Jacquie Gibson spoke to Lacy Curtis-Ward, general manager, about life at Church House Conference Centre.
When I met up with Lacy Curtis-Ward she was reflecting on the undoubted success of the Strawberries & Shakespeare event that had just taken place at the Westminster venue in July. Some 250 conference and event buyers had attended the event - essentially an evening of Bard-based entertainment designed to show off the facilities available in central London.
Lacy Curtis-Ward is every inch an American in London - enthusiastic, articulate, interesting and committed to the 'can-do' way of working. The Conference Centre, where she has been in post since December, is the first venue she has run, and judging by the way she talks, she fully intends to make the most of it.
She kicks off by stating her intention of reclaiming lost banqueting business saying, 'We used to get a lot of banqueting business before the renovation two years ago. Most of my business right now is conference business. My personal ambition is to get evening events back
Curtis-Ward is confident of succeeding in this and part of the process of getting back lost business is to find out why it left in the first place. In the case of the Conference Centre, this has meant updating the fixtures and fittings, overhauling the catering and looking at, and evaluating, methods of customer service, with a view to taking the venue to another level. The venue, which was the first in central London to obtain the MIA's Hospitality Assured Meeting status, was also the first to sign up for the new MIA Tracker system, designed to monitor conference organisers' feedback.
Curtis-Ward comments, 'We started Out as the Conference & Banqueting Centre, then we went through a big refurbishment and had a review which showed we were mainly used for conference business.'
'We're going through all the rooms and this will culminate next year when we re-do the Assembly Hall in a half-a-million pound refurbishment. We'll have to pull out all the specially made chairs and rebuild starting from scratch, with new carpets and a new AV system:
'We want to up the ante on how this place is perceived. Our caterers, Crown Venue Catering, have a new management team and our catering sales have gone through the roof. We want to offer cutting edge lively food and we'll be doing a soft re-launching our menus in September, with a full launch in the New Year.'
She continues, '48% of our business is governmental; 39% is corporate and the remainder is a mix of association and other business.' Ironically, the conference centre is 'too expensive for the church', though Curtis-Ward points out that the venue does make money which is re-invested.
So where does that leave the quest for banqueting? 'We're getting our appearance up to scratch and the catering side is sorted out. We have 59% repeat business and we hope to get this up to 75% in the next year. The decor of the rooms has always been good, I'm just taking it from 98% to 100%. I can take us into the banqueting side without feeling like a twit.'
Part of this new approach to the business has been engendered by the fact that Lacy is a meeting planner by trade and has never run a venue before. 'I've sat in more meetings than I've had hot dinners', she laughs. She reckons that delegates are probably only interested in half the speeches being given and only around half of these maybe particularly good.
She comments, 'I have always wanted to run a venue so I can make it the way I wanted it to he when I was a meeting planner. I can bring the client perspective.' She does emphasize, however, that her 'predecessor was great' and that 'he created this from nothing'.
This same client perspective should stand her in good stead when it comes to ascertaining what clients really want from a venue.
She remarks, 'When I was a meeting planner, it never occurred to me to come here. I used to use four and five * hotels because I felt that as I dealt with purely corporate clients they'd he much happier in a hotel environment:
While she is full of praise for hotels in general, Curtis-Ward does add a cautionary note saying, 'You are just one of many clients and you don't get the individual attention.'
The flip side to this, according to Lacy, are the benefits of using a non-residential venue.
She comments, 'We don't have sleeping rooms. We only do conference and banqueting and if we do that wrong, we're out of business. This is our primary focus and our staff are here to work for those people'.
For Curtis-Ward, the difference is clear, 'I could have 10 clients but I've got 25 staff so everyone has someone to speak to and I have control over the delivery. A banqueting manager in a hotel doesn't have control over the other departments', and consequently no overall control of delivery.
Staying with this theme, she continues, 'One of the nice things about working at Church House is that we're not owned by shareholders. We can look at the medium term and not the short term. If we hit the revenue and profit targets, then we can spend the money. Decision making is very quick and there is a very flat hierarchy:
This formula would appear to be working. 'Business is up 8% on last year and we only dropped 1% of business last year. I think that is because we are in Westminster and we're somehow insulated because of government meetings.'
She attributes the success in part to having the right product too.
'If you have the catering and decor where it needs to be, the sales and marketing is less of a challenge and that is a lovely problem to have. There is business out there, so I feel very lucky but I don't rely on that. I keep at it every day:
Current market conditions are delivering 'very short lead times'. She elaborates, 'In May, 70 per cent of our room revenue was booked in the month of May or two weeks prior to it taking place
'It is a very pragmatic market and we've got to deal with it. The reality is if your clients are pressured it's not going to change. Current stock market conditions could mean we have a couple of years of this behaviour at least.'
She concludes, 'We haven't had to discount and our rates are reasonable anyway. We're not overbuilt in town in terms of good quality meeting space - not in Westminster anyway. Our prices for the year are published on our website; we don't change our rates hourly, daily or monthly. We honour our contracts and we're incredibly transparent. We can do our jobs, we're staffed correctly and we can cope'.
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