September sees the start of Europa’s 18^th year and although we have plenty to celebrate, we are determined to raise the bar again for FY11-12.

We’re doing this because it’s good for our clients; it’s in our DNA to do so, and it’s even more important to keep striving for excellence if we are to sustain our current excellent growth curve despite the continuing challenging market conditions.

And as we approach Olympic year in our country, it also seems appropriate (and fun!) to adopt the Raise The Bar strapline. We have designed a strategy around achieving personal and team ‘bests, across the board. We’re a competitive bunch in general and we like winning.

The Olympic motto of “Faster; Higher; Stronger” is a fine starting line, we also need to embrace: ideas, creativity, leadership, intelligence, efficiency, ethics and trust. This is vital to us, as our business model is engineered to deliver the type of service that needs those qualities for it to work.

So we are looking for evidence of achievement in those areas in everything we do.

How will that manifest itself in the eyes of our clients, suppliers and business partners?…

Some are obvious; some ‘behind the scenes’. But in the coming financial year the strategies which will touch our clients in some way are as follows:

• Prove that we are #1 in outsourced business development in the ‘non volume’ IT market – in Europe.
  There are a number of ‘proof points’ that will demonstrate why we are the partner of choice in the area of outsourced business development for those organisations with high value solutions in the IT marketplace. Our current clients know why we are the best option for them but we need to keep pushing the limits of what is achievable and spreading the word to others in need of this level of service.
• Maintain Account Management Excellence and drive our clients forwards and upwards
  Once again we have proven that solid growth can best be achieved by looking after our existing clients. New ones will come, but they will come for the right reasons if they are referred to us, which is our most successful new business stream. So we will keep listening; keep showing the best understanding of our markets; being proactive and maintaining the account management quality that our clients clearly value. We will also be encouraging our clients to see where they can raise the bar in the marketing and sales areas where our joint success is vital.
• Promote the benefits of Longer Term Programmes
  Our most successful relationships are the long term ones. They constantly show clients that sustained activity delivers much more than one-stop campaigns. These models are win-win, for us and for our customers, so we will keep promoting them!
• Commit to a Culture of Learning and Leadership Development
  We are respected for the skills of our front line people and the people who support them. We have shown that the best way to sustain the knowledge and skills of these people is not just through constant training and mentoring, but in maintaining peer-to-peer knowledge exchange. This needs discipline and commitment from all concerned, right across our business. Our clients like the fact that we are proactive in our ideas and in our determination to only do what is best for them. That is borne out of having strong leaders and good decision- makers at all levels.
• Achieve excellence in management and delivery of market intelligence
  A key component of our success has been based on the principle of ‘Intelligence-based Marketing’. In other words, helping our clients to sell to people on the basis of more knowledge of specific situations; tailoring propositions to fit the needs of each; honing messages to be more relevant to more people. This is achieved through proper research, analysis, deployment and management of market behaviour. We have shown it makes the difference between success and failure in competitive market conditions and hence we must maintain our edge in this area.
•  Continue to offer more Onsite Resourcing
  A successful feature of our service is that we offer our clients an open option when it comes to resource placement. If they want people on their own sites, we want to deliver them. Continuing to closely embed our people with our client operations bears fruit in so many ways, so we will continue to engineer our organisation around this.
• Continue to Raise the Bar in everything we do!
  And finally, as we said in this year where so many of our countrymen and women will be looking to push themselves further than they have ever been before, we are asking ourselves to do the same. Every member of our staff is looking at everything they do, or we do with them, to identify anywhere that can be improved upon, and then to challenge themselves to show incremental improvement.