Joe Gordon and Mark Skipper join James Ashton to discuss keeping up with customer expectation, battling budget cuts, riding your luck and the excitement of opening night.
Joe Gordon is the head of First Direct, a trailblazing phone bank when it launched 30 years ago. Part of HSBC, today it has 1.5m customers largely transacting on the internet and smartphone and gearing up for the open banking revolution that could see it recommend insurance and energy deals alongside savings accounts and mortgages.
Gordon was unloading carrots as a Sainsbury’s graduate trainee only 15 years ago. After several years at BT, he took over the running of HSBC’s call centres in 2015, moving to First Direct two years later.
Mark Skipper is the chief executive of Northern Ballet, the Leeds-based touring company that popularises ballet through more than 200 performances every year in towns and cities across the UK.
Dracula, Queen Victoria, Jane Eyre, the Little Mermaid and Casanova have all had the Northern Ballet treatment. Skipper has spent 32 years at the company, joining as deputy stage manager in 1987 and taking the top job in 1996.
During his tenure he has carved out new income streams as state funding has fallen, experimented with beaming ballet into cinemas and become a leading voice for the arts outside London.
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