Sketches from a comms career...7

The British are coming!

In 2005, just as my work on the emissions trading campaign was tailing off, I was given responsibility for the communications and stakeholder engagement element of BAA’s bid for Budapest Airport, which was being privatised.

I had no previous experience of M&A, but quickly understood that my role was to help make ours the preferred bid to the government, local authorities and other stakeholders. We needed to pass all technical thresholds and we had to bid enough money, but if it came to a tie between BAA and another bidder, then we needed to be the company that they really wanted to take over this prize asset – winning hearts, as well as minds.

The campaign was quite straightforward. I worked out who we needed to influence, how best to reach them, what our narrative and messaging would be, what materials we would need to pull together and when to engage.?

I adopted the ‘three-Cs’ as my theme – ‘credibility, continuity and change’. We were a highly-credible international company with a great track record of investment, operational competence and sustainability; we respected what had been achieved by the state-owned management and would build on what we inherited; but we were innovative and could bring new ideas to make Budapest the leading airport in central and eastern Europe.?

We assembled comprehensive written material – the extensive bid documentation, which I edited, and a pack of around 20 two-sided briefing notes, professionally designed in both Hungarian and English, about all aspects of our company, from our employee policies to how we tackled noise, emissions and biodiversity. Supported by interpreters, the bid leader and I went to see all four local authorities around the airport, asked them what their concerns were and explained how we wished to run the airport and engage with them if we were successful. We met business and community groups and maintained a steady stream of news for the Hungarian media, bringing some key journalists to the UK to see how we ran our airports here.

I was doing this alongside my group public affairs director role, shuttling between London and Budapest with increasing frequency to keep all balls in the air.?

In the end, ours was the outstanding bid, technically and financially, so we were announced as the preferred bidder. But my work on winning hearts wasn’t wasted – far from it. Because we had invested so much time and effort in engaging with stakeholders and the media, we hit the ground running with positive stakeholder relationships from day one. I was astonished to hear, as we revisited our four local authorities within the first month of ownership, that none of the other bidders had bothered to contact them. So they were all truly delighted that we had won and we maintained excellent relations with them all through our period of ownership.

My final task was to manage the official signing ceremony for the transaction, with the Finance and Transport Ministers on their side and my CEO, Mike Clasper and incoming Budapest CEO, Chris Woodruff, on ours. The bid team were all there – about 15 of us – and we were looking forward to a bit of a shindig after the ceremony, with flights home booked for the next day, as we weren’t taking ownership for another few weeks. But, as the documents were being signed in front of the media, our phones started pinging. One by one we read the message and shared looks of dumbfounded horror: the airport's nine recognised trades unions had announced an all-out strike to start on the day we were due to take over. After some hurried consultation, it transpired that some of us wouldn’t be going home the next day after all.

While two of my colleagues embarked on lengthy negotiations with union officials, I led our media and staff communications, to ensure that news about what was happening was coming as much from us as from the unions. My approach was two-pronged: to reassure staff about our good intentions and track record, sharing our briefing papers with them via the airport’s comms team so they could see what we were about (we hadn’t been allowed to do that during the bid); and to show calm restraint in the media, saying that we recognised that the unions had concerns, but that we were confident that we would be able to work with them and avert a strike. Which we duly did. A few days before Christmas, the unions agreed to postpone the strike until the new year and then called it off entirely in January after we reached agreement with them on how we would work together.

I was asked to stay in Budapest for a few more weeks as part of the transition team, but in the end it was decided that it would be easier to replace me in my group role in London than replace me in Budapest. I agreed to this because I hoped that a period on Budapest’s executive committee (and later board) would widen and deepen my corporate experience for a future tilt at the executive director job in BAA and, frankly, because Budapest was a fantastic place to be right then. The anti-democratic changes since wrought by the right-wing populist, Viktor Orbán, were three years away.

It was in Budapest that I became a leader and people manager. Looking back on my earlier time in BAA I realise that I was one of those senior people who was good at what they did in their core job, but had no experience of management or indeed any training in it. I regarded team meetings and one-to-ones as getting in the way of my 'real' work and I hadn’t learned to delegate responsibility to team members so that I could free time to invest in leading them. I’m very sorry to those who were poorly led by me during that time.

But in Budapest I literally couldn’t do the thing I was best at – writing – because we were a Hungarian company, operating in Hungary and I didn’t speak Hungarian. I had no choice but to trust and rely on my team (most of whom spoke excellent English) by providing clear direction and supporting them to do their jobs, while acting as adviser to the CEO and being a nuisance in the executive committee by asking difficult questions of my colleagues. I also took on the environment portfolio, leading a major consultation about flight paths and ground procedures that eventually led to more than 30 airspace and ground improvements to reduce aircraft noise and emissions for two million residents.

The bid, the modernisation programme and the many crises, challenges and opportunities were all great experiences, but I’m most proud of how I developed personally as a leader in Budapest, seeing my team grow in confidence, influence and impact, as I nudged and supported them to realise their potential – to the extent that my head of media was to become, a couple of years later and with my strong encouragement, the official spokesman to Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai.

Our time in Budapest ended unexpectedly in 2007 after BAA succumbed to a hostile takeover by the Spanish infrastructure company, Ferrovial. Their first act was to put Budapest up for sale, to start to pay off the debt they had incurred in the takeover. I had no intention of working for the new owners, especially as Mike Clasper and Ian Hargreaves promptly left, so I left too. Not being ready to end my central European experience, I moved to Berlin for a few months to learn German, for the fun of it, before returning to London in October to establish a ‘lifestyle’ political consultancy with two of my best friends.

Next time…three tall blokes at Altitude.