A very warm welcome to the GFSB Annual Dinner 2024.

One of the key pieces of feedback I received about the Annual Dinner 2023 was that there was too much talking. We have two very interesting speakers this evening: Minister Vasquez-Arias, recently returned from the United Nations, and our very special guest, Mr. Roger Pollen.

In part to make way for those presentations, it’s my intention to keep this address short.

In furtherance of that objective, this year the board has produced a short booklet, “The Board Report,” for the benefit of our members. It updates you on some of the work going on behind the scenes at the board level and, perhaps more importantly, how that work is being done. By doing so, we hope to make it easier for the membership to get in touch with and work alongside the board. We also hope it will highlight the work undertaken by the board this year, much of which takes place out of plain sight, as has always been the case throughout the many years of the GFSB’s existence.

Some Reflection on the Past Year

A year ago, the board of the GFSB held its first away day. At that meeting, and at subsequent follow-up meetings, we set out a blueprint of our practical objectives for the following 12 months, as well as defining some core strategic goals for the organization.

The practical goals were to:

Conduct a detailed census of our membership
Complete a rebrand of the organization and relaunch our magazine and website
Give our premises a once-over and enhance their use by the membership
I am pleased to report that we concluded our most in-depth census of our membership at the end of last summer. That census has given the board the raw data required to achieve the organization’s longer-term strategic goals.

In January of this year, we relaunched the GFSB brand and our new publication, Thrive Magazine. The publication is now edited by full-time editor David Revagliatte, delivering business insights and practical information directly applicable to our membership, together with GFSB and business news and a roundup of what our members are up to.

In February of this year, we launched Thrive Edit, a weekly electronic newsletter that complements our quarterly physical publication. It is a testament to the increase in activity and productivity that the GFSB can sustain such a substantial weekly newsletter.

On the premises front, we have now released all of the GFSB premises for use by our membership, giving us a suite of rooms of different sizes for rental. We have increased the number of training, information, and social events using both our own premises and member premises. We are currently averaging approximately one event per week.

Event highlights this year include International Women’s Day kindly hosted by Sovereign Group, an informal networking event held at Artspace, together with a host of wide-ranging practical training sessions that have taken place in our own premises, including an interesting and slightly scary session on artificial intelligence. There is much more to come.

In parallel, we have also strengthened our ties with the Young Enterprise organization, launched a youth membership initiative, and launched the second policy-focused working group with our Equality and Wellbeing Group.

All of this continues alongside the GFSB staples – the Business Innovation Awards generously supported by Gibtelecom, and our speed networking events. This increase in activity and productivity is in no small part due to the hard work of each individual board member, all of whom are volunteers, and the GFSB office.

But it is also a result of the structural changes that have been brought about in the GFSB in the last 12 months. Some details are set out in the board report, but to summarize briefly:

Whereas the work of the GFSB used to be done entirely by the board, we have now broken down our operations into a series of working and policy groups. Board meetings have been reduced to once a month, with the time freed up dedicated to the individual working and policy groups. This means that we have more time to get into the detail of individual areas. Each member of the board has now been assigned specific policy areas to ensure that it is easy for the membership to get in touch with the right individual, and also to ensure that our board members are developing a deep knowledge of their policy areas.

We have had some changes at the board and office level as well. As a direct result of our census, we specifically recruited additional board members in underrepresented sectors, and we are pleased to announce that Dr. Karl Alvarez, Mr. John Sigue, and Mr. Seth Gallia have joined this year as co-opted members. We were also very sad to lose the ever-popular Georgie Weekes, although I’m glad to report that she continues to be a regular attendee of GFSB events and is indeed here this evening. We are very pleased to have the exceptionally able Phoebe Kelly join us as Business Support Manager, ably assisted as ever by Marianne Ballester. Thank you both for all your hard work organizing this dinner.

All of these practical objectives and structural changes continue to serve the strategic goals identified at our away day in May 2023:

To increase the provision of training and information
To improve the communication and advocacy conducted on behalf of members
And in doing so, to grow the membership of the organization
These remain our strategic objectives for the next 12 months.

Looking Forward

In terms of practical objectives, we have identified a shorter time frame. Over the next 100 days, the board and the office will be working to deliver on three sprint objectives:

The implementation of a membership platform. We recently signed a two-year deal with industry leader GlueUp that will help us enhance our member relationship management – providing for slick onboarding, live and virtual event management, online networking, and the development of an online GFSB community space.

Premises refurbishment – We benefit from amazing centrally based premises. With the deft application of some creative skill, we will be undertaking a transformational yet cost-effective refurbishment of the premises to bring it right into the 21st century where it belongs.

We will be focusing on fundraising by securing medium-term partnerships with Gibraltar-based businesses, both members and non-members. This is vital to the continued growth and success of the federation, and we very much look forward to meeting and presenting to prospective partners.

On that fundraising note, I would just like to thank you all once again for attending today. Together with membership fees, this is the federation’s main fundraising event, and we do appreciate your support in this regard. Conscious that the ticket price may be simply too much for some members, we introduced for the first time last year a summer BBQ with a much-reduced ticket price – to ensure that the full membership has access to GFSB social events.

That is the GFSB review and look forward. But it would be impossible for me to close without mentioning the single biggest business issue facing Gibraltar today, which is of course Brexit. It has been three and a half years since the framework agreement was announced. Negotiations remain ongoing and we are told edge ever closer to a final agreement. While the basic parameters of what the deal might look like from a business perspective are in the public domain, the detail, understandably, is not. The continuing lack of certainty about that detail, or even whether there will be an agreement at all, is having an impact on businesses’ ability to plan for the future, and more importantly, invest in that future.

We have had the benefit of a series of very detailed briefings about what a non-negotiated outcome might look like, courtesy of the office of the Deputy Chief Minister, Ivor Lopez and his staff. In April this year, together with them, we were able to run a very useful desktop exercise to assist our members in understanding and planning for that scenario. But it has been much harder to assist our members in preparing for the alternative, and for some – perhaps many – the preferred outcome, an agreement. With this evening’s keynote speaker, Mr. Roger Pollen, I hope we will go some way to addressing part of that deficit.

Roger heads the FSB in Northern Ireland. As is well known, Northern Ireland has had its own complicated Brexit challenges to overcome. Its situation and circumstances are quite different from that of Gibraltar, as is its business landscape. But it should be perhaps of some hope that, despite those challenges, an agreement was eventually reached in the form of the Northern Ireland Protocol. This evening, Roger will speak to some of the challenges and opportunities that Brexit presented in Northern Ireland so we, the membership, can consider what we might learn from them in a Gibraltar context. Special thanks to Dominic Searle for his assistance with arranging this evening’s keynote.

Please do have a very enjoyable evening. Thanks to sponsors Gibtelecom, Lewis Stagnetto, EY, Bassadone Motor. We are running a raffle this evening – another important aspect of our fundraising. Thank you to Bianca and Lianne from the EV Foundation who are selling tickets table to table and to the absolutely amazing support of all our member businesses that have contributed this year.

I will not keep you from your starters any longer.