The director general's post has been vacant for over a year since the previous holder's resignation due to ill health.
Fielder, who has been acting as chairman and chief executive, said he had decided not to reappoint for six months while a recovery strategy was being implemented.
An appointee who was due to take up the position four months ago, had also 'let us down at the last minute,' he said.
The new shortlist of two includes a career civil servant 'with great government contacts' and a commercial manager 'at a senior facilities management level' returning to the UK from abroad.
The institute reported a pre-tax surplus of £5,237 for the year ended 31 December 2000 — a dramatic improvement on the £176,629 deficit in the same reporting period for 1999. A recovery of reserves is expected at the end of 2001.
Fielder put the turnaround down to 'focus'. 'We are here to deliver membership benefits and everything else is peripheral,' he said. 'We set up a strategy, got our stakeholder groups to do business plans and created a budget that was workable.'
Three positions were cut from the headcount at the institute's HQ in Saffron Walden.
An increase in membership subscriptions, supported by a much lower than expected attrition rate — 2.5 per cent instead of 15 per cent — and a new member monthly growth rate of 80 people, all helped to increase revenue from subscriptions from £464,128 in 1999 to £581,527 in the year to December 2000.
Among the problems behind the institute's poor finances in 1999 was a change in the membership database system.
This has now been resolved, reports Fielder. 'We went through a year of cleansing month by month,' he said. Membership now stands at just under 7000 — a new landmark for the institute.
Constitutional changes proposed for the AGM aim to allow regional groups to more easily create the committee structures they require.
Source
The Facilities Business
