Deighton's daunting task: finding a billion

[richard]

Paul Deighton is talking sponsorship. Securing enough of it will be one of the biggest challenges he faces when he takes over as chief executive of the London Olympic organising committee tomorrow and the question he is pondering is how much London will need to raise from each of its main commercial partners.

"It's complex because some of the money will be value in kind, but it's a three-digit answer," he says. After a pause his communications director adds: "That's three digits before the comma."

Given the mind-boggling sums London requires to offset the £2 billion cost of staging the Olympics, it can't hurt to have a boss who uses a million pounds as his basic unit of currency.

Deighton, 49, is the former chief operating officer in Europe of Goldman Sachs with a personal fortune also estimated to be three digits before the comma - £110 million. He has taken a huge pay cut to take up Sebastian Coe's challenge of delivering the 2012 Games, though his compensation will be one of the most powerful jobs in sport.

The lifespan of an Olympic organising committee chief executive is notoriously short, however. Sydney got through four in the build-up to the 2000 Games while Athens was ordered to change CEOs by the International Olympic Committee.

Deighton insists he is in it for the long term and has even started dreaming up ideas for the opening ceremony. After 22 years with Goldman Sachs, he knows the secret of longevity. "The only way to survive in that business for that long is to be risk-averse," he says. "I was always on the control and advisory side so I was always the guy who said, 'You sure? You really want to go a billion dollars long against the yen? Wouldn't 500 be better?"'

It helps that Deighton, who lives in Chelsea with his wife and two teenage sons, is a huge sports fan. He supports Arsenal but spends much of his spare time watching his sons on the sports field.

Although he admits to being "Olympically inexperienced", he has already accompanied Coe, the London organising committee (LOCOG) chairman, and deputy chairman Sir Keith Mills on fact-finding trips to the Winter Olympics in Turin and the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.

His key tasks will be securing £1 billion-plus of sponsorship, growing a workforce from 80 to around 3,000 and ensuring that the world's biggest sports event runs without a hitch. He will also face a media onslaught whenever things go wrong, as they inevitably will. So how does that make him feel? Daunted? Frightened?

"As with any major undertaking, you've got two choices" he says. "On the one hand you can say, 'My God this is so complicated and hard I'm just going to cry', or you can say, 'This is a fantastic opportunity. Let's break it down into the component parts which make it a do-able task and figure out how to get them done'. My first bit of breaking down is to divide my task into raising the money and getting the Games done. Then there are sub-sections under both of those. Prioritisation is crucial. It's easy to get distracted by things which may seem urgent but aren't actually important."

Raising the money will be the first priority, though Deighton is in no hurry to land the first sponsorship.

"It's easy to do a quick deal with someone and then spend the next three years tearing your hair out trying to nail down the details," he says. "I'd rather spend a bit longer getting the deal clear and workable before announcing that we've broken the world record in terms of getting the money coming in. It's the last pound you raise that's the hardest to find, not the first."

Deighton's appointment is something of a coup for London. Articulate in a jargon-free way, he exudes self-confidence without arrogance and has the hands-on financial and organisational experience to complement Coe's sporting and political connections and Mills' marketing background.

He is convinced the capital can "put on a show that is the best the world has seen" and certainly has no regrets about taking on such a high-pressure job. "Obviously, I did my due diligence before taking the job and I was comfortable with the career risk on three levels," he says.

"Number one, I think Seb has done a terrific job in how LOCOG has been set up with the stakeholders, which gives us every chance of getting the job done. The second reason was that I had enough confidence in our joint abilities that we would do a good job. And thirdly, although I am by nature risk-averse, why wouldn't you want to have a go at an opportunity like this?"


Source
By Simon Hart
telegraph.co.uk