A few months into her new role, we speak to new Chair of beam, Julie Shorrock about how the organisation is progressing.
Julie Shorrock, Managing Director of Hotel and Travel Solutions (HTS) took over as Chair of beam, the UK trade association for the Business Events, Accommodation and Meetings industry, for 2024. Julie was previously Vice Chair and has been a Board Director for many years and took over the roll from Sian Sayward who has become Immediate Past Chair and continues as Governance Director.
Julie told us how busy she’s been since taking over: “My feet have barely touched the ground,” she quipped. “I don’t think I really appreciated the volume that comes with the role, however it’s high volume for a short period of time right now. We’re doing a lot of changes at beam, but I can certainly see the light at the end of the tunnel, and then things will calm down.”
The organisation was previously known as HBAA, but announced its name change to beam in January 2022: “With changing the name, you’ve always got: ‘beam? What’s beam? Who’s beam?’ And we’re just slowly coming out of that, which is really good.”
Julie has been called the Queen of Delegation and is living up to this new title in her new role, giving out more responsibility to beam’s board members to create a more unified organisation:
“I’m quite a delegator. I think it’s very important that we have a board of 13 very experienced entrepreneurs and leaders, and they all need to be seen and heard. It’s really important that not just our members but the whole industry know that beam isn’t just made up of a Chair. There’s actually 13 of us behind the scenes making all of this happen. All of this year’s calendar of events has be delegated out across the board – voluntarily, with everyone choosing what they want to take on board.”
There are other changes afoot at beam as well: “We’ve first of all moved our secretariat. We had a company called AMC previous who have been fantastic! Very professional very driven, very association focused. Now we’ve moved over to Hills Balfor, a company fairly well known in the events industry. They came onboard as of February, they are very much industry focused.
“Last December, I started to talk about collaboration and say that that’s what I felt beam needed to be doing. The associations in the industry all have USPs and a purpose, but what I felt we needed to do was support one another more, so that as members, you can choose to be a member of all, or the one that is most appropriate to you, but you still want support for the others. We’re looking at doing more affiliate programmes and collaboration together, which just makes us stronger together. We’ve signed a collaboration with IACT, and I’m also talking to Clive Wratten at the BTA and Kerrin MacPhie at the mia.”
Beam represents the interests of UK agencies and venues. Its members are specialists in the business events, accommodation and meetings sector which contributes £31.2 billion to the UK economy annually. Its agency members transact over £1.2 billion’s worth of bookings for their clients.
Beam-org.uk