Playing to win
The 2002 Commonwealth Games, to be held next July in Manchester, will be the biggest multi-sport event ever held in the UK, and Sodexho Prestige has won the first tender, worth £3m. Amanda Marcus went to see its team in training.
Sodexho Prestige's sales and marketing director, Sean Valentine, has good reason to be cheerful. The company, the specialist hospitality and events management division of Sodexho UK, has secured the first of three parts of a tender for the biggest multi-sport event ever held in the UK, the 2002 Commonwealth Games. To be held in Manchester over 11 days from 25 July to 4 August, the event is expected to attract one million visitors, which includes up to 10,000 corporate hospitality guests, plus sponsors and athletes.
The bid has been divided into three sections, each open to tender: sponsors and corporate hospitality; Sportcity catering; and the Commonwealth Games village for 5,900 athletes and officials. The sponsors and corporate hospitality contract was the first to be announced, in July, after a vigorous tendering process that began in January. It is worth more than £3m. Winners of the contracts for both Sportcity catering and the athletes and officials' village catering have yet to be announced.
Valentine puts Sodexho Prestige's success in winning the sponsors and corporate hospitality contract down in large part to its previous experience at the Sydney Olympic Games. There, the company held the contract to provide for sponsors and hospitality, plus all public catering, doing 10,000 covers twice a day and catering for 32 private boxes.
"It was crucial for us to leverage our experience from Sydney," Valentine says, "and to show we had depth of experience and understanding not only of the games as an entity but also of the clients' requirements."
The success, says Valentine, is also down to operations director Russell Haddon and his wealth of experience from Sydney. Haddon and his team have created a new concept for the Manchester games, which Sodexho Prestige calls the "total service solution".
"The idea is that we will see the customer through the whole process, from his first contact with the games to the time when they leave, making sure they get complete satisfaction from sales, operations and during the post-event follow-up," Valentine says.
In simple terms, this means Sodexho Prestige will be offering sponsors and corporate guests a lot more than just food. The company will be supplying a full sales and marketing campaign for corporate hospitality from November, and information on the sales packages will be available on the games Web site, www.commonwealthgames.com. It will also get involved in the logistics, including arranging marquees for sponsors, all temporary kitchens, entertainment, floral arrangements and garden designs.
For the core sponsors and partners, Sodexho Prestige is planning to offer a special package that will include a temporary marquee structure within the "sponsors' village" adjacent to the main stadium. Here, sponsors will have access to furniture, theming, entertainment, and landscaped gardens so they can create their own personalised environment. An allocation for food catering comes as part of the package.
Richard Burtt will be the dedicated client liaison director with the job of matching the sponsors' requirements to the right offer. "We have a baseline offer and then it's anything upwards. They can pick marquee linings, furniture, carpets - in fact, everything within their chosen area. If they want to sit round a glass table engraved with their logo, we can arrange it," says Burtt. The company has created strategic alliances with specialist companies, from tentage to furniture, for the event, and these all have project teams to liase with clients.
The corporate hospitality facility Club Sport - for which Sodexho Prestige is expecting anything from 4,000 to 7,000 corporate hospitality guests during the games - will also be located near the main stadium. Club Sport will live up to its name, says Valentine, offering a club-type environment with TV walls, bars, a buffet to graze on with a selection of dishes from around the Commonwealth, hostess service, and a dedicated corporate shuttle bus running from Sportcity into the city centre.
Core offers will be brunch (8am-11am), lunch (11am-5pm) and high tea (3pm-11pm). Prices start at £230 per person, going up to £495 for the opening and closing ceremonies.
"We want to maximise the experience for corporate hospitality guests," explains Valentine, "by trying to marry up, for example, morning swimming with afternoon squash, thus giving clients a real mix for each day. The key strand is flexibility."
Sodexho UK
Total number of contracts: 3,725
Annual turnover: £1b-plus
Sodexho Prestige
Manor House, Manor Farm Road, Alperton, Middlesex HAO 1BN
Tel: 020 8566 9222
Profit centres: 116
Annual turnover: £90m
Biggest contract to date: Ascot racecourse (£18m)
Managing director: Stephen McManus
Operations director: Russell Haddon
Sales and marketing director: Sean Valentine
Client liaison director: Richard Burtt
Commonwealth Games contract
Venue cluster manager - sponsors and hospitality: Trish Tracey
Venue catering director: David Payne
Manchester 2002
The Commonwealth Games is an 11-day event with 72 nations competing in 17 sports. It is expected to attract about one million spectators and up to one billion television viewers.
Sodexho Prestige expects about 65,000 sponsors and corporate hospitality guests, requiring 4,500sq m of marquee space. Up to 72,000 pieces of fine bone china and crystal glassware will be used.
Temporary staff
While experienced managers are key, the major challenge for every event caterer is the recruiting of temporary staff. Sodexho Prestige will need to recruit 600 personnel for sponsors and hospitality alone, at a time when Manchester will be buzzing with activity.
But Valentine is unfazed by the challenge. "One of the reasons we won the bid was that we have 54,000 employees in Britain alone. We were able to draw 40 managers just from the UK for Sydney, and we operate in 70 countries around the world. We have huge resources within the company, and these will be drawn upon to ensure the Commonwealth Games are given full support throughout the 11 days."
Sodexho Prestige intends to bring those managers with hands-on experience of the Olympics back for Manchester and then use its in-house recruitment agency, Prestige People, to recruit temporary staff. Prestige People has more than 1,000 temporary staff currently on its books.
"The advantage over an external agency is that we know these staff are trained to a certain standard and they know our expectations," says Valentine. "One of the major barriers to recruiting consistent, good-quality temporary labour is giving them consistent work throughout the year. They're not bound to us, but we try to get consistency into the temporary labour market and it's really paying off."
