Head 2 Head: Paul McPartlan, CEO of Places Leisure

Click here to listen to Craig‘s conversation with Paul.

Craig

Paul, thank you very much for joining me today on the Head2Head podcast. I’ve done a bit of an introduction beforehand, but inevitably guests make a much better job of it than I do. So, could you introduce yourself to the people listening, please?

Paul

Yeah, thanks very much, it’s really great to join you today. I’m Paul McPartlan, and I’m the Chief Executive Officer at Places Leisure, which is part of the Places For People Group.

Craig

I know you’ve got quite a background in the health industry, I’m always fascinated to know and understand how people have developed their career to sit in the CEO seat. What’s that journey been like for you?

Paul

It’s been a really interesting one, full of excitement, challenges and changes.

I guess my initial career started fairly early; I found out at 19 that I was going to become a dad, so I went out to work, probably a bit earlier than I thought.

I took a job in a leisure centre, trying to be a lifeguard, swimming teacher and a fitness instructor and worked my way through various different roles both in public leisure and private leisure, and then went to work for six years for Whitbread in both David Lloyd facilities and in a hotel and restaurant division.

I really cut my teeth in the hospitality sector for a number of years and then got an opportunity to get into a broader spectrum of health care and became a hospital Director. I worked in nice parts of healthcare and for the last two or three years, I worked for Nuffield Health across both spectrums. I wanted to work for an organisation where I could take the opportunity to use the skillset that I had both in the pure leisure division, but also in the healthcare background that I’d worked on in the past 10 years. Nuffield was really one of those kinds of unique organisations that bridge both of those sectors.

I don’t think I ever really started my career with an ambition to become a CEO, but I’ve always enjoyed leadership roles, even as a young lad, captaining the football, rugby and cricket teams.

There’s the sports analogy of taking your team with you and leading from the front, something I’ve always enjoyed. I like, I like leading teams, but I like staying quite close to them too, so I joined Places in August last year.

It was a challenging time for anybody to join.

I’m back in the public arena as well, which is going through some incredibly challenging times. So, you know, I feel honoured and privileged to lead an organisation of about 7,000 employees.

I take my role as CEO incredibly responsibly, in terms of the welfare and wellbeing of all of those people, more so now than ever before. I’m really excited to step into the role of CEO. I am learning every day. And, you know, I use all of the experiences I’ve gained working my way through the organisation, everybody has a different career path, but I believe I’ve earned my stripes at every level and done pretty much every job that exists, and that that certainly stands me in good stead I think to lead this organisation at the moment.

Craig

That’s interesting you say that. I do think that the fact that you didn’t have the objective of having to get to CEO has made you enjoy and take in each of those steps on the way.

Paul

Yeah, very much so when I look back at the different layers of my career, I enjoyed them in various ways. I’ve always been an operator at heart so I have always enjoyed the operational roles, getting my hands dirty, rolling up my sleeves and getting stuck in, but at the same time, the ability to move more strategically and to get involved in start-up organisations where you’re much more strategically focused, answering to investors and dealing with boards in both the private sector and the not for profit sector has been really exciting.

You often sit in either a number two or three role and look up at the CEO and think, I don’t want that much responsibility, but then when you’re sitting in that role and when I take what I’ve found over the last six or seven months, stepping into the shoes, is how tremendously exciting it is to be able to push the organisation in a particular direction and coach and to lead teams of people, knowing full well that you’ve probably done the job that they’ve done, and you’ve got a really good insight into the challenges they’re facing and you know that you can help.

Whether that’s through improved communication or strong culture and ways of working, all of those things that get you frustrated with when you were at a certain level and looked up at a CEO – thinking I could do a better job than you.

When you’re there, it’s not quite so easy and certainly, the last six months, managing through a global pandemic, has not been easy. I’m delighted to be in this role and I think if there’s a message for anybody wanting to develop their career…In 1990, I was a lifeguard in a swimming pool and in 2020 CEO at the same organisation, albeit under a slightly different name.

So, anything is possible if you work hard and, and you apply yourself in the right way.

Craig

That’s a top message. I know you’ve got this draw to the organisation because of where you started, but what was it specifically that pulled you back to Places and made you want to take on the responsibility of CEO?

