Re: Re: November/December

[Anonymous]

Hi All.

In no particular order (and I’m sure I will forget some of the comments I meant to pick up on), here are some ‘observations’….. I think Baz is perfectly within his rights to comment on the lack of attention he received on his second visit to the NEC stand. One of the things the club ‘management’ is trying to do is to get honest comments from members. I get the feeling, while chatting over a pint, that sometimes there is an air of “I’ll get this off my chest now, while we’re at the bar, but there’s no point grumbling to the club as nothing will happen”. I’m convinced that’s not true. At this year’s AGM Cleve effectively said “Tell us your thoughts, good and bad” and that meant the meeting lasted about one hour forty minutes. There’s little point in having ‘open meetings’ if no one is going to say a dicky bird. When the Club Spares thing was going on, one member told me a long story over a pint (or two..) about ordering a part from club spares and it didn’t fit (of course the blow-by-blow account took a lot longer to tell than that). I waited for him to run out of steam and then asked whether he’d told anyone ‘in authority’ about this, as the club was trying to find out what was true and what was ‘legend’ regarding problems with spares. His reply? “Well, you know me Bob, I don’t like to make a fuss”. Well, that was bloody helpful then!

I agree with Baz (having spent time on the NEC stand over the past few years), that sometimes it reminds me of a private club and I do get ‘twitchy’ when I see stand ‘staff’ deep in conversation with each other. One of my many incarnations as a youth was as assistant bar manager in a disreputable drinking club (they’ve all gone out of business now we have 24 hour licensing 😀 ) The first thing I was told was ‘keep your eyes open even when you’re re-stacking the shelf. The job is to serve people, even if you’re in the middle of something else’. So, I can chat to other members while on the NEC stand while keeping my eye out for visitors who may want a bit of information. Unfortunately, I agree with Baz, that many well-meaning members who man (and ‘woman’) the stand don’t seem to have this skill and it ‘does my head in’ to watch visitors giving the so-called buying signal, and our lot are all nattering amongst themselves.

On that subject, I thought the NEC on Friday (the day I did stand duty) was very good for visitors. I personally gave out two or three membership leaflets and someone else told me he’d given out four or five. The problem we have is that we have no way of tracking whether people join later as a result of the NEC, other than the anecdotal evidence. John Oates tells me there is no logic to how the membership applications come in. I think he said he suddenly had five in a week, but there was no tie-in with anything that he was aware of.

Regarding the two topics of how much money the club has in reserve and the quality of the NEC stand, this is quite interesting. The NEC costs the club a fair amount of money each year. As far as I know, the stand is ‘free’ but the materials we put on the stand cost money and, where vehicles have to be trailered to the NEC, the club pays for trailer hire. The club also has to fund ‘the organiser’ staying in a hotel for three or four nights. There are two different trains of thought in conflict here. Those who say the club holds too much money in reserve will be happy that the club uses some of that money to cover costs like the NEC, while those who question the value of the NEC stand will point to the cost of the stand as one reason why we should stop doing it every year. The balancing act that ‘the management’ have to achieve is to have a reasonable stand background, while not spending a fortune making a new backdrop every year. I noted that this year’s backdrop was cobbled together from the materials we used last year. So, I guess this is an unwinnable discussion.

I’ve done the NEC for five years now and my own observation is that it’s the cars that draw people onto the stand. If you watch people wandering around, you see them suddenly spot the cars and then come straight over for a closer look. The big draw this year was Martin de Little’s rear wheel drive Citroen. I saw more people go straight to this than all the Tractions. But the Tractions drew in a lot of people too. So, it’s not clear to me that the ‘quality’ of our stand makes a lot of difference (which is not the same as saying we shouldn’t try to make the stand look good).

Finally, as other people have said here, if anyone’s unhappy with the stand then the answer is to try to get more involved next year. But, at the end of the day, I think any criticism is very useful, so please keep giving your opinions. I’ll certainly print any relevant letters in FP.

Ed.