We went to win – not to war.
I don’t do anything in business or when racing boats to simply take part. The old British sporting adage that taking part is more important than the winning is not something I’ve ever subscribed to.”
Keith Mills doesn’t stand on ceremony. He and the London bid team wrestled the 2012 Olympiad from the vice-like grip of the French at the very death. No apologies, no humble British befuddlement at the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) final decision. They believed they’d win – and shared a conviction that they deserved to win – so went all-out for victory.
As for the French? “They were kicking themselves quite frankly,” says Mills. It’s his simple response to the widespread Gallic allegations that the British team bent the rules and employed underhand tactics to secure the biggest sporting bounty the world has to offer.
EPIC TURNAROUND
The bid itself was a turnaround of epic proportions. London’s package was roundly dismissed as inferior from the outset. Its initial chairman, Go airline entrepreneur Barbara Cassani, was written off as an inappropriate appointment only serving to illustrate the lack of belief and leadership talent in the UK.
To have an American woman fronting the bid, and one who felt discomfort doing the essential but brazen bar room lobbying, appeared absurd to many. Technically, the bid’s shortcomings were writ large in blinding neon. London had, or has, a decrepit transport infrastructure incapable of serving the great influx of people an Olympics would bring.
The residual feeling that the government would come up short again, stemming from the Picketts Lock World Athletics Championships fiasco, was also strong domestically and among voting IOC members. Couple that with the apparent superiority of Paris’ third (time lucky) bid for the Olympics and its impressive, and already built, national stadium, as well as the submissions of three other major world cities and it was hard to deny the merchants of doom had a point.
But ultimately they were wrong. And Mills proved why he has a reputation for winning. The AirMiles inventor and founder of the hugely successful Nectar loyalty card scheme was, as chief executive and international president of the bid, the business brain that masterminded the behind-thescenes operation.
While Seb Coe was rightly given credit for chairing it – after replacing Cassani – and leading from the front it was the detail and Mills’ record as an arch-pitcher that put the team leader in a position to contest the sprint finish.
Like a top class domestique in the Tour de France Mills was reliable, hard-working but ultimately happy to sacrifice personal glory. The comparison might not appear to do him justice but as someone who recognises the value of a tight unit and was part of the crew that won the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race he would no doubt detect the compliment. So how did he and his team pull it off?
CONCEPT TO REALITY
Mills was hired as chief executive in September 2003. He had never been to an Olympics, had no experience of working with the public sector, and, bar his yachting, no sporting pedigree.
What he did have was a lifetime’s worth of pitching experience from his 20 years in marketing and advertising. With AirMiles, devised in 1988, he had turned a concept into a global reality. He also knew the bitter taste of failure. In 1993 a US AirMiles scheme collapsed costing Mills around £15m and in 2002 he finally exited ticket-ordering business First Call – the company he’d bought and taken private – having lost an estimated £10m. It proved he was prepared to take risks for a win rather than settle for second best. Later in 2002 he launched Nectar, sealing his rehabilitated reputation, and remains as chairman of Loyalty Management UK, which following an acquisition last year of AirMiles International Trading now owns both the AirMiles and Nectar assets and turned over £230m last year.
After accepting the role from Cassani it quickly became apparent the IOC wanted a well-founded bid delivered on time and to budget. Its 115 members across 80 countries were keen to avoid extravagance and lofty promises while retaining flair and imagination.
Cassani and Mills responded immediately by lining up the participation of spectacular sports stadia in Wembley and Wimbledon, and combining them with historic venues such as Greenwich Park, Lords and Horseguards Parade for beach volleyball. In addition London proposed the biggest new park built in 200 years, offering a legacy and environmental clout. “In any good business you start by doing research,” says Mills, “to understand what the customers are really looking for, and then try to build the product that best meets their needs and aspirations.”
Just over two months after his arrival Mills and Cassani had to present the complete Olympic plan – all the venues, all the budgets, absolutely everything – to the Cabinet for approval before the initial submission to the IOC on 15 January. “We basically had nine weeks from me starting to putting the plan together for the biggest event in the world, and that’s just not enough time. But we got to the shortlist.”
