businesses they work in.
...
Bawden has been surprised about how some other professionals and the media have responded to the economic crisis - rushing out into print and spreading anxiety in response to the credit crunch and downturn."We have continued doing what we are good at, holding back from a panic reaction," he says.
"And things are changing so quickly that, by the time you have printed something, it is out of date."The firm has concentrated far more on face-to-face meetings and networking, sensing a need among contacts for actual conversation and sharing of collective experience, he says.
When Bawden joined three years ago, there was a marketing regime in place but it was rather 'basic', he says - "a website, a magazine and the odd press release".
Since then he has assembled the basic marketing infrastructure, clarified and opened up the channels to market and begun generating the contents of the marketing message.
And he has also worked hard to outstrip the expectations that his colleagues had of him.
"Nobody in this business thought that we could bring in a client through marketing alone - but we've done that," he says.
An article that was written on 'strategic option reviews' for a new series of pamphlets (Five Minutes with Catalyst) "generated several enquiries, one of which will turn into a multimillion pound piece of work," he says.
Bawden is from the straight-talking school of marketing.
And even in an interview like the one for this article, he prefers to talk about results than the details behind them.
So while he volunteers his views on being a profit centre, he has to have extracted from him information about how he puts procedures in place.
He accepts that the partners do not expect him to cover the marketing team's costs in this way, but he says:"We have to be a profit centre, not a cost centre.
I believe I've got to deliver a result on that."
Catalyst's International work has been steadily growing during Bawden's time with the firm, and given his own international experience (living and working in Greece and Australia amongst other things), it is an area he is sure will grow.
While Catalyst has no ambition to expand overseas through offices abroad, it belongs instead to a 20-firm international network, Mergers Alliance, through which it has done work with Chinese, Indian and many other partner firms across the globe.
Through this, Catalyst has been involved in various international conferences in 2008 - a food and drink sector seminar in Holland, an investment conference in India, and a conference recently in America on global M&A - and Bawden is increasingly involved in finding speakers and delegates, as well as liaising with his international partners on cross marketing opportunities and ideas.
Nearer to home, he sees the legal sector as an area in coming years that Catalyst could work in when law firms start to merge and be taken over by businesses, under the Clementi reforms, and he sees opportunity for those in the sector.
"Professional services marketing still does labour under some old and outdated misconceptions about the value it generates, and to be fair some of it is still quite frighteningly bad," he says."However marketing in the sector will have to change still further in the next couple of years as new brands and business models take shape, particularly as a result of Clementi, and for those commercial marketers out there there should be some fantastic opportunities ahead to generate tangible value and progress your career."
Despite the recessionary talk surrounding the UK, Bawden and Currie are quite open about the opportunities facing them."Some of our competitors are going to struggle," says Bawden.
Despite the recessionary talk surrounding the UK, Bawden and Currie are quite open about the opportunities facing them."Some of our competitors are going to struggle," says Bawden.
15 online sources [ view sources ]
