It is most difficult to dislike Conor La Grue. I am working at it, but have to confess I am losing heart.

Conor is a large, solid, 36 year-old ex-Royal Navy Leading Hand. Not the sort of apparition you would want coming at you in a barroom brawl in some far-flung port. But sitting across the table from him it is difficult to imagine him ever letting a brawl happen. He has a smile like the actor Russell Crowe, and also the surface calm which I am beginning to recognise as a hallmark of the BLOODHOUND breed.

No – the effort is hopeless. It is impossible to dislike Conor La Grue.

I am forced to reflect that the mere attempt is pure sour grapes – and that within my person, to my shame, there exists a small green-eyed monster called Jealousy, which is apt to smell in the sun. And that nothing drags Jealousy out into the sun more than being faced with a guy doing something you used to do, but doing it a great deal better.

For 25 years I ran an aerobatic display operation. I was Managing Director, Chief Pilot, Junior Aircraft Cleaner – and also Chief Sponsor Hunter. This last is of the very first importance if an aerobatic team would wish not only to fly but also indulge such trivial whims as eating – but it was the one role I hated and loathed with a passion. Nonetheless we managed to aviate in the liveries of seven major sponsors over that quarter-century, and in upbeat moments I am moderately proud of that. In downbeat moments I have to admit that of those seven I personally found – exactly two. The rest were introduced by somebody else or simply walked in the door.

 

Conor La Grue joined BLOODHOUND eight months ago as Supply Chain Manager – which means Guru of the Product Sponsor programme.

In 25 years I found two sponsors.

In 8 months Conor La Grue has found – 114 sponsors. Add 16 who were already on board and this makes 130 – or maybe 131 or 132 by the time you read this.

Hence the little green-eyed monster. How does any human being do that? Not a mythological publicist like Max Clifford, not a neo-Mussolini like certain people in Formula One, but a normal, sane individual who – despite a comment I made in jest in an earlier article  – does not carry a Browning 9 mil into business meetings. (Well, not provably, anyway).

The answer to this is actually not simple. And to get to it, it is necessary to look at the man. Not to lionise him – he would shudder at that – but look at what makes him tick.

The child Conor La Grue was given a transistor radio. His first action was to take it apart to see how it worked. His second was to put it back together again – and lo, it still worked. Maybe a certain amount of luck involved, but not bad at the age of seven.

At 18 Conor joined the Royal Navy and trained as a Weapons Engineer. When he came out top of his class the Navy said  “Ahoy – we appear to have a brain here”, and sent him off to University to study Electronic Engineering. This led to his assignment to the Sea Dart sea-to-air missile used on Type 42 Destroyers such as HMS Gloucester and Exeter, in which he spent five years at sea.

Now Sea Dart can be seriously bad news for aircraft incoming with pugnacious intent. Being rocket-initiated and then ramjet-powered it reaches Mach 1 about one metre after launch, which means it is firmly not recommended that you stand behind it to light the blue touch-paper. In fact Sea Dart is a very highly complex piece of kit, as are its guidance systems, and you most definitely do not bring one to readiness by some cheerful Matey on the bridge bawling “Fire!” and throwing a switch.

No; you have a team of experts, with layers of management. Enter Conor as a key part of the team, mainly on the radar side, which is ever so slightly vital.  And just for a bit of added adrenalin you have to get it right all the time.  Pretty much the whole reason for the Type 42s’ existence is as a Sea Dart platform for Fleet air defence – so saying “Hang on a mo, we’ve got to change a fuse in the surveillance radar”, is a seriously bad news for the operator unless you have suddenly decided it might be rather fun to incur the wrath of the Skipper, a dozen other Captains and Commodores, Admirals various, plus the First Sea Lord back in Blighty.

So you learn a great deal about electronic systems, communications systems, rockets and ramjets. And also a great deal about project management….

“Avast there!”, said the Navy. “This chap La Grue ought to be an officer. Got a French Huguenot name, of course, but what the Devil – we haven’t actually been at war with France for 200 years. Can’t matter too much”.

