Ensuring our assets enhance the communities in which they are located through tenant and community engagement is one of three key pillars of our Sustainability Strategy. At our larger sites which have Centre Managers, we actively empower and encourage our site teams to engage positively with the local communities in which the assets are based.
As part of our Q&A series with SUPR’s Centre Managers, we are pleased to share our latest interview with Simon Revill, Centre Manager at Beaumont Shopping Centre, and put a spotlight on his work with a range of impactful local initiatives and his outstanding leadership in the local community.
What is your role?
My role as a Shopping Centre Manager is incredibly varied, including the delivery of our short, medium and longer term strategies. These are created in conjunction with our site owners and key stakeholder inputs, covering a wide range of core disciplines including operational, leasing, retail liaison, H&S compliance, PPM, cost management, ESG, income creation and marketing.
What is your favourite part of your job?
Whist I enjoy most elements of my role, collectively it is the amount of autonomy afforded to me across all disciplines. However, the best part of my job is managing my team, helping them to realise their full potential and recognising individual and collective successes.
How do you interact with and support the Centre’s tenants?
With circa 30 years of retailing experience, I am able to fully understand the opportunities and challenges faced by our retailers. As a centre manager it is key that the team fully understand their roles in the wider sense, with our core skillset fully focused as a retail business and not limited to property management. Fully informed and engaged retailers provide us with the opportunity to maximise across all elements of our business, driving occupation, sales density, retailer / customer satisfaction and feeding into our longer term strategies. Anecdotal performance updates are also shared to support informed and results focused intel. Centre updates including trading, sector and marketing opportunities are shared with our retailers via quarterly retailer meetings, providing them with the opportunity to fully exhaust all additional opportunities to drive their business.
In what ways does your work impact the local community?
We have a number of community focused activities through the year, with local being a key priority for the centre. However, I have two that I am incredibly proud to have been involved with. Working with Forest Way school, we currently provide work placements for young people with Autism. This has been a great success and provides an opportunity for the placements to gain skills and confidence that may not come naturally. This initiative was born out of the realisation of the potential employment challenges faced by people diagnosed with autism. Just 22% of autistic people are reported to be in paid work, leading to a huge number of people that seem to fall through the employment gap. As a result of our programme we offer a permanent position to the placements and recently recruited our 2023 placement Kelton into the team and he’s doing an amazing job! The second community initiative that has been incredibly rewarding has been our work on Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB), collaborating with numerous local agencies including Leicester City Council, youth groups and the Police. Through local workshops with young people held on the centre we managed to obtain a better understanding of why we were experiencing such behaviours. The feedback was very clear, with a real lack of youth provision within the local area. A working group was formed, funding secured, a venue sourced, and I am thrilled to say that the Youth Centre was launched in April ’24. Since this time, we have seen a real step change in the types of behaviours on the centre. This initiative was also recognised at the Shopping Centre Sceptre Awards in 2024, with the centre winning the ‘Community Initiative of the year – The Midlands’.
What environmental and social impact activities do you have planned for 2025?
I currently sit on the steering group representing the midlands cluster for Savills. This provides me with the opportunity to share and drive key local initiatives across the cluster, which will be a key focus for 2025. These include our work on young people with autism, our ASB reduction strategy and working with Young Enterprise supporting future entrepreneurs. We are also targeting a Green Apple Award.
