Finance and Marketing

The Role:

The Royal Bath & West of England Society

The Client:

The Client

The Royal Bath & West of England Society is a charity that was set up in 1777 to promote and encourage Agriculture, Manufacture, Arts and Rural Crafts through an innovative approach to education and knowledge transfer.  The Society is best known for hosting the annual Royal Bath & West Show on its own Showground at Shepton Mallet. At present it organises two other specialist agricultural shows, Grassland UK (every three years) and, annually, The Dairy Show - the country’s largest such event.

The Showground also hosts a wide variety of third-party organised events which, together with catering concessions, is worth circa £1m per year of additional revenue.

The business of the Society has evolved into four parts: -

  1. Hosting financially viable agricultural and rural shows through Bath & West Shows Ltd.

  2. Gaining best commercial value from their showground through Bath & West Enterprises Ltd.

  3. Developing superfluous land to release capital for showground improvements.

  4. Delivering their charitable objectives.

The Campaign

Former Chief Executive, Rupert Cox, was seeking to appoint two critical senior roles, a Financial Controller and a new Head of Marketing in 2019.  

Both roles were key to the Society’s growth plans and as such we wanted to identify candidates who knew the Showground and what it stands for, had an appreciation of the breadth of the Society’s offering and the importance of upholding the history and heritage and therefore could operate by being true to the Society’s culture and values. Both roles reported to the CEO and would join to be part of the Senior Management Team.

The Challenge

The Royal Bath & West of England Society is so unique as it is both a Charity as well as a trading business. The site itself is vast and has a great reputation for putting on tremendous events. Therefore, we had to ensure all candidates appreciated the hugely varied and multi-faceted nature of these events, ranging from Showground events such as the Bath and West annual show, an antiques show, music and comedy nights, ongoing venue hire and ultimately relying on footfall and recurring revenue. We also needed to be mindful of the history and heritage behind the Society and the calibre of the Board of Trustees, ion ensuring we identified appropriate interview shortlists. So, there were many nuances to the search.     

The Solution

We adopted a thorough national search with a detailed screening process. All candidates were interviewed and met by us before including in the shortlist. Each candidate was asked about the Society and Showground, what research they had undertaken and if they were familiar with the site.

We also introduced a second stage in the process called a ‘Walk & Talk Tour’, where short listed candidates had an opportunity to meet the CEO in a more informal setting, walk around the site and view the premises outside of a major showground event. This allowed candidates to ask any questions along the way and the ‘Walk & Talk Tour’ proved to be the most popular part of the process, as it was so personable. The final stage involved a more formal presentation and panel interview by the CEO and Trustees.

Both campaigns were conducted on a search basis, and we looked at a mix of event space, museum, charity and food, hospitality and agricultural backgrounds. We wanted candidates to show us what they knew about the Society and also be as enthusiastic as the CEO is about the organisation.

Vanessa Moon, Director of Moon Executive Search said ‘We were so proud to have been chosen to hire these two important roles for such an iconic organisation. I had mentioned to Rupert when we pitched that we had just booked for Truckfest and I think that helped with our proposal! On a serious note, these were two fascinating campaigns and ones where knowledge and research of the Society were equally important.’

Rupert Cox, former CEO says, ‘We were delighted to work with Moon Executive Search. They clearly understood our objectives and values and we were so pleased with the outcome of successfully bringing in our two hires on time and to budget’ adding ‘we must never underestimate the important work the Society does to promote a broad range of economic, social, educational and cultural improvements to rural life today’.   

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