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Who is doing well now in the UK?

Back in April, I wrote a blog post about companies, individuals, and sectors in the United States that were doing well despite (or in some cases, because of) the coronavirus pandemic. Today I want to offer some research that I’ve done on the same topic, but focused across the Atlantic. For everyone who has prospects in the United Kingdom, this one’s for you.

Just as everywhere, the economy in the United Kingdom right now is on a slanting slide into sure recession. However, that doesn’t mean that every company or sector is in the red along with it. As I go through the individual companies and sectors that are doing well right now, think not only of those who are executives or major shareholders that are in these companies, but the companies themselves and others in that sector that may be prospects. Also consider if they have a corporate foundation with funding priorities that your nonprofit might fit.

Basic goods

Just like here in the States, the major supermarket chains are experiencing solid sales right now: Tesco’s sales are up 12.7% and Sainsbury’s and Waitrose are both up 12.5%. Discount grocery chain Co-op is up 30.8% and sales for mainly-frozen-foods grocer Iceland are up 29%.

In order to get those groceries, many people are relying on the UK’s main delivery service, Ocado, which is reporting sales that are up nearly 33%.

Companies and manufacturers

According to Make UK, the professional organization for the UK’s manufacturing sector, 90% of UK manufacturers have continued to operate fully or partially since March, although around 20% have furloughed or laid off staff.

Which manufacturers specifically are doing well?

Any company manufacturing Perspex (plexi-glass), for example. Every person operating a cash register or sitting at a customer service window has (or will have) a sheet of plastic between themselves and the customer, so those manufacturers are operating on all cylinders.

The same goes for anything medical related, including PPE manufacturers/suppliers (face masks, gowns, visors, aprons, thermometers), medical equipment parts and materials (beyond just respirators to the base materials like plastics and sheet metals), and companies that make household and institutional cleaning supplies, including Reckitt Benckiser, the maker of Dettol, and hand sanitizer manufacturers.

And of course early on in the lockdown just as in the United States, UK television streaming services, games, and other forms of entertainment did (and continue to do) really well, too.

Who does well all the time?

Grocery stores usually operate on fairly thin margins, but people always need groceries so they tend to be fine no matter the economic circumstance. Banks, energy companies (those delivering heating oil and gas, for example), internet and phone companies, and the infrastructures that support them do well, too.

Right now, in addition to ecommerce (like UK-based companies selling must-have items like Argos, B&Q, Curry’s, Screwfix, office suppliers, etc.), shipping (and supporting industries) are also doing well because all of those ordered items have to be delivered.

Which companies and industries are having a moment?

And speaking of delivery, a new-ish form of vehicle is increasingly important, with drones supplying medicines and PPEs in half the time over the Solent to the Isle of Wight and from mainland Scotland to the islands. Look for companies like drone operator Skyports and defense and technology companies like Thales that manufacture these useful technologies.

It’s not just corporations and UHNWIs doing well: Local bike shops can’t keep stock on the shelves – especially bikes under £500, and they can’t keep up with repairs, either. Electric bike sales are up 96%! Britain has re-discovered biking in a big way, and it’s healthy for the bikers and for the bike sellers, from local shops to chains like Halfords.

The UK is a gardener’s paradise, of course, and garden centers which have now reopened are experiencing the same sort of panic-buying (and associated boom in sales) as we Americans had with toilet paper in late March. There’s an 8-week wait for certain plants as sales at some centers have exploded 75%.

Who will be doing well moving forward?

Because of COVID-19, demand is also beginning to rise for contact-free items like touchless faucets, flushers, and dispensers, so watch those manufacturing spaces as well.

Property investors with deep reserves like Great Portland Estates, one of the largest property owners in London’s West End, bought up bargains during and after the Great Recession. They purchased nearly 60% of their current portfolio between 2009 and 2014, and according to an article in the Financial Times (paywall) they plan to do it again.

As in the United States, look for managers and investors in contrarian hedge funds. Some that shorted the market back in January and February have made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Any company with a contract to supply to the government should do well in the next year (or more) as well. Once awarded a contract, a company can expect steady payments from a reliable source. Look for connected companies like Liberty Global, (no relation to Liberty of London) which signed a deal with the UK government to provide on-street charging points for electric vehicles.