Paul

It’s really interesting and sounds quite dry but I wasn’t looking to make a move. I had a fabulous job at Nuffield overseeing a portfolio of hospitals and fitness and consumer clubs, as well as some of the other streams. It was a great team of people and quite a unique sort of product mix, but, somebody sent me a brief and I saw the role and I thought, yeah, I fancy that that’s got my name written all over it because of the mix of skillset that was needed for the role.

And, and where the organisation wanted to go and Places For People as a group, as a social enterprise, is really looking to create itself as an organisation that wants to improve places for people. Essentially it wants to ensure that it’s building really strong community foundations, not just in the bricks and mortar.

The leisure division has a part to play in ensuring that when the group builds a brand new community it can start to embrace the wellness and the wellbeing of that community.

I could see a really good, long-term opportunity to really stamp my authority within the wider group. I’ve worked in pretty much every organisation; startups, strong commercial organisations, charitable organisations and now to rejoin a social enterprise that reinvests all of the surpluses it makes back into the communities that it serves was something really important for me at this particular stage in my career.

I knew I had the skillset to be able to make a difference. The first three or four months of the pandemic, really dealing with the front end of the pandemic, which meant you needed strong leadership skills to really take people on a tough, tough journey, and I loved it. I really enjoyed it. It was really difficult and so I guess it was at that point that I thought that if a CEO role came up I’d be interested.

I read the brief and put my hat in the ring.

Yeah, I mean it’s been tough it’s been, I mean, no one’s got a navigation point to say well you haven’t mentioned this before and this is how we dealt with it. So, everything we’re dealing with now is kind of unique.

We’re not alone in this but it’s been catastrophic for the sector, there’s no doubt about it, whether that’s the public or private sector. It’s been incredibly challenging to plan because you’re looking at an unknown sort of quantity in terms of time, are we open for a week or month, six weeks, six months.

I think we all felt when we got to the sort of tier system,  even in tier three, we could still keep the facilities open, albeit slightly restricted on some of the services that we could offer, and then clearly the new variant, and the new strain destroyed the tier system and has put us in the position we’re in now which is still huge uncertainty as to when we reopen.

And of course, all of the support structures that are in place, job retention scheme, various relief funds that are therefrom, from the local and national government are the only reason I think that many operators are so alive, but they don’t cover all costs, they don’t meet all of your liabilities, so we’re, we’re extremely fortunate that we’re backed by the Places For People Group. And yet, you know that that that support can’t and won’t be there forever and we have to survive.

I think that’s, that’s the biggest challenge we all face at the moment as well. How do you survive? How do you just survive to get through this? Because we all know when we come out the other side there’s a wealth of opportunity to go after, not least you know, a huge population that’s been inactive for so long.

I think there’s a real desire for people to improve their over overall physical and mental wellbeing and there are great opportunities to be had, but we can’t escape the fact that at the moment it is about survival and while some would say well you’re hibernating at the moment, even hibernating consumes significant sums of money and so you can only hibernate for a defined period. We’ve got to try and get some idea around when we can reopen the sector. When we can start to generate some income again.

In the public sector, the way that we operate our contracts is very similar to the majority of other operators in the sector, it’s a mixture of either we would pay the local authority some of the money to run the facilities for them, or they would pay us a sum of money to run the facilities, and of course that, that’s all been turned on its head.

We’re extremely grateful that the majority of local authorities, continue to support their provision. Without that support, I’m not sure many of us would still be trading. But, their finances are stretched as well and they’ve got huge competing areas where the money is needed, and leisure is one of those that they know they’ve got to try and keep the facilities alive for when we come out of the back of the pandemic, but it is a big base to keep alive.

Shut the doors, you’ve still got to maintain these big buildings, many of which are quite old. Not all of them in a great state of repair, but all big energy-consuming sort of infrastructures that still need looking after, even though no people are using them so it’s really tough and it’s been tough on the workforce, really challenging for people to plan and keeping people motivated.

We think we can see light at the end of the tunnel and when we were open last year for the short periods, the usage was very good, so we know the pent up demand is there. We’ve just got to be still in good shape to take advantage of that demand when we can.

Craig

Those are really interesting insights. I’m guessing it must have been strange for you coming into a new role as you say, there’s no blueprint and coming into a new role I think you’d said to me before that, there are still people you’ve not met in your team, face-to-face.

