Club news
I am standing for election to the Board because I want the Rooks
to achieve success on the pitch and long term financial sustainability
as a community owned club.
Football is my lifelong passion and I love the Rooks. I
also enjoy a good argument and could happily pass judgement on the Board’s
decisions over the last few years or the relative merits of Darren’s recent substitutions. But I love the club too much for that – we have one
urgent need as community owners and that is to raise more money.
All of our goals (forgive the pun) as a club rely upon
generating more income. I strongly support the brilliant Equality FC
campaign in principle but as with our other long term aspirations it will only
be sustainable if we increase our income. If we don’t attract a few big
sponsors, thousands more owners, more local commercial and community supporters
or other sources of income then we’ll either have to severely cut back on our
ambitions or keep our fingers crossed and continue to rely on the deep pockets
of a few benevolent owners.
If you elect me, I would like to be the Board Member with a
focus on overseeing and driving all aspects of income generation at the club.
Whilst my many recent achievements on Football Manager 16 suggest I could be a
big help to Darren, my main professional experience and skills are all in
corporate governance, strategy, fundraising, partner management and service
delivery.
As an ex charity CEO, strategy advisor to CEOs/Chairs, Cabinet
Office civil servant and founder/owner of number of small businesses, I have
the skills and experience to work with the rest of the Board and our Commercial
Manager to agree some clear targets for income generation, professionalise our
approach to potential sponsors and grant givers, build a clear pipeline of
potential backers (big and small, high and low priority etc), agree a clear
plan for contact and account management and report at least twice a year
to owners on progress against our agreed targets and our activity plans.
If I am elected, I will also be a consistent voice on the Board
arguing for transparency and information sharing with owners and volunteers.
This always makes Board members nervous as some information cannot be shared
because it is private and/or commercially sensitive. It can also be time
consuming not just to share the information but handle all the feedback. But
the Board’s default working practice should be to share information with owners
and ask for feedback and support whenever resources allow and it is legally and
commercially possible. We ‘talk the talk’ of being a community owned
club, we should always try our best to ‘walk the walk’ too…
Our teams are doing the business on the pitch this season.
As well as cheering them on, I’d like to help us raise the money that allows
our teams to progress next season and the one after…..COYR!
Graham Walker