Kay England, chief executive of imago, has declared that despite the conference and events industry having just experienced its most considerable downturn in business over the past 18 months, imago ended the year on a high, retaining its strong occupancy levels. Here, Kay reviews 2009 and explores imago’s strategy moving into 2010 to ensure imago remains at the top of its game: “2009 was a challenging year with bookings coming in with a much shorter lead time and enquiries slowing. Despite this, we have retained good occupancy levels and have hosted some incredibly high-profile events and conferences. 2010 looks optimistic and we remain confident that we see a boost in bookings. “imago as a business is fortunate that it has an extremely broad customer base, which helped to cushion us somewhat from the full impact of the recession. imago is also now a very well established brand name in the conference industry and this certainly helped us to compete in a difficult market. “We diversified into new markets in order to fill gaps in our business and to fill our ‘shoulder’ periods. We developed local business partnerships alongside our weddings, spa and leisure break markets and have also started working in conjunction with local attractions to attract visitors to the region. Plus, in an effort to be more in control of our own destiny and develop a separate income stream during these unpredictable times, in 2009 imago established an event management company and venue placement agency, both of which are already proving successful are attracting new business to our venues. “We also recruited a specialist sports manager based in our sales office whose role it is to attract high profile sporting business to our venues. One of the biggest coups for the year was to attract the Japanese Olympic team to Loughborough University between 2009 and 2012 and our venues are already hosting the Japanese sporting teams. The world-renowned sporting reputation of Loughborough University along with our high levels of repeat business and broad customer base have ensured that we will most definitely be returning a surplus this year. “Cost control is always very important when times are troubled and like many of our colleagues in the industry, we scrutinised our cost base. This in itself was an interesting exercise and, for example, changing our telephony supplier saved us £5K this year alone, with an increase in the quality of service. “Highly trained staff is extremely important to the success of our business and we took the conscious decision not to make any redundancies. Interestingly, due to the recession, we noticed that very few staff have left the business, but where members of staff have moved on, we have, on occasion, used this opportunity to restructure or replace with casual staff if appropriate. We have always been mindful to ensure this does not impact negatively on our levels of quality and customer care. “Looking forward, I do believe 2010 will continue to be challenging, made more so because with less business around we are expecting hotels to continue competing on price, which will in turn reduce average rates. As a result, we will be concentrating on providing our consistent excellent levels of customer care and ensuring the quality of our product remains high, in order that we maintain our repeat business levels. We are also still being proactive with our sales strategy and are managing to pick up new business. “As budgets become more buoyant and companies start recruiting, this optimism will begin to filter down to our industry with clients booking more meeting rooms and bedrooms. The meeting and conference industry is often one of the last sectors to pull out of a recession. Because of this, we have made a conscious decision not to cut back on our sales and marketing resources as we want to ensure when it does we are in a the strongest position we can be when the economic climate starts to improve.”