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Dr David Gibson became the managing director of the Sutton Harbour-based National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth. He has since turned the NMA’s fortunes around and given back its ‘national’ importance.
OLIVIER VERGNAULT went to see him at the aquarium to find out the why and the how.
Q: What is your background?
A: I was born in Airdrie, near Glasgow. I have a BSc in zoology from Glasgow University and a PhD in fish diseases from Stirling University. That was assuming that I would go into aquaculture but by the time I finished my PhD the world had moved on and that topic was old news. In the early 90s the public aquarium sector was kicking off. In 93, I joined Deep Sea World in Edinburgh as an aquarist.
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Q: What’s an aquarist?
A: It’s a person who looks after the fish on a day-to-day basis. It involves feeding the fish, cleaning the tanks and some diving.
I trained as a diver and I very much enjoyed that part of the work. Within four years I was head of department. Within five years I was Curator and within six years I was running the site near Queen’s Ferry.
Q: What did you do after that?
A: I joined Blue Planet in Chester which was the second biggest aquarium in the UK. And in 2001, I was lucky enough to be given the role of Curator at The Deep, a Millennium funded project in Hull.
Q: What does a Curator do?
A: This is the manager responsible for exhibitions. For a zoo or an aquarium, he’s responsible for all the animals, the life support system which keep the animals alive and for acquisitions from other sites around the world.
My role also involved managing the team.
The Deep received £55 million worth of capital funding. After the Eden Project it is the second most successful Millennium project and it is still going strong.
Q: What made The Deep so special and different?
A: What set it out from other aquariums was that it is a lot more interactive. It was a lot more hands on. I am pleased to have been the Assistant Chief Executive of this fantastic project.
But my career was not going to move unless the Chief Executive retired or quit neither of which he had any intentions of doing so I decided to make a bold move. I looked around and secured the role of director of the Fota Wildlife Park in Ireland.
Q: How different was it from what you had done previously?
A: The biggest challenge was to go from an aquarium to a land based zoo. As a director it was about managing people and the business side of things. I was confident I had the skills to run the business and to manage teams of people but I didn’t have any experience in managing the animals.
Q: What did you do?
A: I had to get some forestry training, driving diggers and looking after not only animals but a large arboretum. I can adapt and I learn quickly. I even underwent fire arms training and became a marksman as we had to handle big animals like European Bison.
Q: How long did you stay there?
A: I was there for 18 months. I had to come back to the UK for family reasons and I found this position with the National Marine Aquarium in 2010.
The NMA was stable financially and had a small surplus as a charity. A lot of hard work had been done to secure it financially. There had been a major restructure and many staff had been made redundant.
The NMA had had to go through RDA refinancing. The NMA may have been financially stable but its reputation was absolutely rock bottom.
Q: Why was its reputation so bad?
Q: The NMA was open in 1988 but it never achieved national status. The aquarium had very little self esteem. The exhibits were poor. There was a very high turnover of staff. It was run as commercial enterprise and not as a charity. It was almost unrecognised on the international scene. Academically it did not have reputation at all.
Q: What did you do to change that?
A: My remit was not only to secure the aquarium’s financial future but address its reputation problem. It’s a job that will never be finished because you can always improve something but we are a long way down the journey from where we started.
As an organisation we’re a lot fitter and more efficient. Staff costs are under control and we are now developing a much wider range of income streams. The big challenge is the low regional population we depend on. 45% of visitors come from the local area. We have a high dependence on local population. Which is why with a 1.2m population within a 90-minute drive radius we needed to increase our reputation to attract more people. That makes us vulnerable to the weather and the vagaries of the tourism industry. Tourism is a very important sector of the economy in Devon and represents around 11% of the total economy.
Unfortunately in Plymouth, people just bypass us to go to Cornwall. In the Duchy they have a strong vision and strategy and a very cohesive sense of direction. In Devon we don’t. People don’t know what Devon has to offer. They don’t know what the product is.
Q: As an indoor attraction how dependent are you on the weather?
A: It is free to go to the beach. People thrive on the beach trade. But when it rains they come to us. The weather has an enormous impact on our business. It is 70% reliant on it. During the August Bank Holiday weekend we had 3,500 people come through the doors on the Monday because it rained. The day before it was really sunny and we only had 1,200 people. It makes it difficult to plan in term of stock holding and staff rotas. We need to diversify our income streams such as our corporate hospitality.
Q: how big is corporate hospitality in term of revenues?
A: When I arrived it represented about £85,000 a year for us. Now it is £250,000. Most of it happens out of season so it is good for our cash flow. We’ve also introduced an annual pass at £13.75 for adults whereby if you come once then it’s free thereafter. There is a big advantage for customers in that they get a lot more for their money and can access the facilities all year round. It helps drive footfall and local loyalty. We also reclaim about £300,000 each year in Gift Aid contributions which helps us run the charity.
