Feature: Just the job for motivation

“When I grow up, I want to work in motivation…”. The incentives industry has some way to go before it supplants astronaut and fireman as a career choice for five-year-olds, but it has matured into a profession that is attracting people from the worlds of marketing and management and beyond. The growth of companies such as the Grass Roots Group, Motivcom and BI mean that there is a constant need for fresh talent to enter the industry.

“Recruiting the right people is always a problem but we are constantly receiving applications from people who want to join the industry,” says David Evans, chairman of the Grass Roots Group which also encompasses motivation houses Maritz and Projectlink. “Because of the nature and the quality of the work we do, we are attracting more and more interesting and qualified people.”

With businesses across the globe, Evans says that Grass Roots has the added appeal of offering people the chance to develop their careers by transferring anywhere in the world. He is not prescriptive about the professions of potential recruits. “We use all sorts of talents. We are not looking for anything specifically. We want people not just with intelligence but also emotional intelligence – you have to be sensitive in what is a service business.”

The performance improvement industry has attracted a significant number of people from travel and events backgrounds, brought in through the use of trips and events in motivation programmes. Nick Bender, now managing director of Maritz, began his career as a travel representative at Thomas Cook, rising to managing director for Thomas Cook Performance Management. He moved into live events, eventually at CVL which was taken over by Maritz 10 years ago.

Motivcom, which includes motivation specialists P&MM, AYMTM and Zibrant, has attracted staff from agencies in other marketing disciplines such as sales promotion, advertising and direct marketing as well as some who were client side and wanted to move into an agency. “Predominantly, people are joining us from a marketing or a project management background,” says Motivcom director John Sylvester.

Much of the graduate intake has marketing or business studies degrees, but he says this is not essential. “It’s more important that they have the aptitude that comes from studying at university.”

As well as having a career development programme for all employees, BI has a graduate scheme that provides new people with a 12-month introduction to the skills they need to work in the industry, spending three four-month rotations experiencing the key areas of the business: events, client services and sales and corporate marketing communications.

Graduates at BI include client services executive Emma Price, who graduated in business management from Staffordshire University, and client services manager Lisa Kirkwood, who has a marketing degree from the University of Northampton. Tarun Patel, who joined from Aston University with an international management degree and a masters in international business, has been seconded to BI’s subsidiary, The MINT Organisation in Dubai, as a client services manager.

Davies and Sylvester were among a number of leading motivation practitioners who helped to set up the ISP Motivation Diploma along with Oxford Motivation managing director John Fisher and Grass Roots directors Debbie Watt and Rik Burrage. This has provided the industry with its first qualification, bringing a structured and consistent approach to professional development for people working on programmes to incentivise staff, channel partners and customers.

Case study: Mike Davies

Mike Davies, now director of performance improvement at BI, originally intended to follow a career in the retail industry and started off at Argos on a fast-track management programme. He was seconded into a newly-formed team to deploy Argos’s loyalty scheme, Premier Points, which was extended into the incentives sector.

This experience prompted him to join sales promotion agency The Continuity Company and then Maritz, where he managed large-scale performance improvement programmes. He now heads a large team at BI developing and implementing programmes for the likes of General Motors, Peugeot, Vodafone, Skoda, Aston Martin, Roche and the AA.