David Taylor: Morning! How are you?

Rachel Bell: Good morning! I’m alright. How are you? 

DT: Yes, very good. So: this is our last edition of the year coming up and I thought we'd start basically with a question about how it's been for you, this year? Obviously, since March, things have been odd for everybody. We at NLA have pivoted to a digital format pretty much and I guess as a business development person within your practice you've had to find new methods. Is that a fair suggestion?

RB: Absolutely, yeah. What a year!  I actually joined the board at Stride Treglown on 1 January as well, in a new role on the board and, as you say, doing business development sat at home has been tough. We are all people-based, and love face-to-face meetings, and obviously seeing everyone's reactions, and how you deal with that. But actually, I think it's addressed quite a lot in the industry as a whole, and I hope that there are a lot of points that people will pick up on and actually take forward and start questioning what we were doing. You know, the 7a.m events, or the crazy late nights and the big dinners and that very social side that comes from business development, but also the fact that I've actually found lots of great meetings and actually the willingness of many people that ordinarily you kind of think well, they might not give me the time of day, but actually they've been very open to half an hour discussions. 

And that's actually been a really enlightening moment; that you don't have to be doing lots of travel. So, before lockdown I was travelling across the UK around all of our nine offices supporting all of the teams in each of those regions. And actually being able to do that without the travel and overnight stays, all of those crazy hours I think will really make me question what I want to do beyond this, and how I make the most of it. So: really thinking about what the purpose is and that has really started to make a lot of people think about how you tackle business development and that engagement side, and look after clients and those relationships when ordinarily can't you be in the same room together.

DT: What is missing I presume is the face-to-face, which is just so difficult to replicate. Is it the case that you think that it's just going to be different ratio of that going forward?

RB: Yes. Absolutely. I think there will still be a need for people to get together, to collaborate. As people in the creative industry, that's the hardest thing that we found but there are methods, and I actually think that the discussions around the death of the office and various other things like that is…it's just not going to be to that extreme. The fact that people will still want to get together; I think it's just the emphasis on people jumping from event to event, meetings to meetings. That's actually been one of the first things that I think I've highlighted very early on in lockdown was that downtime that you have between meetings, and to some extent that is part of the commute that you have. Or the travel. That's the thinking space, whereas if you’re bouncing from call to call, you literally are jamming things in back-to-back, or you're dealing with the missed phone calls whilst you've been on the other calls. But no, absolutely, I think we are about that interaction with people and therefore it is key that we still have those opportunities to meet together. But I just think it will be questioned in terms of the large-scale events, or how they are dealt with and actually what people are trying to get out of them. And I think that’s having a clear agenda. What's your target? Which should have been the case anyway.