April 5, 2022
As you will already be aware, the British Drilling Association (BDA) recently welcomed Joel Stevens, as the Association’s new Membership Manager and we thought it would be good to get to know a little bit about Joel and his plans for the BDA within his role.
In the short and medium term, Joel wants to get to know the organisation, how it works and issues of the drilling sector. Specifically, he wants to engage with membership, find out what is working, and what isn’t and what do BDA members want? This of course, means that he will be working alongside the main and sub-committees to increase training, health and safety and technical guidance for the membership. Much great work has been undertaken by the BDA and Joel will be looking to support this, but also add knowledge from different sectors into the various sub-committees and the Association overall.
Though Joel has not been long in is role with the BDA, he has already recognised how committed and productive the members of these various sub-committees are and one of his key objectives is to streamline processes to take some of the time burden off these volunteers.
Whilst training, guidance, and support on related topics are very apparent, Joel sees the BDA Audit as a good indicator of where the industry should be, but also recognises the need to engage more with membership about relevant/salient issues.
Joel is not from a drilling background but has amassed an enormous amount of experience from previous roles that he would like to bring to the BDA. Joel managed an SME company, with 40+ employees (private sector), with a turnover of £1.8m and is still a part-time finance director. In this role he controlled all aspects of cost, contract negotiations, managing relationships and business development, which are essential for his work at the BDA. Joel also worked for a small consultancy firm within the construction industry, contracting to companies who have social housing contracts, enabling them to run more efficiently and effectively, as well as select, lead, and motivate the project team from both internal and external stakeholder organisations. Other roles include working within the horse-racing industry, assessing the role of the Integrity Services and Licensing Department in protecting the integrity of racing, managing staff in UK, Ireland, and Hong Kong.
More directly relevant, Joel has worked for a Member / Charity, or ‘third sector’ organisation as they are known, where he worked intensively with groups to devise a way of them becoming sustainable through various strategic plans. A large part of his work has included providing support to groups on areas such as governance, safeguarding, health and safety, insurance, equality and diversity, business plans, finance, and funding opportunities. The position also included identifying suitable monitoring/reporting information and general grant management responsibilities, creating business and sustainability plans, consulting with project delivery teams and producing monitoring/reporting information. All of relevance to the BDA, but especially the work he undertook in establishing and maintaining strong relationships with statutory and voluntary agencies and other key bodies.
Much of Joel’s work within the charity saw him contract manage multiple projects, whilst effectively monitoring, reporting and evaluating all aspects of work within the team, whilst developing and maintaining effective personal relationships with a wide range of organisations.
With finance never far from any organisation’s agenda, Joel’s work saw him raise income to agreed targets from existing and prospective Trusts, Foundations, Lottery and statutory and European funding streams, by undertaking research into external funders which give to the youth sector. In fact, Joel’s knowledge of submitting high-quality written funding applications will be extremely beneficial to the BDA.
Of course, through all these positions the most important skill gained is Joel’s ability to communicate effectively, succinctly, and efficiently and it is a skill perhaps most prized by the BDA.
