Local charities will benefit this year from 10 different fundraising efforts by a local management consultancy marking its 10th anniversary.
CBO Projects, founded by Philip Smith in 2011, has grown to a 14-strong team of highly qualified and experienced consultants. “We wanted our 10-year anniversary to be about giving back to the community in a meaningful way”, said Philip.
“Since 2014, CBO has had an initiative in place whereby each staff member has an extra five days leave a year to put towards supporting a charity or community initiative of their choice. We wanted to expand on this to mark this milestone in the life of the company”.
CBO has grown consistently in the last decade. The company’s chief operating officer Alastair Bisson joined in 2013, bringing with him a wealth of blue-chip technology project and programme experience. Another major catalyst for growth arrived in the form of director Ed Gowan in 2015; his background was in delivering major change programmes for the public sector.
Ed, who is now responsible for all aspects of team performance, said it was the growth of the ‘talented and vibrant’ team that has been the key to CBO’s success. “Our recruitment has always targeted character type”, he said.
“Finding people who really understood our DNA, and who were genuinely willing to commit to our levels of quality, was incredibly challenging but that effort has been equally rewarding. We’ve worked hard on training, as you would expect, but it’s the underlying qualities of our team members that make this business work”.
Alastair added: “We’ve focused on developing a really strong reputation for our work in the Channels Islands (and beyond) and work hard to promote and maintain CBO as a fantastic place to develop your career. At the very heart of that has been the application of quality as our core principle, something that we feel has benefitted clients and staff alike”.
Philip said that the two key challenges over the last 10 years had been ensuring consistent quality and value for clients, and attracting and retaining the best talent. “A focus for us has been putting the right things in place early in our growth to ensure that we had a successful response for these two challenges. The fact that we are celebrating our 10-year anniversary is hopefully evidence that our approach has worked”, he said.
Staff at CBO will unveil their 10-year anniversary fundraising ideas in the coming weeks, and planning is already underway for another big annual event. “The CBO Summer Beach Party is a real highlight, with clients, the CBO team and all their families enjoying a nice summer’s evening on one of Guernsey’s finest beaches. We’re really looking forward to hosting the next one, post-pandemic, to help celebrate this 10-year anniversary”.
