Thoughts of a CEO

Thoughts of a CEO December 2024

I have been hearing about, and talking about, more and more horror stories about failures in commissioning and procurement across local authorities and NHS partners: little or no co-design, little or late consultation (or worse, consultation after a decision has already been made), late decisions with no consideration of the impact on bidders, late payments, […]

Thoughts of a CEO October 2024

Our annual conference has been put to bed, and what a great conference it was too – speakers, workshops, stalls, lunch and a hundred or so of you lovely people. I thought we had a while before we needed to think about next year’s conference, but Justine (the brains behind the conference) is already reviewing […]

Thoughts of a CEO September 2024

September is always a tricky month. The days get shorter, traffic gets busier, summer is fading away, Christmas stuff starts appearing in the shops and pumpkins start appearing, well, everywhere! But on the positive side, September is the month of our annual conference. More good news is that there are a handful of tickets remaining […]

Thoughts of a CEO July 2024

In case you somehow hadn’t noticed, we’ve just had a general election and now have a new Labour Government. In Surrey, of course, we always like to do things a little differently, so we have six Conservative and six Liberal Democrat MPs now, with nine of them being new to the role. Although it is […]

Thoughts of a CEO June 2024

There’s only a matter of days now before the UK General Election. We all have our personal political opinions, preferred parties and policies, hopes for the outcome etc, and that’s fine at home, but can get more complex in the office. Those of us who are registered charities have a legal obligation to be independent […]

Thoughts of a CEO April 2024

“If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together” That’s a great proverb that illustrates the importance of working together to get things done, and that is a message that is even more important as we are all being expected to do ever more with ever less. I’ve […]

Thoughts of a CEO January 2024

Welcome to 2024! Is it too late to say Happy New Year? If not, Happy New Year! I think it is going to be an interesting year – lots of last year’s headaches are still here (cost of living, Covid, etc) and as it’s a General Election year, then there will be a whole new […]

Thoughts of a CEO November 2023

It’s that time of year again – nights are darker, the weather is colder, festive songs are starting to pop up on the radio, Christmas items are appearing on the shop shelves (although that started in September!), and I am preparing the CEO introduction for our 2022-2023 annual report to the Charity Commission. In the […]

Thoughts of a CEO September 2023

At the time of writing this, there are only 14 sleeps (as my kids would say before they got too old and cool for that kind of nonsense), until our 2023 conference, and it’s shaping up to be our most popular one yet, with tickets flying off the virtual shelf. We’ve managed to release a […]

Thoughts of a CEO August 2023

I’m delighted at how quickly tickets for our annual conference have been snapped up (thank you!!!), but should we be concerned that so many of us remain worried by the ongoing cost of living crisis? It’s interesting how the media is reporting that inflation is down to however-many-percent, yet they often fail to mention that […]