Anyone who has worked in international business will know that the brilliant film ‘Up In The Air’ is a pretty accurate description of the business travel game.

Ultimately, clients get the agencies they deserve and agencies get the clients they deserve. The best RFPs I ever worked on started with the client presenting their business first and giving the agency real insight into the aims for the next 3-5 years.

What I do hope will be most enduring though was the belated mixing of male and female events. Mixed relays in athletics and swimming at The Olympics were brilliant ideas, especially as Team GB seemed to be so good at them. And having been highly doubtful about it as an overall concept, The Hundred’s men’s and women’s cricket formats proved to be entertaining viewing.

I have sympathy; I’m out there every day trying to sell my services and it’s tough. But that doesn’t mean resorting to the blind tactics used by the many companies who know absolutely nothing about me, yet who are guaranteeing to connect me to hungry, cash rich clients at the drop of a hat. Or, more precisely, the opening of my wallet.

My wife and I love Chinese food. And for us, no Chinese meal is complete without a huge portion of prawn crackers to kick it off.

It was not a pleasant experience, but it taught me several valuable lessons which I leaned on during the rest of my career

On the weekend we travelled to Snowdonia to pick up a gorgeous 8 week old Cavalier King Charles spaniel. Neither my wife nor I have owned a dog in adulthood so this is a pretty new experience for us – another of the long list of changes we’ve made since the first lockdown.

It will be interesting to see what lessons businesses have learned. Do you need so many people attending a meeting that several have to sit in the awkward second row of seats by the window? Do you need trays of expensive, handcrafted uneaten pastries wilting in the heat (whilst simultaneously showing off your green credentials)?

I like wine. And I like learning about new stuff. So, a few years ago I joined a well-known wine club. I order a few bottles, they deliver, I drink it, forget to make a note of which ones I like best and repeat 3-4 times a year.

That’s just over 50% of a typical day spent reading, watching, listening or gaming via traditional or digital media channels and devices. And it does not seem to include time spent staring at screens at work or for personal email.

It left me thinking, is this a more open approach being taken as a result of attitudes to customers changing because of the pandemic? Is it because we’ve moved out of London and everyone is just friendlier outside of the capital? Or was it always like this, but previously I was just too busy to notice?

So, there’s a simple equation: don’t keep the customer informed and lose the small profit you were going to make vs keep the customer informed and actually sell more product than you might have done originally

It amazes me how many clients consider the scoring mechanism to be a secret, not to be shared with participants. It’s in their interest to provide the maximum amount of information possible to allow tendering businesses to produce the best response, yet many fail to do so.

There is something especially exciting about summer sporting events – those periods where international football tournaments coincide with cricket test matches, golf majors, Grand Prix, the Olympics and so on.

I was very fortunate to have the wonderful Jim Hytner as my boss from 2013 to 2017. If you are a direct report of Jim’s, you have to have a nickname, and after a couple of false starts he picked up on mine and my wife’s passion for Shakespeare and from that point onwards I became ‘The Bard’

I became a Trustee of Calibre Audio last June and have attended regular meetings ever since. It’s fascinating to work with an organisation that is not primarily commercially oriented and to hopefully be able to bring a contemporary business perspective to help them grow and provide even greater and more diverse content for their members.

I spent 30 years working in advertising agencies, where new business is part of everyday life; clients tender their business on a regular basis – as often as every 3 years. So you spend the first year bedding the client in, the second building the relationship and the third preparing to defend the business in the next pitch.

My kids say that I can turn any conversation into a reference from one of Blackadder, Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy or Monty Python’s Life Of Brian. Is this part of a cunning plan? Or maybe because I could never get the hang of Thursdays? Or am I just looking on the bright side of life?

You are reviewing the new business performance for the year and realise you tendered for far too many new clients, resulting in a poor conversion rate, overstretched teams and potentially, a poor reputation in the market. You unanimously agree to do less new tenders next year. Fast forward to the end of the first quarter and you’re involved in umpteen new business pitches and everyone’s working evenings, weekends and during holidays just to keep up.

Hello. And a particular greeting to anyone who is dealing with significant change.