Glass Half-Full
Former drinks PR Ros Shiel's optimistic guide to life after redundancy.
New Year Resolutions: too many to stick to
Favourite beer tried: Old Ale from Heworths, my local brewer
New business meetings in diary for January: seven (not bad)
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So here we are, nearly two weeks into 2009, a year that surely nobody in the drinks industry, and precious few outside it, are looking forward to. Even I find it hard to be optimistic for the UK economy when household names like Woolworths are shutting shop for good and Marks & Spencer is making redundancies.
That said, there are reasons to be cheerful at the Shiel Communications nerve centre. Only just one day earlier this week, I took three calls that could potentially lead to some work. Last week I had a promising meeting with a food producer who contacted me after I'd left my details on their stand at the "Taste of Christmas" event.
Which just about makes up for the three trains I had to take out to Excel on a bitterly cold night in December. And this morning I popped into a new café that's just opened round the corner from my house, and came away with a brief to write their launch press release. As well as, hopefully, a job stacking dishes for my increasingly high-maintenance son!
It's all very heartening, and is helping to stave off the frankly depressing effects of cutting back on the beer and cutting out the chocolate. Damn those New Year's Resolutions!
Challenges ahead
Outwardly, I know my attempts to find freelance PR work bear little resemblance to the challenges facing so many licensees in the current downturn. Selling my time is a much simpler affair than running a pub: I don't have to buy and then sell quantities of food and drink, or recruit and train staff, or put on a quiz night, or any of the other things that all multi-skilling publicans do as a matter of course, and for which they have my unending admiration.
But, I did realise early on that if I'm to find any work this year, I have to be flexible — and I'm not talking about the Pilates class I've signed up for (another resolution!). Better to do some work for less than my ideal day rate than do no work. If that makes me sound desperate, it's not meant to, just that I'm pretty sure working and getting results will generate more work in a wonderful virtuous circle.
So if there is any parallel with the licensee trying to grow his business, it's surely about how you have to get customers into the pub, give them the best possible experience of it, and then encourage them to come back and refer their friends. Easy to say, less easy to do, and I know that there are some hard-working publicans out there who have tried every business-building idea in the book and still can't make the sums add up.
So, to work. And to a long, New Year "to do" list that includes improving my website, taming the chaos that is my home office and, belatedly, sorting out my new self-employed status with HM Revenue & Customs.
I'm baffled as to why it will apparently take them eight weeks to give me a sole trader number, unless they're planning to send it hand-calligraphed and illuminated on top quality parchment.
More beer on the box
Programmes about beer are beginning to feel a bit like London buses, you know, none for decades and then two within as many months. Which is maybe why Tuesday's Oz and James Drink to Britain felt a bit, well, samey. Two blokes drinking quite a lot of beer in Yorkshire? Hadn't we seen this on Neil Morrissey's show before Christmas? They even appeared to be sleeping in the same standard issue "celebs slum it on location" caravan!
I don't wish to appear ungrateful. I enjoyed the sections on beer's natural ingredients, and the tasting notes in the bar at Dewsbury station. And I was grateful when Oz reminded us that we should drink beer, not wine, with a curry. But I would have liked a bit less of that blokey-ness, the downing of pints rather than halves, the talking rubbish after at least one too many.
It just didn't seem to bring anything very new to the beer party. However, it is of course good to have beer on the telly and this was the first of eight shows, so I'll reserve judgement for now.
Ros Shiel was public relations manager for the industry's beer image initiative Beautiful Beer. She was made redundant by the British Beer and Pub Association after members slashed funding.
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