Finding the right match

Paul Faulkner is one of the best-known figures in business in the West Midlands. Football fans will know him from his time running Aston Villa FC while hundreds of business owners will recognise Paul from his six-year spell as chief executive of Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce.

He’s crammed in a series of other roles too, including with Birmingham Children’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Sport Birmingham and Kids Village Charity. And around a year ago, he co-founded Element 45 –a consultancy offering a variety of senior leadership, strategy and performance services to businesses. It has seen him take on a role as chairman of Exhall-based hair and beauty supplier Ellisons to help the business during a management buy-out phase and to steer it through its next phase of growth.

Corin Crane, chief executive of Coventry and Warwickshire Chamber of Commerce, paid a visit to the company’s new look showroom and met Paul and Ellisons commercial director Matt Champney for a chat.

Corin: “When we first met, you were incredibly generous with your time, especially when I was just starting at the Black Country Chamber of Commerce back in 2016. That’s something I’ve always loved about the Chamber network. But you’d had some very interesting roles leading up to joining Birmingham Chamber.”

Paul: “I made the switch from professional football into the Chamber which is quite unusual. I moved to Birmingham in 2006 to work for the American family who bought Aston Villa. I’d been working for them in the US and then became Chief Executive at Villa until 2014, then went across to the East Mids for a spell with Nottingham Forest.

“By early 2015, I knew my time at Forest was going to end when I saw an article about the CEO of the Birmingham Chamber retiring. I sent a text message saying ‘good luck, let’s meet up for a coffee’, and he immediately rang back to ask if I’d considered the role.

“I hadn’t, but I said I’d give it a ponder. I drove home that night and spoke to my dad and asked him what he thought about it and he said to go for it.

“We’d actually been members of the Birmingham Chamber when I was at Villa, but I probably hadn’t engaged with it much, which, to be fair, is one of the big challenges for Chambers: making sure members actually use the services on offer.

“I applied and got offered the role probably about a year before you started at the Black Country, Corin.

“I live just north of Birmingham, and my family is anchored in that area, so I didn’t want to move. After over a decade in football, which is quite a transient world, I didn’t want to uproot everyone again.

“It felt like the right time to try something different. I had a really clear vision of what I wanted to do if I got the Chamber role, to commercialise it and take a business-led approach.

“When you started at the Black Country, we were neighbours. We were partnered up on a number of different initiatives, and that was great.

“It felt like a fresh mind and fresh energy coming into the Chamber movement. I’d already been trying to wade through some of the intricacies of the Chamber network, which at first can feel very alien. So, it felt natural to try and help, to share what I’d learned.”

Corin: “It’s fair to say you probably applied some of the principles from football to the Chamber, didn’t you? Across the network I think that was quite unusual at the time, being really driven and commercially focused.”

Paul: “At Villa, we’d built this “propensity model” around membership. Season ticket holders, in that case. It was all based on 15 characteristics for each individual. We’d track and measure those to work out your likelihood of renewing.

“That included things like how far you lived from the stadium, how long you’d held a season ticket, how many games you’d attended, whether you’d bought online. The idea was to focus our energy on those less likely to renew, rather than spending all our time on those who were guaranteed to.

“You can apply that model to football or really any membership-based organisation – or any business focused on customer retention, for that matter.

“I brought in a colleague who had built that model for us, along with a few other key people, and we totally applied that philosophy at the Chamber.

“Membership had been declining, but we reversed that quickly using this model with some real engagement.

“I only wanted people to be members if they were getting value. If you’re not getting value as a business, don’t waste your money. So, the onus is on us, the Chamber, to deliver that value.

“Whatever the fee is, you should be getting something for it. One good connection or bit of business that you win should cover that cost. In fact, it should pay for itself many times over.”