“Oh”, said Conor, faced with the prospect of leaving his fascinating technical role for three years of officer training. The spirit of the seven year old who took his radio to pieces came to the fore. He saluted respectfully and left the Navy.

“And so you learn a
 great deal about project
 management….”

Next came the offshore oil industry, and Conor bossing projects like ‘bundle tows’. Now personally I understand this the way Icarus understood solar heating – which means not a lot – but basically oil companies create, onshore, a pipe with a bundle of systems running through it. Not a small pipe. A pipe 1.5 metres in diameter and 6 kilometres long. A pipe which must be towed out into the North Sea – an ocean not noted for its benevolence – and must NOT be kinked more than a few degrees in the doing of it, lest there be a multi-million pound crack from somewhere within. Someone must arrange transponders on the pipe to early detect if any such kink is even thinking about developing. Someone must then most rapidly prompt the rectification of any such distressing tendency should it occur. And that same someone MUST have the whole kit and caboodle ready to roll on a given date because if a weather-window presents itself and the phone rings there is very definitely no such answer as “No”.

Project management and electronic know-how again.

And then the same again, when he left the offshore industry and went into telecoms. He rapidly became a company VP – meaning Very Pressurised in telecoms corporate-speak – running a team of 60 people. His glittering future in electronics and management was assured…..

So…. he quit.

Having a lovely wife and two small children he decided it might be nice if he walked in the door often enough for the kids to recognise him. Life would be calmer if he stepped off the corporate mincer and started his own nice, safe small business.

Building up racing engines for cars, hill-climbers, drag racers and the like.

Calm. Safe….

“I saw a gap in the market….” he says with only the slightest hint of irony.

In fact the venture worked out. Based on his own participation in motor sport from schoolboy moto-cross on to drag-racing and track-racing, the company thrived – well, operated, anyway – for fours years until he exhibited the shrewdest of all management skills by selling it at the top of the market in mid-2008. He then deliberately and with aforethought took the summer off to be with the family.

And then a mutual friend introduced him to John Piper. Who told him about this weird project, BLOODHOUND, of which he was Engineering Director. And introduced him to Richard Noble, who swung that hypnotic watch…..

Conor La Grue joined the BLOODHOUND team in October 2008. On 23 October BLOODHOUND was launched at the Science Museum.

Within a week Conor had run his first four Product Sponsor meetings.

At which point any normal engineering team would be highly jumpy about this new marketing guy let loose on them. He’ll promise things we can’t deliver…. He’ll head off in directions we don’t want to go…..

John Piper, the Bhudda, smiled in that John Piper way. And the rest of the team took heart. In fact no contest here….

Remember I said it was necessary to take a look at the man.

Conor La Grue is not that slightly suspicious word ‘marketing’. He is not an adjunct to the design team – he is part of the design team.

This makes a difference. A big difference.

The first difference lies in target selection. Most sponsor-searches have more than a faint whiff of randomness about them – some idiot like me, for example, taking it into his head that manufacturers of left-hand Wellington boots seem to be doing okay at the moment, so let’s target all the manufacturers of left-hand Wellington boots. One of them must want an aerobatic team – they just don’t know it yet.

This approach, as anyone who has ever sought sponsorship for even a school fete will tell you, is vastly time-consuming, hideously more expensive than you ever imagined, and almost always produces a nice round figure of results – namely, zero. You might be prepared to kiss an awful lot of toads before one turns into a prince – but mostly you never even get to see the bloody toads, never mind getting onto mooching terms with them.

Conor sits down with the rest of the design team and they hash out exactly what they need. Not roughly, but exactly. – or at least, as exactly as you can get with a venture involving a sort of ground-born spaceship. And because the whole team are experts in their scientific fields they almost invariably know exactly which companies they want to hoist on board. Not much point in talking to a left-hand Wellington boot manufacturer when what you actually need is a massive upgrade to your Computational Fluid Dynamics capacity….

This targeting is gimlet, not scatter-gun. More than once a targetee has said to Conor; “I wondered when we were going to hear from you….”  Words that in my 25 years of sponsor-hunting would have left me bereft of the power of speech.