Paul

I’m not alone in this, but you join an organisation and most of your initial meetings are virtual. I would ordinarily go on a road trip and go meet all of my team on-site and shake everybody’s hand and introduce myself and find out more about what they’re doing, but that’s much more difficult to do when you’re wearing masks, much more difficult to do remotely and some of our team are shielding so there’s a couple of my senior team that I still haven’t physically met in person.

I’m delighted that I was able to meet my boss in a pub back in July.

It’s been challenging to get across your vision to get across the way you want to shake culture, the way that you work the way that some of the changes that you want to make, to do that remotely has been quite difficult but equally I think what it’s shown is that we really can embrace different ways of working and we’re far more efficient at many things by not travelling hundreds of miles to sit in the room and meet people.

Our meetings now are far more efficient, far more agile, far more punchy than they ever would have been before. I think we’re making decisions faster where we’re much more efficient in some ways but the interaction, the human element, that sort of team bonding ethic of getting together and doing stuff together is just not there at the moment and I think people are really missing that.

We’re social animals that are missing the interaction so I think we’re all looking forward to doing that but I’ve got a great team of people, they’ve accepted the challenges and the changes that we’re making. I had to take some tough goals very early on in tenure, we restructured the organisation we rebased a lot of positions.

We said goodbye to a lot of people, because we had to reshape to survive, so you know that that certainly wasn’t my expectation, but it became a necessity when we realised we were going to be locked down again. It’s been tough but I think we would keep one eye on where we can take the organisation and the potential of this organisation is so exciting that’s what keeps us motivated.

Craig

What are some of the sort of things that you have planned for the future?

Paul

I think one of the first things we’ve got to do is we’ve got to rethink the way we contract the services and the way the services are funded and the method in which we bid for contracts as a sector.

I think we’ve got to sit down with our local authority partners and find better ways of collaborating and making sure that we’re contracting for the long-term as opposed to any kind of short-term gain, and then we can track the right kind of investment, rebuild facilities, there’s a huge stock of leisure facilities in the country that, that are in desperate need of refurbishing or, or replacing and rebuilding and you can only really do that if you’ve got an element of a decent long-term contract.

We’re in the middle of doing that with our partners at the moment, but there’s a long way to go there. I’m really quite excited about how we move away from being a traditional bricks and mortar face-to-face delivery provider, how we embrace what we’ve seen over the last year in terms of digital access, but also how we support the local community in a broader spectrum of wellness and wellbeing.

With some of the health reforms being talked about at the moment, we want to become a partner of choice, to be a preventative part of the NHS rather than something which is just seen as a discretionary non-essential facility. We can do an awful lot more and some of that will be physical, some of that will be online, and face-to-face.

Incorporating more of rounded health care and wellness offering, both within our facilities, but also outside in the local community and other places.

This isn’t about all doing it all ourselves, this is partnering with other institutions and organisations we’re talking to several different organisations at the moment that will be able to use our facilities and we can partner with them and support their services. We want to be part of that new thought process of how communities can become better and more positive in their wellbeing.

I think that’s, that’s what makes this exciting, and what makes Places legendary I think, in a unique position to be able to do that. We’ve got a great opportunity to ensure that when we build stuff that we wrap around a service offering that that is really exciting for that particular local community.

Craig

I think it’s widely appreciated now that one of the next biggest challenges, once we start to get over the pandemic, is that a lot of people that have been very inactive over the last few months. I think it’s gone one of two ways, people have either gone yeah I’m into my running or biking or whatever, but there’s a lot of people that haven’t had that. I also think is widely appreciated now that people’s mental health and wellbeing will need some nurturing over the next period of time.

Paul

You don’t want to be a doom and gloom merchant but the knock-on impact of this pandemic will last for many years if not decades and I think we’ve all got a part to play in trying to find different outlets and different ways of supporting that.

I also think is a sector that will move away from our traditional payment method and we’ll be a little bit more akin to where the health sector has gone over the last five to 10 years and moving towards more of payment by results type sort of mechanism. I’d be delighted in some of our communities, if we were able to contract with our partners’ local authorities, with the local NHS and say well look, we can help you reduce the amount of type two diabetes in a particular sub-sector of the community because we believe we’ve got the expertise and the services that can help you there and we’re prepared to contract with you to be paid on results, you know we don’t just want you to pay us to open our doors every day, we want to be paid along a mechanism that that shows that we can make a difference.

