Project Brighton: Sarah Springford, Director of Brighton and Hove Chamber of Commerce, discusses her win at Brighton and Hove Business Awards

A few months ago we did a personality test with the Chamber team. It was the Myers Briggs Indicator. I’ve done it before in previous jobs and found it really interesting and useful. We enlisted the help of Susan Carroll from Scala Advance. Susan works with lots of big and small companies across the UK and beyond. She’s also been a member of the Chamber for a couple of years now and has facilitated sessions with our Board so she knows how the Chamber works, about our ethos and what we want to achieve – our vision.

‘Doing’ Myers Briggs helps you understand how you and your team work best, how you take in information and enables you to work to each others’ strengths. One of the questions on the MBTI online questionnaire was about what you feel about being noticed. It got me thinking about how we like to be rewarded and what being noticed means to different people.

When I heard my name announced at the Brighton and Hove Business Awards on the 14th of September, as this year’s Outstanding Brightonian, my first thought was that I’m a behind the scenes person, not a get up on the stage and talk to the 300 strong crowd person. Fortunately I had recently attended one of Steve Bustin’s brilliant presentation skills courses and I remembered him talking about the importance of working out what the audience is interested in, and the message you want to get across, and I managed to say something. But it dawned on me that whilst the big moment on the night was exciting and scary all at the same time, this was not actually the nub of being awarded the accolade.

When I heard my name announced as this year’s Outstanding Brightonian, my first thought was that I’m a behind the scenes person

One of the reasons given by the judges for this year’s choice was the success of the Brighton and Hove Living Wage campaign run by Brighton Chamber. This started over four years ago after a commission organised by Bill Randall and chaired by the then President of the Chamber, Julia Chanteray, agreed that Brighton and Hove should have a living wage campaign, and that it would be led by the Chamber. It’s the only business-led campaign that I’ve heard about. Last week the 300th employee signed up to the campaign: Flowers Unlimited.

Running excellent events for our members is what drives us and takes 75% of our time and resources. The Brighton Summit – our big annual conference – was on 14th October this year and it was a big success. It was sold out with over 300 businesses attending and was like no other business event I’ve been too. The energy was palpable, the feedback has been fantastic, Twitter went mad! The secret behind what we can achieve is that we have a huge group of 60 or so business people who volunteer their skills, help and ideas to make things happen. By 7.30am on the morning of the Summit, The Clarendon Centre was buzzing with volunteers ready to buddy speakers, run sessions, write blogs, make videos – that’s what I love best about being part of Brighton Chamber.

Winning an award is good for businesses, and since the Outstanding Brightonian we’ve had lots of new members joining, lots of interest in what we do, and lots of people getting in touch to say well done. I think it’s brilliant that a Chamber of Commerce is recognised in this way by the Business Community.

To find out more about Brighton Chamber see www.businessinbrighton.org.uk