Finally, although it would be easy to think that private equity and venture funding would be completely dried up, it’s not always the case. I spent a little time spent in Crunchbase and found that startups and young companies in the UK received $3.9 billion in the period between March 1 and June 1 of this year. A quarter of those companies are outside of London, too, so it’s not all invested in the south. Both the funders and the companies funded are worth a look to see if there are prospects for your nonprofit.

What other companies and sectors do you know of that are doing well in the UK right now? Please share in the comments for all of us to benefit from!

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Paying it forward

Black Lives Matter. Photo by Fibonacci Blue

I first saw the poem “First They Came” by Pastor Martin Niemöller when I was about 22 years old. It was on a beautifully designed poster hanging on my boss’s office wall. Maybe you know it?

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

My boss Michael was gay. We never talked about it but I knew he was because he had a Silence=Death sticker on his car. Back in the Eighties only gay people put those stickers on their cars.

Having an ActUp sticker on your car back then in North Carolina was a dangerous political statement. You could get into serious trouble for it. Followed at night. Pulled from your car. Beat up. Killed.

It may sound unbelievable now, but that’s the way things were then. Michael was kind of a slight, skinny, average-looking guy. He could totally pass for straight. No one ever would have known.

In my heart I thought he had the courage of a lion, because Michael would have gone down in under three minutes if somebody pulled him from his car to beat him up.

I knew that a bunch of Michael’s friends had died of AIDS. I didn’t know it at the time, but I realize now that he must have been frustrated and filled with rage to be so ready to put his body – his life – on the line like that.

His “First They Came” poster was another courageous act of saying – at work – who he was. Or maybe reminding himself daily of who he wanted to be, I don’t know.

I’ve been thinking about Michael’s poster and his Silence=Death sticker a lot these past few days.

This is Gay Pride month, and it wouldn’t be recognized as Pride Month except for courageous gay people like Michael with stickers on their cars. Protesting at die-ins. Fighting back against police brutality at Stonewall. Getting beat up and killed. Marching. Donating to PFLAG and ACT-UP and HRC and GLAD.

And straights who stood up and did all the same things, being allies and advocates. People who had no other skin in the game except that they recognized a wrong and worked to fix it.

Most importantly for me, equal marriage would not have become law in Massachusetts in 2004 without that bloodshed and protest and marching. My 21-year old relationship finally became a legal marriage that year because of them.

Equality is important. Most straight people didn’t realize that before equal marriage was made law, if my spouse or I at any point during those 21 years had been in the hospital, we would have not legally had the right to accompany or visit them or get any news of their status.

It’s things like that that most people take for granted. Everyone who can’t visit their loved one in the hospital with COVID right now is experiencing what gay couples had as their normal everyday experience up until 2004.

Civil rights are important.

Societal change can be peaceful or it can be violent; it depends on how receptive to change those that control the power are. Usually they’re not receptive, so equality happens with a fight, first physical and then legal. You’d have thought we would have learned as a society by now, but apparently we have to go through the horrific motions again and again and again.

And so we’re at it again. A continuing civil rights issue violently coming to a head.

And I’m here to say that there is no defense for killing people or putting their lives in danger because of the color of their skin. Period. People out walking. Jogging. Driving their car. Sleeping in their own home. Bird watching.

Just doing things that white people take for granted being able to do on any given day. Just living.

Nobody walking down the street deserves to die or be harassed or threatened simply for being who they are. It’s really as basic as that.

Silence equals Death.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

I know that you come here to learn more about what I and others have to say about prospect development. And I’ll go back to that (probably) next week, so tune back in then for fundraising-related information if you think I’m being too political today.

What’s happening in our country is significantly, historically important, and we all need to have our black and brown friends’ backs right now. We need to speak up or show up with the courage of this girl to shield people we know or don’t even know.

Please join me in doing whatever you can do to make a difference out loud. Here are some things everyone can do:

  • If you can’t speak up, or if you’re not on social media, or you can’t march, make a donation. Support those who do the front-line work for justice. If your employer matches gifts, put that paperwork through as soon as you can.

We’ve all been stuck in our homes, inactive, for weeks. Now’s your opportunity to make an active difference for positive change.

