From King Street to Standing Tall, a memoir of Cambridge BID by outgoing CEO Ian Sandison

As he prepares to stand down as CEO of Cambridge BID, Ian Sandison writes for the Cambridge Independent on how he got into the role and what has been achieved over the last 15 years.

King Street

Like many things in Cambridge, getting into city centre management was rather serendipitous. After graduating from Oxford Polytechnic (Brookes University now) in human biology my first career was in corporate healthcare sales and marketing. Twelve years on I made my first real bold move. A surprise restructuring led to redundancy, I married Pippa and we embarked on our first adventure travelling round the world for three months.

I returned not wanting to go back to a five-day-a-week corporate life and thus the second part of my career was in portfolio form, mainly again in healthcare.

It was during this time that Pippa opened Boudoir Femme in King Street in 2006. We quickly formed a street traders’ group and with some persuasion and various meetings I secured funding from the local colleges, the city council and local traders so we could have Christmas lights on the street in 2007.

Love Cambridge

This success received some positive attention and led to me being asked by the city council to be the founding chairman of Love Cambridge, a new city centre partnership set up in 2009 to improve the city and its shopping and the overall experience for businesses and visitors. Early projects included a citywide Christmas lights scheme, a family of welcome guides for visitors, a mystery shop programme to improve customer service in businesses and the citywide wayfinding map and finger node network that remains still in use today 13 years on.

Cambridge BID: The first five years

Love Cambridge was very successful, but the annual voluntary funding model was at risk of changing business priorities and not sustainable. Thus, when the opportunity to develop Cambridge Business Improvement District (BID) came along in 2011 we embraced this and, after a successful ballot of businesses in 2012, we started to deliver projects in 2013.

There is always anticipation and respectful caution about such a new venture, but when I was chairman of the BID I always took a direct approach of meeting funders and key stakeholders and simply explained what our aims were and how we would add value to the funder and the city.

I learned this direct approach from an early career in sales. Before the internet or mobile phones you had to go and see customers, argue your case and make the sale. I think one of the most important skills in life, but one that is overlooked, is being able to quickly build a rapport with a new contact and present a case for your business.

Initially, the BID’s focus was consolidating the good work of Love Cambridge and then developing a host of new projects that include working with the Cambridge Business against Crime Partnership, widening our mystery shop programme, hiring a team of on-street Ambassadors to meet and greet visitors, hosting free film nights in the under-used market square and for the first time bringing city centre businesses together so they could have a strong voice on important issues like transport, skills, housing and access to the city.

Another approach to business I have always taken is to start with the end in mind and take a long view of projects.

During our first term, the CB1 development was in its infancy and was really putting Cambridge on the map in terms of high quality office space and attracting global companies like Amazon, Microsoft and later Apple and Deloitte to name a few.

In late 2016, we started to consult with our businesses about our second five-year term and it was clear this development was going to be a significant economic boost to the city and that the city centre and rail station areas wanted better connectivity to their mutual benefit. Thus, having presented our case, we included the CB1 development in the BID area for our second term business plan and the very strong yes vote from levy payers confirmed their support of this.

From 2018, we have operated across a larger CB1 and city centre area, encompassing some 1,200 businesses.

Cambridge BID: Years 5-10

Our main projects continued, but we then started to deliver more outdoor cultural events like the screening of Wimbledon, the Commonwealth and Olympic Games. We built upon our film nights, showing key events including the royal wedding and significantly increased our project delivery within CB1, working with the office sector.

We launched the Love Cambridge gift card, now selling over £125,000 per year, securing this spend within the BID area, and this has recently been adopted by Pay it Forward to help homeless people.

Our ambition for our second term was bigger than that. We wanted to bring the city together in the shape of the largest free public art event the city had ever seen with Cows About Cambridge.

This connected the office, retail and resident communities together with local artists, community groups and taking a long-term approach over two years the project developed to start in March 2020. Alas, just as we were about to deploy 45 full-size cow sculptures and 45 smaller mini moos Covid struck, along with lockdowns.

Far from winding back, on reflection some of Cambridge BID’s best work to date was in the heat of the pandemic when we shifted our activity to business support.

I hosted weekly business webinars to explain furlough, bounce back loans, the multitude of grant schemes, comms and then, as the city reopened, we were part of a strategic task force to enable this to happen and support businesses through this.

The pandemic saw the demise of Visit Cambridge, but we stepped in financially and with resources we now manage the Visit Cambridge website, PR for the city, all the social media channels for this and we are working closely with Visit Britain to showcase Cambridge around the world.

In June 2021, the cows eventually came out to graze across the city for 10 weeks. More than 533,000 people engaged with the trail and over £13million in economic value was delivered. It was a great boost to the city and visitor economy as the world opened up again and we raised £257,000 for Break, our charity partner.

Cambridge BID: Years 10-15

In 2022, we again consulted with our businesses and another positive yes vote means our work will continue until 2028.

The BID area is largely unchanged and we will continue a broad portfolio of projects, but our main new themes are firstly connectivity of the office sector to the city centre, of residents and students to their city and, secondly, encouraging more visitors to stay longer in our city.

In addition to this, in June we will host our second jobs fair, as Covid and Brexit have depleted the talent pool in all sectors.

We are taking the cultural offer of the city into CB1, working with Cambridge Film Festival, Cambridge Literary Festival and Make Music Day to deliver events in that area and, once again taking that long view, we recently launched our 2024 art trail ‘Cambridge Standing Tall’ that will feature giraffes sculptures. This will once again bring the whole community together and deliver many social and economic benefits.

I am very pleased to hand this baton over to the next person. I truly have a great team who deliver well thought through and effective projects.

How have we achieved all of this? Well, patience helps. I do believe things take time to develop, to consider, to build ideas, to brainstorm. We started discussing Cows about Cambridge in 2017. Wwe started looking at gift cards two years before we launched since the technology was not right. We played the long game on including the CB1 development and could see early on how important it was going to be to the city centre.

Similarly, we have included Botanic Place in our area for our third term, even though it will be many years to be delivered.

As mentioned, you also must make your case to people, explain your aims, understand theirs and find a pragmatic way forward that requires honesty and integrity.

And finally, you have to lead from the front, show people a vision and then deliver.

I look back with great pride at what Cambridge BID has achieved and that is down to one thing - a highly skilled and motivated team who care about their city.