The follow-up I never made

This should have gone out yesterday. I had a few things on and I didn’t get to it. The point of a weekly letter is that it turns up, so that one’s on me.

I had a run of sponsor conversations planned for the end of my second season. The order was presentation night, then the end-of-season review with the committee and the players, then the sponsors. All of it sat after the AGM.

I decided to step down at that AGM, so the sponsor round never happened. I can’t tell you how it would have gone.

I said last week not to wait for the AGM. This is why.

I also wasn’t worried about it, and that’s the part I’d look at now. I knew I could get around those sponsors quickly once I got to them, because I had good relationships with them. That’s the problem I’m describing, and I couldn’t see it at the time. Being relaxed about leaving the sponsors until last was only possible because those relationships were mine rather than the club’s.

There’s a version of this that goes further. In some clubs, who holds the sponsor relationships becomes part of the argument at an AGM, and a reason for keeping the same people in the same jobs, because they claim they’re the only ones the sponsors will talk to. I can see how a club gets there. If a sponsor will only deal with one person, though, the club is relying on that person staying in the job, and nobody sat down and decided that on purpose. I’d want to test that claim rather than take it at face value. My view is that a sponsor who is there for the club will talk to whoever is in the job next. If they genuinely won’t, the club is probably better off without them.

That isn’t me saying a sponsor owes the club anything. A business can stop sponsoring whenever it likes, and plenty have good reasons that have nothing to do with the club. That’s their call and it always will be. What I’d be wary of is money that turns up with conditions attached about how the club is run, because at that point the club isn’t setting its own direction any more. The sponsors you want are backing the club, not whoever happens to be in the president’s chair.

The way I’d fix it now is to write two or three year agreements wherever both sides are comfortable with one. I used to think the benefit was knowing the money was there, and it is. The one I didn’t appreciate at the time is that a written arrangement takes the AGM out of it. The club has something that doesn’t depend on who’s in the chair, and the next person can pick it up and see exactly what was agreed.

One warning on that. With a bigger business I’d expect it to take longer to get done, because it will go through more process on their side than a one-year arrangement would. That’s worth allowing for, and it’s a reason to start the conversation early rather than a reason to skip it.

Club Funding builds fundraising tools for clubs, and that’s how this gets paid for. This isn’t the pitch. Nothing above needs anything from us.

Something different this week. Five issues in and I’ve never once asked you a question, which is a bit rich from someone who spends every week telling you to go and talk to people.

So here’s one, and it takes a line to answer. When you took over your role at the club, what’s the one thing you wish had been included in the handover?

I read every reply myself.