Photographs by Tim Gander

F or the then-13-year old Bristol-native Dan Panes, career training at school amounted to a CD-rom designed to make sense of a user’s likes, dislikes, abilities and inabilities and churn out the appropriate career. Though the algorithmic approach seems mystifying, some, like Panes, end up learning about themselves and their opportunities.

At the top of Panes’ list of suggested careers was ‘journalist.’ Always creative, the teenage Panes had writing experience, drama training and keyboard skills, but a career direction had eluded him until that point. Not one to hesitate, Panes jumped at the chance to gain experience at local media outlets. After school and weekend work at local newspapers led to a regular freelance desk at the Clevedon Mercury followed by positions with the North Somerset Times and the Bristol Evening Post.

A journalism degree at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design in Farnham followed swiftly as Panes – now head of communications at First Great Western – pursued the path trodden by budding journalists throughout the years. Experience had allowed Panes to develop a love for features writing. “That really drove me to tell a story, push emotion,” he says. “Which you could do much more easily in 1,000 words than you can in a 300-word news piece.” That drive toward storytelling led Panes to a regional business magazine group which owned the title Business Southwest. Three weeks into his time with the magazine, Panes got one of the first of many opportunities throughout his career to succeed in a difficult spot. “The editor at the time quickly, within probably about three weeks of me starting, disappeared for personal reasons leaving a small team. Actually within probably eight months, I was editing two titles [of] 30-40,000 words every fortnight to pull these magazines together,” he says.

For the upstart young graduate, the editing role was the first of many times in Panes’ career in which he would take on more responsibility than expected. “I was really dropped into the deep end,” he says. “Which has been a defining arc in the whole of my professional career to date. Although I knew where I wanted to go, I never specifically planned progression, it’s always sort of been dropped on me from a great height.”

“I’ve always worked for organisations since that mean something to people, that have a real connection at some level with the normal man on the street”

If the choice of a journalism career was the result of a computerised suggestion, Panes proved it was the natural place for him at the time. He relates an anecdote about a potential interview he was due to have with Bob Geldof. Having all but given up on the singer-songwriter after rescheduling multiple times, Panes, facing a five-page hole in the magazine, took a lunch break to sort out a backup plan. The phone rang just as he had sat down with his food at a local coffee shop. Panes had nothing to write on or with to record the long-awaited interview. “I had to grab a notepad from the waitress and a pen from behind the bar to write this interview that ended up spilling from beyond the waitress’ notepad onto napkins and horrible things over this hour-and-a-half session. So some of it’s about being resourceful,” Panes says.

 After taking a redundancy from the faltering magazine, Panes got a call from a mentor at the CIPR informing him of an opening for a PR stint with the Royal Mail Group. The potential move to PR was a hard choice for Panes, who had been a journalist since his teens. “I remember distinctly wrestling with my conscience about it. At that time, you’re stretching your wings, you’re determined to go down the crusading journalism route and I’d seen myself on that path with some very serious editorial pieces,” Panes says. In the end, he was swayed by a quick job offer and the economic benefits PR brings. Panes has no regrets, however, about switching over from journalism to communications. “I instantly fell in love with PR,” he says. “And it was a great disappointment to myself to start off with. I genuinely felt that six months in, I was doing more journalistically and more to something more meaningful, strangely than I had ever done working for a media outlet.”

Panes says the influence-building and relationship-management aspects of public relations, particularly for an organisation with a wide number of stakeholder groups, was all it took to win him over. Some bit of the young idealistic journalist still pervades, though. Panes says about his time with Royal Mail, “I just thought that there was, rather cornily, a real difference that could be made.”

Swiftly after he started, the government announced plans to reduce the number of regional, rural Post Office branches – presenting yet another challenge for the then-22-year-old Panes to meet head on. 2001 was the year the group officially attempted a rebrand to Consignia. The ill-fated effort led to a union boycott and the adoption of the Royal Mail Group moniker. Budget cuts plagued the organisation until its IPO in February 2014.

