Platinum Business Magazine Issue 9

Page 42

have already had some really talented part-time mums join the team. I’ve been really impressed with the calibre of applicants for all the jobs we’ve advertised. We will also have a large influx of seasonal staff. There’s a natural work force here in Brighton, people who are looking for summer work, and they want the jobs exactly when we need them. If it wasn’t a university town, I think we would really struggle.” On the actual construction, will the local economy benefit? “It is difficult as it is very bespoke, very specialist. It’s about managing risk. We’re doing something that is quite complex in terms of engineering. For the pod and the drive mechanism we’re using a specialist cable car manufacturer, Poma, who also did the London Eye. It’s not a core expertise in the UK. We don’t build cable cars, we don’t have snow, we don’t have the Alps. There are very few companies in the world that could actually have done that. And we have a huge amount of confidence in the one we’re working with because we’ve done another project with them before. There probably would have been a handful of two or three others in the world that we could have gone to.” When all the misinformed flak was flying around, Eleanor remained admirably calm, and a read through her CV gives an indication as to how she was able to maintain her focus. “My background is tourism and visitor attractions. My career started at British Airways as a management trainee in 1994. It was a really exciting time at BA, a time of great innovation. We

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launched the first flat beds into First Class, then into Club World and launched the World Traveller Plus premium economy brand.” “I did a stint over in LA as the Airport Operations Manager, dealing with everything thrown at me, from diverted flights to technical problems and highly-strung celebrities. It was very unionised,

“The Council see their competitors in cities like Barcelona rather than run-down seaside towns. But to do that and to win that business, we have to keep moving things forward” so there were people-management challenges. I was there for 18 months. It was a great baptism of fire into front-line operations. “Since then, when I’ve had anything operational, or anything that requires planning or dealing with challenging customers, I’m pretty fearless. “I went on secondment to the London Eye,

which had opened only about two weeks before, and we had quite a few operational challenges. British Airways had basically sponsored it, and they put in most of the funding. So they had a very strong vested interest to protect their reputation and ensure that the customer service was outstanding. “The biggest issue was dealing with the sheer volume of people arriving on site. The London Eye was a great success from the beginning, but success brought its own challenges. The business plan anticipated a maximum of two million visitors. In fact, the London Eye has always got around four million, and that volume of people wasn’t planned for. “We were working with an amazing team. I think we all fell in love with the London Eye, so people just really worked their socks off. You just had to prioritise, deal with the really big issues first, get them out of the way, then deal with the smaller ones. I think my experience at BA gave me good training for the early days when we’d have wheel stoppages. You can imagine, you’d have another 800 people arriving on the site every half hour. You had to have amazing operational procedures to deal with disruption, whether due to bad weather or technical problems. Half of it is communication, because people want know where they stand, what they can do, how they get their refund, how they re-book, when to come back. You’re just dealing with masses of people, and you have to get that communication message out to them. And back then we didn’t use the internet or smart phones.


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