Talk, eat, drink and be merry

The company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company

It’s not very nice out there in the real world: the Air India crash – enough to make even the most confident frequent flyer wonder whether they should leave a Post-It Note with their passwords on pinned to the fridge – , Russia’s continued failure to read the room, the determination of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to penalise family-businesses and discourage them from investing for the long-term future, and I can’t bear to think about what’s happening in the Middle East and its implications for the world.

So, in the light of all this, allow me to gently turn your attention to something more wholesome. This is an industry that thrives on the strength of the relationships that have been built and nurtured. Whether that’s over the trade counter, round the negotiating table, in the pub, on the golf course, or, this last weekend being a case in point, in the conference auditorium, round the pool, at the Merchant/Supplier Connections session, and at the bar, those relationships are what keeps this industry going.

The theme of the conference was Building Tomorrow Together, appropriate considering how many challenges there are: meeting sustainability and net zero targets, dealing with the Government-imposed financial constraints of the new Minimum Wage and Employment Act changes – and everything else that’s being thrown at SME businesses, an aging workforce and customer base , and a pool of potential replacements that thinks work should be more messing around on TikTok and less grafting in the yard.

Conferences are about so much more than the speaker line-up, though these are, of course, the glue that holds the event together. To put it more bluntly, the line-up is what gets the accountant off our backs when pounding the company credit-card to a pulp. I can tell my boss that three days in Barcelona on his shilling might look like a jolly, but would he really want to spend his day-off on what were officially The World’s Most Uncomfortable Chairs, listening to a self-proclaimed disrupter talk about Change Management for 45 minutes? He doesn’t need to know that Ellis Watson’s presentation had me crying with laughter and rapt with attention for most of it. Nor that it introduced me to what may now be my favourite put-down line ever. For those who were there too, yes, it was the one about ‘spawned from Lucifer’s….’

Nor does he need to know that I now have a new girl crush, on the fabulous, funny, totally down-to-earth Girl-From-Mansfield Becky Adlington, who not only has four Olympic medals, World Championships, European championships and Commonwealth Games gold medals – cat-nip for an Olympic geek like me – but a fanatical passion to get everyone to learn to swim. As she put it, swimming is the only sport that could, one day, save your life.

So, the presentations, and the official speed-dating connection sessions with suppliers and merchants, are only a part of what makes up a successful conference. It’s the chats, the laughs, the earnest discussions in the wee small hours, the networking, the strengthening of relationships, the birth of new ones, that are the real measure. Strong business relationships are the rocket fuel of an industry that, to quote Joe Tipper on the Saturday morning session of the Conference, isn’t ‘rocket-science’. Those relationships are what matters when things get tough, when supplies are short, even when they are so plentiful that it becomes hard to get price rises through.

This weekend was the second time the BMF had held a conference in Barcelona. In 1995, the great and the good of the UK building materials sector gathered for three days at the same hotel, though it was called the Rey Juan Carlos in those days, and has had something of a glow-up since then. What shone through this weekend though, was the fact that people are as much of a key to the success of this industry as they have ever been. The strength of those relationships  are as powerful and vital as they were 30 years ago. I should know, I was there.