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Fife Chamber Interim CEO Update March 2023

16th March 2023

Your Chamber has been very active since our last newsletter. We hosted a brilliant Business Breakfast event at the Doubletree by Hilton, North Queensferry welcoming Gordon Dewar, CEO of Edinburgh International Airport who gave a comprehensive overview of the performance of the airport, post Covid, and enlightened those attending with ambitious future plans. Feedback from this has been superb, so watch this space for a similar event later in the year.

The charities distribution, in which £5,120 raised at 2022 Chamber events was shared equally amongst 18 charity members, was very well received. Given that fundraising is particularly challenging at present, this way of giving everyone a “slice of our charity cake” was deemed to be a decent solution, and it was a good opportunity to engage with them, hear their stories and offer them some publicity on the day.

Only last week Fife Chamber offered a full contingent to participate in the Tri-Chamber networking event alongside Perthshire Chamber and Dundee Chamber. Again this has received excellent feedback from our members which goes to prove that we continue to offer great value for the investment that our members make in their membership.

I also take this opportunity to welcome our new members joining us over the last month and look forward to meeting with them at future events and likewise thank our renewing members for their continued support. We continue to offer guidance and support to our members on a daily basis so if we don’t know the answer to your issue immediately we do have the resources to achieve this, please see below our new and renewed members.

Our flagship Fife Showcase event for 2023 – The Fife Business Awards is now a sell-out event and we look forward to over 400 people celebrating success at the Old Course Hotel, St.Andrews in May.

There is much to look forward to in the coming months with Fife Chamber with a wide and varied programme being rolled out so keep watching and book your places. There will also be a new CEO leading your Chamber team in April, so again keep an eye out for our news release on this.

In broad business terms our members continues to report difficulties in recruitment, the affordability of energy, raw material price inflation, raw material stock availability, extended delivery times and a slowdown in payment receipts all of which can be encapsulated under the heading of “the cost of doing business”.

There were steps in the right direction in terms of the Spring Budget however I remain unsure as to whether our membership will take much comfort from the Chancellors' statement. We also have the uncertainty of who will be the next First Minister but whoever that may be MUST engage with and listen to business as we have been ignored for too long now.

Ken Richards

Interim CEO, Fife Chamber of Commerce