Q:What’s the attraction of zoos and aquariums?
A: They have living animals so there is always something different to see. You may not always see the big sharks but there will be other things to see. Besides animals grow and change. We have to ensure that there is something new to see.Typically we win customers at the age of four and lose them when they are teenagers. But we get them back in their 20s and for the rest of their lives. They will come back to us when they start dating, they will take their own kids or grandchildren to visit us.
Q: What’s so special about Plymouth’s aquarium?
A: We have the wow factor with the massive tanks and the rays and the sharks. We have some of the biggest tanks in the UK and some of the best native seas tanks in the country. Few aquarium focus on the native seas. They all go for coral reefs and tropical fish. It’s colourful. People are romantically attached to coral reefs. Selling the UK marine life is a lot harder. There is this perception that it’s grey, dull and cold. We need to challenge that perception. Plymouth Sound has some of the most significant marine life in Europe. It is protected on so many levels. The Tamar estuary is a marine protected zone, is a designated protected zone under EU rules as a habitat for wildlife, seagrass and offfshore coral reefs. Drakes Island is a nesting site for rare little egrets. We even have dolphins, porpoises and Basking Sharks.
It’s important that we tell that story. Which is why the first thing visitors see when they come in the local story. We have some of the best marine life in the UK with sun fish, basking sharks, seals and seahorses.
Jellyfish and seahorses fire up the imagination of people. They are also very hard to look after. It is a lot of hard work but the public love them. There is an important backstory to tell too. With so many dead zones in our oceans and seas around the world, such as the China Sea, where pollution has killed almost all wildlife, we are now catching jellyfish to eat. It’s known as fishing down the food chain. The lower down the food chain we fish the greater the impact on the environment and wildlife. In deep sea ecosystems, jellyfish represent 70% of the ecosystem. They’re not just cute. They have a huge part to play.
Q: How many visitors do you get a year?
A: About 300,000 which is more than the entire population of Plymouth. The more people We get through the doors the cheaper it gets to run the aquarium. It costs about £12,000 a day to keep the place going in term of heating and cooling aquariums, feeding the fish, paying the staff. That’s the same whether we have 3,000 visitors or 400 in the depth of winter. The reality is that for 6 months of the year we run a business at a slight loss. We have to manage our cash flow.
Q: What’s the aquarium’s turnover?
A: £3.3m up £500K since 2010. We employ about 56 full time and 25 part time staff all year round which goes up to a total of 110 during the tourist season. A lot of the seasonal staff are students. It is our policy not to use zero hour contracts because we have an obligation to our staff. The senior management team is only five-people strong because the last thing I want it is for the organisation to be bloated at the top.
Q: what are the aquarium’s main costs?
A: Salaries represent £1.2m while the cost of looking after the animals is £500K. Our energy bill is £350K. We have solar panels on the roof which help us save £15,000 a year on energyand e are looking at different energy efficiency measures. But it means serious costly investments. We are employing external consultants to see how we can run the aquarium more efficiently through solar and thermal energy sources.
Q: What sort of scientific programme is the aquarium involved in?
A: We have a large programme about sustainable seafood as part of our “Re-connect Project”. It’s about re-engaging people with seafood. The South West has some of the best seafood in the world but we export most of it to the Continent. We want people to better understand their own seafood and stimulate the local consumption. I was really pleased when we gained the Fish2Fork “Blue City” status for Plymouth. Like with FSC certified wood it’s about encouraging restaurants to sell locally sourced sea food and fish and increasing the knowledge of staff and consumers about sustainable sea food. We see it as a quality badge for the industry.
Q: How is that progressing?
A: it’s doing well. Plymouth is the first city in the world to be awarded the Fish2Fork award. We’re working toward “Sustainable Fish City” status. It’s about getting both public and private sectors involved in sourcing fish sustainably like the council, the MoD, the NHS, schools and large employers. By sitting the board of Food Plymouth we’re hoping to shape the food landscape of our city.
Q: What keeps you going after all this time?
A: I love the technical challenges of running a big organisation. I really enjoy people management. I enjoying working for a charity and knowing that what we do makes a difference. That’s what keeps me interested. I work really closely with Paul Cox my Director of Conservation and Communication. He is exceptionally good at Stakeholder Managment and is able to build a coalition of the willing and works well at engaging with stakeholders. If I were just running a business it would not be enough to keep me going. But because it’s a charitable business that keeps me engaged.
Q: When not running the NMA what do you do?
A: My fiançée and I have bought a run down property on and the edge of Dartmoor. There is a huge amount of work to do up there. It’s a four-acre patch ex-smallholding which has been neglected for 25 years. We’ve already spent 18 months shaping it but there is a lot to be done.
I used to do a lot of scuba diving, golf and mountain biking but I have not done any for a while. I need to get back into doing more exercise.
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FEATURE: Turning round the fortunes of the National Marine Aquarium
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