Ryan Greenaway, Fan Blogger 8th June 2010

Last week the club held its first Open Evening. An opportunity for fans or other interested parties to come along to the club, view the facilities, hear about the club's ambitions and plans on how to achieve them as well as to meet the people who, hopefully, will take us there.

I attended the evening not entirely sure what to expect but hopeful that I would be assured that the club was in good hands. It's important to remember the difference between the club and the Trust.

For the last few years the two have been so tightly intertwined that this difference has become blurred, but on Thursday, at the open evening, I was reminded that they are two entirely different entities.

The evening consisted of a presentation from Norrie Stewart, the clubs CEO introducing the successor to V10 (the original plan to achieve and sustain League 1 football standards both on and off the pitch by 2010), 2020 Vision (or Twenty20 Vision, or 20/20 Vision, whatever spin you prefer).

Ok so we have our catchy title, what does it mean? Basically, it's our plan to become an established Championship football team by the year 2020, whilst still being run in sensible, business-like manner under the stewardship of the Trust.

Ok, it may sound like a regurgitation of V10, but with a bit of a pun included, but essentially it does something very important, it stops us from resting on our laurels. With V10 achieved to all intents and purposes, it's now time to push on again, to be sure we don't fall victim to that second season syndrome and end up taking a step backwards.

What then followed was every management favourite slide, the Organisational diagram. A clear structure and flow of who reports to whom and what their roles are, what their targets will be and how they intend to achieve them.

There have been times when the club have seemed reliant on one or two people who perform essential roles and seem irreplaceable. An irreplaceable person in any business is a dangerous thing, and it seems very much the case now that most members of staff at the club, were something to happen, could be replaced to ensure that the club doesn't come to a grinding halt.

This is an ethos that cascades down from the top right through to bottom and encompasses the playing staff as well. It's always been Paul Tisdale's ethic that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Our team is built as a squad, not a group of individuals. They operate as one and this allows the manager a lot more flexibility with his selections and his tactics.

This approach means that the loss of one particular player, whilst being a blow, should never mean that we are left in dire straits. It seems to have worked thus far so I have no problems with this. I do wonder how this will work when Paul makes the inevitable step up the ladder where the egos become bigger and harder to manage, but for us, it's perfect. Anyway, back to the evening.

After Norrie's presentation about the future off the pitch, we saw some of the future on the pitch with some excellent videos of our youth products and some of the youth teams progressing through the ranks at the moment. It's hugely encouraging to see such young talent being given so much attention by the club and a very good reminder from the club that they will look after every youngster who comes to the Centre of Excellence, not just the ones who make it to the very top, a massive selling point for any parent.

As we watched the goals fly in from left, right and centre (one in particular after a 20 pass move, at Under 14 level) you couldn't help but feel impressed that these youngsters were being taught exactly the same sort of passing football that has made the first team so successful in recent years. If Paul Tisdale is still around when these lads start coming through he's going to be a very happy manager.

The main group then split into three and were taken off in different directions for various presentations. Firstly, Clive Pring gave us an excellent talk about the all important pitch redevelopment. From our vantage point in the director's box the pitch has had its base of sand and soil put down over the new drainage, with our flashy new pop-up sprinklers in place, awaiting the new turf to be laid. Clive explained to us the process the club had gone through in deciding how the pitch would be done and that every option was looked over carefully to ensure the right choices were made at the right cost.

After this we had, what seems to be, something of an exclusive look at plans for the redevelopment of St James' Park. These are obviously at a very early stage, and simply demonstrated how the space could be used, but sufficed to say it was nice to see some plans of what our stadium could look like, at first impressions were good. There was no real detail to go into but it was exciting nonetheless.

We moved on to marketing next and I was impressed with the rebranding that has been taking place. This covered the presentation packs for corporate facilities, the website, the programme, it all looked good. I was most pleased to hear that the club are really tackling the 365-day issue. This being that our ground and its facilities sit dormant for most of the year when there are no matches being played.

We have some excellent conference facilities available to us and with the added selling point of being at the ground, which has a novelty value to many, it makes sense to try and use these, so hopefully we can look to generate some much needed revenue from St James' Park. Further to the conferencing facilities we also have our bars which the club are trying to promote as an evening venue. Given we're in the middle of a fairly strong student population this seems sensible.

We then had a further presentation on the finances and the ICT structure of the club. In short, all the lines that mattered pointed in the right direction, with clear correlations between revenue, playing budget and other overheads. There were no signs that we had been raising the playing budget ahead of income which of course is the most important thing as we continue to see clubs spending beyond their means.

The ICT presentation showed how the club were in the process of tying in numerous legacy systems and creating new systems when needed to try and get everything tied down into one central database. Dealing with numerous systems is a tiresome job and can involve much replication of work so this is an important part of the clubs progress as we try and ensure we have the infrastructure off the field to cope with the demands of higher league football.

That's a pretty brief overview of what was an excellent evening, which I hope the club will repeat again in the future. Throughout the evening there numerous mentions of the Trust, obviously, but no presentation from the Trust. To me, that helped signify how the club is now very much a business in its own right away from the Trust, standing on its own two feet, if you will.

The impression the club left was a highly professional one, that understands the direction the Trust and its supporters want to go in, but that we don't want to get there "at all costs", but within our means.

It seems to me that Paul Tisdale's style of management is complimentary in every way to the way the club and Trust wish to operate, and even when he does move on, we will know exactly, what sort of person we require to step into his shoes.

I have a high degree of confidence in the people running our club at present, and am confident that they will not do anything to endanger the clubs existence, which will be particularly crucial when we approach the extremely tricky challenge of redeveloping St James' Park. It seems we have assembled a team who are setting the club up for a long term future and have completely bought into the ideology of the Trust and its members. Attending these evenings in the future should be considered a must for anyone who has ever wanted to find out more about the club, from an inquisitive supporter, right through to a casual observer who has never really been involved with the club or Trust but is interested in the work being done.

Let's hope that progression being shown both on and off the pitch can continue for many years yet, because as the old business adage goes, "If you're not moving forward, you're going backward".