BUDGET MARKETING
The next challenge was convincing Britain it should want the Games. The nationwide approval rating hovered around the 50% mark and the IOC wasn’t about to bestow the honour on an apathetic nation. By the time the team left for Singapore around 80% were behind it.
Mills’ team achieved this against the odds. “It was the result of an 18-month campaign across London and the UK and we did it like lots of new young businesses with little or no money,” he says. “We didn’t have £20m or £30m to spend on sexy television advertising. So we had to find innovative ways of getting large organisations to donate their media to us.”
He estimates about £25m worth of marketing and media support was secured at a cost of around £1m. A major part of that was persuading the amenable London mayor Ken Livingstone, who had said he would do everything in his power to support the effort, to get Transport For London to give advertising space on trains, tubes and buses.
Equally, the biggest taxi manufacturer agreed to brand its cabs. The Evening Standard donated huge amounts of advertising space and cinemas ran campaign films free of charge. There were many more and few were easy wins. “In the early days it was bloody tough,” he says. “There was still luke-warm government support. I think everyone had their doubts. Corporate Britain did. Clearly the media were pretty sceptical. And the British public were pretty sceptical too.”
It took Mills back to his pitching roots and given a faceto- face opportunity he didn’t disappoint. “Most of them saw that I was talking some sense,” he says. “The reality of selling is that a lot of people will say no to start with and it’s persuasion that converts them.”
Around two thirds of those the team pressed said no initially. “One of things we did right at the beginning was to bring together a group of people that really had passion and belief in their ability to succeed. There was not one person in this building that did not believe we could win.”
TEAM BUILDING
The management team adopted a mantra and stuck rigidly to it, quickly creating a culture of openness. “The rule was if what you’re doing today isn’t helping us win, don’t do it,” says Mills. “It’s very easy in business to get diverted down all sorts of blind alleys. We had very few resources, very little time to deliver something quite complex and could only afford to focus on things that helped us win.”
The disparate group came from government, sport, big corporates, small businesses – some structured environments, others less so. “To get them all to function together was a real challenge in the first six months,” says Mills. To build the necessary esprit de corps he ran weekly team meetings and impressed upon every member of staff that what they were doing – even if it was stuffing envelopes – could win or lose them one vote, if an addressee didn’t get a crucial bit of mail.
He ran what he refers to as a ‘matrix organisation’ based around functional departments and specific projects. Some projects, like the candidate files, involved every single department and were managed by a team of individuals from those departments. “We were conscious not to create a silo mentality and that was something we pursued not just inside the bid, but with our external stakeholders.” Once it had taken root the team, plus Blair, Livingstone and every other stakeholder stood shoulder to shoulder.
BUSINESS MILESTONES
Internationally, the job was even tougher. London’s technical merits, as outlined earlier, fell short at the initial submission. But by the time the IOC’s inspection team visited, London had listened more intently than its rivals.
A number of sports were brought closer to the Olympic Park or into it. For transport the government was persuaded to commit around £3bn more to the infrastructure. “I’ve always run my business on the basis of trying to find a catalyst to make things happen,” says Mills. “Everyone knew the Evaluations Commission was coming to London. Whether it’s opening a store, launching a product, or acquiring a business, creating milestones focuses everyone’s mind on getting something done, galvanises the team and stops the drift that happens sometimes.”
The candidate files stood a metre high containing every piece of infrastructure, security and environmental planning, all the venue information, architectural drawings and hundreds of contracts. There were detailed plans for sports development, training camps, hotels, the athletes’ village and many more things besides.
DUE DILIGENCE
While the IOC was digesting it all Mills was preparing for a week of fierce due diligence. Two weeks before the IOC arrived he put together a team of a dozen or so people, flew them in from all over the world and they did absolutely everything the IOC members were going to do – from picking them up at the airport, to staying in the hotel, every meal, every piece of transportation, absolutely everything to the last detail was rehearsed. At the end of that rehearsal week the stand-ins then downloaded to Mills everything the team could have done better. The 36 presentations on different issues were refined, the logistics tweaked, so that when the real IOC arrived it would be perfect.
