Club still building business after 25 years

The club looks back on the February event as "a real turning point", one of many for a group that turned 25 last month.

Membership and marketing manager Clive Randall said: "In January, it suddenly went crazy.

"It wasn't just the people that came down to the Radisson event. It was the people signing up as new members.

"In the first quarter, we had as many members sign up as we did in the whole of last year. People decided to get up, go out and get business."

As a result, some new faces may be popping up tonight (Thursday June 25) at the club's business awards, which are jointly run with the East London Chamber of Commerce. They will also be mingling at a new venue, since the DBC has traded Greenwich's Old Royal Naval College for Forman's Fish Island. But many of its major supporters will still be present and correct, from original supporters Barclays to Canary Wharf Group, City Cruises, O2 and Tower Hamlets College. Some will leave the venue with awards, including The Wharf's Businessperson of the Year.

The club itself was born in a different Docklands, one viewed with suspicion by many business leaders and heavily championed by a Thatcher government. The DBC was officially inaugurated in May 1984, and its first award ceremony was cooked up over a few gin and tonics at The Grapes in Narrow Street by first executive director Shirley Pickett and John Harding of Barclays.

In the club's early years, it had to petition John Major for a tube line, survive a recession and weather Canary Wharf's own financial disaster in 1992.

Clive Randall arrived from Peterborough in 1990, helping to set up a visitor centre for potential home buyers and visits for travel writers.

He said: "If we want to boil it down to basics, the DBC was part of the overall marketing programme for London Docklands.

"The London Docklands Development Corporation was its fairy godmother, in terms of providing staff and money. It was a way of meeting people face to face rather than depending on advertising.

"Our role was to get the businesses that were already here to meet incoming businesses, so they would not feel that they were isolated from the new people coming in.

"In the early days, we had some very high level members like Texaco, Credit Suisse and Reader's Digest. Now our membership is mostly SMEs.

"If a DBC networking event was announced, it was like a film premiere, with groups of 300 people turning up to some events. People were anxious to know what was going on. One of the big differences was that we used to use the DBC events to keep local businesses up to date with what the regeneration plans for the area were.

"I think our role now is two-fold. It's about introducing people to other businesses, but we like things to be very informal and fun. We want people to come to our events, get a business benefit out of it and have a good time."

While the talk of the eighties and nineties was about the future of Docklands itself, the club is now forging links with the East London Business Place and the South East London Chamber of Commerce, and pushing businesses to apply for Olympic contracts through the Compete For scheme.

It revived its business breakfasts with specific advice for certain sectors, and holds regular events as venues such as London City Airport, CCT venues and hotels such as the Britannia, Novotel, Radisson and Ramada.

Co-coordinator Karla Johnson said: "Clive is very old school, and I'm interested in using new technologies. We're using Facebook and Twitter as marketing tools, as it's certainly a good way to get events and information out there.

"The biggest request is always about the networking, whether it's start up or corporate. They get a lot of things with membership, but every company mainly wants to get face to face with other companies."