I think that that that excitement level of how we can do things differently and how we can be judged by our results that ultimately if we can achieve something along those kinds of lines then the knock-on effect to the NHS will be really beneficial and just genuinely improve the lives of people in that particular community, then, then that’s where I think the sector starts to move into this essential category that it craves.

We want to be seen as a central part of the recovery, not a discretionary part. A lot of local authorities are not compelled to keep their leisure stock open because they’re not deemed to be essential. I think the output of this pandemic says they absolutely are essential for the physical and mental wellbeing of local communities but, let’s think about how we can reward those in this sector.

Craig

Brilliant. And what about anything else that you see or that you kind of envisage for the future of fitness and Health care?

Paul

I think what we’ve seen in the last year is just this explosion in how much more digital we’ve got to be as a sector. A really good stat, which we use when we’re talking to our partners, is this time last year in February about 40,000 people a month would book a class online or interact with us online, and in October that had risen to about 650,000, and that’s based on our usage stats. That kind of growth would have taken us three or four years to get,  with the digitalisation of some of our products we’ve got to accept that the consumer has changed.

You know, Mrs Smith or Mr Smith used to come to a bricks and mortar facility five times a week, they might decide to come once a week now and they’ll do a class in their living room, but they’ll want to do it live and they’ll want to see their favourite structure. They just won’t physically be present in a particular facility quite as much as they were before.

We’ve got to be ready for that, we’ve got to have products that allow people to interact on a face-to-face basis but also allow people to interact, at any time, a bit like TV over the last few years.

My kids now think that I’m a dinosaur, you know at 10 o’clock in the evening I watch the BBC News, they don’t, they don’t get this idea that at a certain time you want something they want it on demand and they’ll take it whenever they want it.

I think all consumers are going to want exactly the same kind of thing, so we’ve got to react to that and smarten up our product. We’ve got to personalise it a lot more I think we’ve got to understand what our consumers want. And then we’ve got to find a way in which we can all make that work.

As an essential service, we’ve got to ensure the professionalism of that service and the chartered status of that service is absolutely spot on. It’s great to see everybody getting involved in online workouts but not everybody can be Joe Wicks. Joe Wicks spent many years honing his skills so when you see, you know, Bez from Happy Mondays doing an online class, you think that’s great because it’s getting people involved, but Bez is not a physiologist and has not spent many years studying the form of physical exercise, so let’s ensure that the status of people that work in the sector, become as cherished and as important as our nurses and our healthcare workers, because we’re going to become part of that service so we’ve got to ensure the career path, I think, is protected and supported as much as we possibly can.

Craig

That’s, that’s really it yeah I’m not entirely sure Bez is the best advocate for health and wellbeing, there’s ever been.

But, but I agree and I think, making sure that people have the right accreditation to take these classes and do them in the right and healthy way is really important.

They’ve been some fantastic insights into where you see the future of the industry so thank you for sharing those if anybody wanted to get in contact with you what’s the best way of doing so?

Paul

I guess LinkedIn is probably the best way, it’s a super platform. I think it’s been beneficial over the last few months to help people stay connected and to be able to share insights that they’ve got and how they’re feeling in the moment.

I put something on there the other day which had more than 9,500 views, which quite frankly bowled me over. I think I’ve got about 800 connections, so to touch 9,500 people shows the power of the platform.

Craig

Your kids will be pleased that you got 9,500 views! I’m sure that gives you some kudos. What was it about the post?

Paul

It was about resilience, it was about how we’re all failing and how tough this period between Christmas and the beginning of February is.  I wanted to get out there that, you know, just because people in senior leadership positions might look as though they’re completely resilient, we have the same levels as everybody else.

And yeah it’s really hit a note with a lot of people which is great to see and I wanted to show a bit of vulnerability and say look it’s particularly like the phrase it’s okay to not be okay, but that is ultimately what we’re saying that we feel the same sort of concerns that you guys do and we take our responsibility for leading organisations, really, really seriously – it’s okay to wobble, reach out, talk to people try and stay positive and yeah the mornings are getting lighter and I know it’s still cold, but you know we can see Spring is coming and we know with Spring and with the vaccination programme that better days are to come, so it’s trying to stay as positive as we can.

Craig

Brilliant. Thank you again for your time today, good luck in the new role, I’m sure you will be a huge success and I look forward to getting to my local Places For Leisure and do some wellbeing training at some point, thanks for your time.

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