And it was perfect. Their visits to every venue in London, meeting with the political leaders at Number 10 and state banquet at Buckingham Palace were carried off with velvety aplomb. “If one of them had had a heart attack we had a swat team ready to go in and take them to hospital. Every vehicle had GPS in it so we knew exactly where everyone was at any given time and you could actually watch where anyone was going at any given time from the control centre.”
The team worked extremely closely with the police, Transport for London, and the transport control centre in Victoria. “The end result was that the message round the world when they left London was that we had a fantastic plan, were technically excellent and absolutely able to deliver. So when we got to Singapore there was no question in the IOC’s mind. We could leave all the head stuff to one side and concentrate on the heart.”
SLICK PRESENTATION
When the final phase began at a training camp on Sentosa Island near Singapore, Mills and Coe once again out-thought the French. Instead of subscribing to the view that you can’t win a Games on the final presentation but you can lose it, the team believed it represented a final and significant opportunity.
Access to IOC members had been heavily restricted to official visits, so unlike previous years’ teams had not formed personal bonds and understandings. The presentation and one-on-one meetings in the days leading up to the vote therefore would be a genuine source of information and inspiration, says Mills.
“Our competitors’ presentations were all very professional but they basically ticked the boxes and didn’t take any risks, they didn’t appeal emotionally to the audience. We decided that we would.”
To achieve this Mills flew out a squadron of script writers and speech coaches to assist the final push. And, away from the media the speeches and prepared responses to around 100 possible questions were practised to within an inch of their lives. “When we arrived in Singapore we had scripts, gazillions of slides, films, but that was only the raw material. What it needed was three or four concentrated days refining that material and working with the speakers, the films and the slides together and polishing and honing it until we got everything absolutely right. And every word, every syllable and every blink of the eyelid was rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed until we got it to a point that we were absolutely comfortable it would touch the heart of the audience.”
THE FINAL PITCH
That left valuable time before the final vote to lobby ferociously. Press conferences and big receptions were banned. Private oneon- ones were permitted and thanks to Sentosa the key players had no concerns about their presentations. So, in a move that riled the French particularly, Mills and his team arranged 66 half-hour meetings in the last 48 hours. “The French didn’t, and neither frankly did New York, Madrid or Moscow. They relied on bumping into members in the bar, the lobby or around the hotel. We just knew that wasn’t going to work.”
Coe, the Blairs, Mills and Livingstone came to the fore, although once again Mills’ thirst for inch-perfect delivery meant his whole team played a part. “We a team of around 200 in Singapore. But within that there was a core group of around 30. And they all had every day mapped out into 15 minute slots. While we were organising all these one-onone meetings, taking numbers, taking them upstairs, suites organised all over the place, the French were wandering around not knowing what was going on.”
Two years of intelligence gathering on each voting member was distilled onto one page of A4 – “Remember, the PM, Cherie Blair and Ken Livingstone didn’t know these people.” Every possible lead – including Cherie Blair talking to IOC members’ wives – was followed up. “All you’re really trying to do is build up a picture of an individual so that when you sit down with them what you say resonates.”
Through AirMiles and Nectar, as well as advertising, Mills has spent a career capturing customer data and using it to cross-sell and up-sell. The principles were the same. “Being able to talk to them – even for just 30 minutes about what was relevant for them, how London could help their sport or particular interest – was part of the marketing programme.”
Not only did Mills, Coe and Cassani (who remained as vice-chair) deliver on time, they came in under-budget with a £1.4m surplus. They proved highly imaginative, admirably aggressive and forthright, and used everything at their disposal. And they’re not about to stop now as Mills and Coe lead the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG), the private client of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA). “We specify what gets built and if the ODA or any organisation of government decides they want to go off and do something else we will start banging drums and making noises. There are examples, now that we’ve won the Games, of all sorts of grandiose ideas. But I’m not having any of it. This is not an ego trip for architects, or government or companies. We built a metre-high pile of proposals and that’s what we’re going to deliver. That’s it.”