I’m forever grateful for people who spoke up for me. If someone ever spoke up for you, or if you wish someone had, join me in paying it forward.

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On Being a Prospect Research Possibilist

Over the past two months the HBG Book Club has been reading Hans Rosling’s Factfulness and, considering what’s going on in the world around us right now, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. I asked my colleague and fellow book clubber Jayme Klein to share her perspective about the book for our blog in today’s article. Thanks, Jayme! ~Helen

People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about…I’m not an optimist…I’m a very serious ‘possibilist…,’ someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible.” -Hans Rosling

During April and May, the Helen Brown Group Book Club read Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World- and Why Things are Better Than You Think by the late Hans Rosling. While our meetings are always virtual, spanning homes and offices across the globe, these gatherings felt different. We were all at home universally quarantined.

As we logged in each week, we admired the various Zoom backgrounds that book club members had chosen. All of them were drastically different places than our kitchen, office or living room. They sparked conversations about personal interests, old vacations, or something calm and pleasant to look at.

No matter what the background, we all had a desire to go somewhere else, to stop focusing on the current struggles all of us were a part of in the pandemic.  Many of us expressed overwhelm with the deluge of Covid-19 news. As we dove into the book and started to look at our thoughts more objectively with Rosling’s guidance, it became clear how much our backgrounds and belief systems shape our worldviews.

Rosling had a decades-long career in medicine and international health. Through anecdotes highlighting his own bias, he showed the challenges and rewards of changing viewpoints after experiencing different cultures and opinions.

By describing 10 instincts that affect how we see data, Rosling explained how those beliefs, and how data is shaped by them – keep us from seeing how much progress civilization has truly made in the past few centuries. We learned that although some of what shapes our thoughts and feelings are unique and personal, some of these are more universal and deep-rooted than we may have thought.

His “Factfulness Rules of Thumb” deftly summarized the book with hints that would prove helpful no matter what the situation when faced with personal or professional interpretation. I’ve adapted them for our prospect research needs:

  • Look for the Majority: Sometimes looking between categories is where the largest common denominator is. For example, alumni, parents, and staff all have the same thing in common: a relationship with the school. While the nature of the relationship may differ, the school still holds value for all of them.
  • Expect Bad News: It is easier to find a negative story than a positive one about a prospect. Keep digging and see what else exists about them beyond something sensational. When reading negative contact reports, look at the history of the prospect’s relationship with the organization. Was the negativity related to a person or story? Was it an outlier amongst years of positive contacts?
  • Resist the straight line. Lines might bend: Sometimes the prospect with the highest net worth may not be the best. Look for other data trends that show a dedication to your cause, such as consistent giving and regular, positive interactions.
  • Calculate the Risks: How much work will a project take to get the results that your team needs? Is the new, shiny resource going to help your workflow?
  • Get things in proportion: Is the prospect’s million-dollar house the biggest in town, or just a small cottage in a high-wealth area?
  • Generalization: Just as Rosling advised in the first point, resist the urge to assume that your top prospect is the wealthiest. What categories do you automatically consider? What lesser-considered factors could help you identify someone?
  • Slow change is still change: Our field is constantly evolving, and it sometimes takes time to adapt. Learning a new resource, evaluation technique or piece of software isn’t easy, but is always valuable. Give yourself credit for adapting- no matter how small it may seem.
  • Get a toolbox: Keep a running list of resources to help you in your work. HBG regularly updates our list with input from staff. Additional lists, such as APRA’s, can further guide your work.
  • Resist blame: Why didn’t you get the results you wanted? Maybe the search criteria for a foundation search was too specific for a long list of funders. Think about how you can change the keywords, loosen the search terms, or re-examine the request to find better results.
  • Take small steps: Faced with an overwhelming list of prospects to screen? Try sorting the results in different ways to reveal different population segments. Using variables such as confirmed assets, number of philanthropic gifts given or the prospect’s largest gift could reveal new and interesting prospects.

In an industry such as ours, facts are paramount to our success. Rosling’s book helped us look more objectively at how data is presented to us, as well as how we take it in and use it in our work. We highly recommend it, especially now, if you’re interested in how data is presented to us and how our perspectives change how we receive it.

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