And the gimlet drills in further. Conor calls it “due diligence”. I call it finding (a) the right geezer in the right company to talk to about the technical issues, and (b) at the same time spearing whomever other geezer(s) might be required for the final sign-off. Oh, and also deciding if you need any other of the BLOODHOUND team to take part in the pitch – which you frequently do. Not a decision to be taken lightly if you’re going to be dragging the likes of John Piper, John Davis or Ben Evans away from their computers.

Conor has the ability to talk to the technical people without going “Err….” and having to refer back. This sounds easy – engineer talking to engineer – but this is only point (a). Point (b) – getting the ultimate decision-maker on board at the same time – is a matter which has a touch of the voodoo about it. Conor, like everybody else concerned with sponsorship, rapidly learned that the last thing you want to hear at the end of a meeting are the dread words “I’ll put it to the Board”. This means it will float up vaguely into the corporate consciousness at some point in the next six months – maybe – and then be presented by someone who by now only dimly remembers the salient points.

I know this because I’ve been there. At worst – and mostly – letting this meander through its natural course is not so much the kissing of a toad but the kiss of death through neglect. At best the GO decision takes so long that you suddenly get the green light in March after you put the proposal to them the previous November – and then they are slightly astonished if you have the temerity to point out that the display season starts in late May and that acquiring two new aircraft, getting them certificated, working up the new team and then organising a 100-display season for it, just might be a slightly tall order in the seven weeks you now have available to do the job.

Conor seems to have acquired a certain knack in working around all that big-company bullshi…. er, faeces. Not infallible, but pretty brisk. Perhaps it’s a knack which Naval Leading Hands acquire through dealing with ships’ pursers.

However the complication does not end there. This sponsor hunt is practically never a matter of saying to a company; “Here, can you supply some of them there widgets you make”, because BLOODHOUND invariably requires widgets which nobody makes. So it’s more a question of saying: “You know those widgets you make – well actually we want a sort of wodget, and you’re the outfit with the know-how to do it for us”.

Which is why only about half of 130 Product Sponsors are fully signed up yet. ‘Tisn’t that they’re not willing – ‘tis because negotiations sometimes have to go on hold while the design team define exactly what the wodget in question is. Which can be a shifting feature as design progresses. Solidity is coming, but it ain’t quite here yet…..

And, of course, some of the wodgets are, firstly, not exactly cheap, and secondly are inextricably combined with other wodgets.

The wiring loom is a case in point. I call it a ‘wiring loom’ for want of a better word, but in fact it has about as much in common with a conventional wiring loom as Sea Dart has with a siege catapult. BLOODHOUND’s loom calls for the highest leading-edge technology in computers, sensors, data transmitters, actuators, communications – you name it. And sheer logistics says you’re not going to find the top kit in all the necessary fields under any one roof. A company who is ace at, say, brake monitoring systems, may well know nowt – in fact almost certainly will know nowt – about rocket initiation. Yet these functions, and myriad others, all have to go through the same ‘loom’ unless BLOODHOUND is to grow two feet wider and a tonne heavier.

So what Conor now has to do is get four or five different sponsors together, each according to their own expertise and also with due regard to the depth of their pockets, and form them into a ‘Loom Syndicate’ so that they all work together to produce the combined result – hopefully without scratching each other’s eyes out in the process. In fact the scratching of eyes is not too big a problem – or it hasn’t been so far – for the perfectly adequate reason that one of the benefits of being a Product Sponsor is that you end up working with other companies who might well become your customers in the future. A bit like introducing your left-hand Wellington boot manufacturer to someone who makes right-hand Wellington boots….

Nonetheless, these Syndicates – and there will be more of them, wheels and composites particularly coming to mind – do naturally need….. well if not managing exactly, certainly a high degree of liaison. To put it mildly.

Re-enter Conor, possibly now starting to look a bit hassled. Running a meeting with a potential portaloo sponsor for the run-site in the morning and a Loom Syndicate meeting in the afternoon.

114 Product Sponsors in eight months…..

Damn….. I ought to be able to dislike the man.