Chris Heck - President of Business Operations

[London Villan]

Can't print gold (easily) and gold on screen doesn't really work either.

[john e]

Saw Chris Heck outside Selhurst park yesterday

seemed a decent enough chap

People were getting a photo with him including my kids even though they didn’t know who he was

He is small even I’m taller than him

Said we weren’t leaving VP ( I asked him )

He was with some important looking Asian fellas in smart suits maybe Japanese, he was definitely trying to impress them

Then Elmo turned up trying to get out of the palace car park and got mobbed ( more photos)

[Keeno]

An interview with Chris Heck on the re-brand and his first twelve months at Villa;

https://www.marketingweek.com/aston-villa-club-rebrand/

Thanks for sharing - standard trade media fare, obviously not as well informed on the sporting side of things and as you'd expect a lot of personal PR-ing being done, but a few interesting lines in there.

I know not everyone here/elsewhere is happy with how they've dealt with the badge and rebrand, but I do think his justification for the speed at which we've needed to move on this and issues like the kit supplier at least make sense, even if its not necessarily agreed with.

They have basically had this season, 9-10 months, to catch up with the exponential progress Emery and Monchi have made on the footballing side of things to keep us growing, and the gradual process you'd usually take here wasn't really an option.

“The club was run on efficiency as opposed to ambition" - really sums up the Ellis-Lerner-Purslow CEO years of the Club quite well. This clearly needed to be changed if we want to compete with the Sky 6. How this mantra then runs into the brick wall of PSR, it remains to be seen. You can see why we have been one of the most vocal teams against the current rules - for good reason, as it really scuppers any upward mover like us and protects the cabal at the top...

Obviously, the jury is still out and this time next year we'll be able to judge the job Heck has done off the pitch. But to be coming out of this season with CL revenues, Adidas, double the money from the front sponsor, is about as good as we could've hoped on the financial side of things and at least gives Emery/Monchi/Videgany the best possible chance to strengthen us this summer.

[OCD]

“The club was run on efficiency as opposed to ambition" and the bit about bringing all design in-house so that we can be in control of our revenue streams stood out of that article for me.

[London Villan]

Binning the £100m investment in the ground and fudging the re-brand because of the existence of the lerner badge everywhere in the ground, would say efficiencies are still important....

[Risso]

It's all very well talking about not counting the pennies, but then he's cancelled a big project ie the North Stand that would have had a huge effect on our finances.

[Keeno]

Binning the £100m investment in the ground and fudging the re-brand because of the existence of the lerner badge everywhere in the ground, would say efficiencies are still important....

Re the ground investment plans, if the Castore/BK8 deals had been badly negotiated and designed I dread to think what we'd got ourselves into on that... Feels like we dodged a bullet

[London Villan]

Maybe we did. But shouting about ambition, then stopping the most ambitious investment the club was ready to make is a little disingenuous.

[chrisw1]

Binning the £100m investment in the ground and fudging the re-brand because of the existence of the lerner badge everywhere in the ground, would say efficiencies are still important....

Re the ground investment plans, if the Castore/BK8 deals had been badly negotiated and designed I dread to think what we'd got ourselves into on that... Feels like we dodged a bullet

They weren't necessarily badly negotiated.  I'd guess they just reflected where we were as a club at the time they were agreed.

It's a bit easier to negotiate a stronger deal when we're in Europe, have an elite manager and at the time were on an incredible run that made CL look a decent possibility.

[Villan82]

Binning the £100m investment in the ground and fudging the re-brand because of the existence of the lerner badge everywhere in the ground, would say efficiencies are still important....

Re the ground investment plans, if the Castore/BK8 deals had been badly negotiated and designed I dread to think what we'd got ourselves into on that... Feels like we dodged a bullet

Chalk and cheese.

The highlighted bits there were negotiated with us as a fairly newly promoted team that had finished 11th in the league and hadn't been in Europe for well over a decade.

It would be disappointing if we couldn't get better deals as a top 7 club that looked good to reach the top four for the first time in a generation.

As for the new stand, building materials are building materials, labour is labour. Supply and demand will always be the main issue there which is why delaying in this climate isn't going to improve our position on those.

[Sexual Ealing]

It feels like Heck's media strategy is basically to troll Purslow. While I'm not against that per se, given that Purslow was a smarmy twat, it feels like he needs a bit more after a year in the job.

[Ads]

Well he's got us about £50m more a year in sponsorship.

[Sexual Ealing]

That's not a media strategy.

[Villan82]

Well he's got us about £50m more a year in sponsorship.

In a scenario where we dine at a table we haven't dined at since 1996. The top four. I am sure even a Tom Fox would have been bashing out the lucrative deals if Lambert had got us top four!

[Ads]

We qualified on Tuesday, these deals were agreed prior to that. They dwarf anything else we've ever done by a country mile.