Traditional PR led to stakeholder engagement, primarily with members of local and national government and regulatory bodies. The fast pace of change spoke to Panes’ journalistic training, “I could quite literally be dressed as a vegetable promoting the latest set of first day cover stamps and the next day, I would be sat in front of a group of MPs talking about a picture of the local post office centre.” Panes says finding his way amid that sea of change relied on his ability to build relationships. The regional PR job led on to a wider role based in Birmingham looking after PR and stakeholder relationships in the midlands and southwest. But being away from his southwestern home put too high a strain on Panes’ work-life balance and he took a redundancy from the Royal Mail to return to Bristol.

He then launched his own PR agency as a sister-organisation to Proteus Marketing Communications – an established B2B Bristolbased firm. The experience could be summed up in one word, “Terrifying.” Panes says Proteus Media Relations was a necessary step for his own sanity, but brought with it all the challenges of running a small business. Between 2005-2007, he produced publications focusing on B2B events and conferences. “Businesses were starting to understand the concept of content marketing and using good strong editorial as a platform for their corporate messages,” Panes says. “I’ve felt I’ve just been at the right place at the right time, geographically and in my own head. I’ve always just been at the cusp of things that have been in those embryonic stages. I’ve learnt quickly to make the most of those resources to fit.”

After about 18 months, the lustre of running his own agency had worn off and Panes was taken on by one of his clients, FirstGroup. Panes came aboard at a difficult time as the organisation had recently taken over the Greater Western franchise and was facing cuts to service frequency, prompting customer complaints across the southwest. The cuts allowed for increased express options and journeys to major destinations, at the expense of off-peak, slower and less-used destinations, such as the Oxford-Bicester Town route.

“There were performance problems,” Panes says. “They were being dubbed ‘First Late Western’ left, right and centre and it had been happening for a while. So the team from a comms and operational perspective had been under a great deal of public and political pressure.” Panes was tasked with helping to restore the company’s reputation. He assisted in placing a communications specialist on the board and then he and director of communications for First Great Western Sue Evans worked with the newly-emerging board to position a £29m Department for Transport in a way that worked for them. “The fine was transformed into a package of improvements for customers of the same value. That made sure that not only was it just a punitive measure, it was something tangible that would really deliver for customers,” he says.

Panes adds that the reputation of the business was in a bad place. Relationships with journalists had eroded and cynicism about the company abounded to the point where “Good news was actually falling on deaf ears,” he says. Instead of trying to change the minds of journalists about First Great Western, Panes and Evans instituted a no-proactive-media policy in which no press releases were issued. They worked on relationships with stakeholders to improve customer service statistics and regain their third-party endorsements in terms of reputation. Internal perceptions were tackled as well.

After two-and-a-half years, Panes says that First Great Western was finally delivering on its promise and was seeing the results of that renewed credibility make it to the press. A regional title published a front-page report titled ‘First Late Western? Not anymore’, which spread across the region. “It was counterintuitive to many that a strategy that was based on us not directly talking to the media actually produced some really fantastic results from a communications perspective,” Panes says.

He says the relationships the company had begun to influence allowed it to regain the trust of the media and of its customers. That trust may have been of assistance last year when storms wiped out much of the southwest’s transportation infrastructure. In a stunning incident, the seawall-perched rail line in the coastal town of Dawlish was washed out, leaving the rail suspended over raging seas. The customer service response was immediate and massive spanning from 30,000 cups of tea and coffee given to passengers awaiting replacement bus services to ticket price reductions and taking steps to repair the damaged lines. A digital campaign that allowed First Great Western to manage the crisis alongside a comms push after the incident led to a 28% increase in retained current customers.

Train services hit right at the heart of public life. They can be, like in Dawlish, the lifeblood of a community, or simply a way for people to get to work, home or school. What communicators have become aware of in recent years – that the separations between stakeholder, internal and marketing communications have eroded – is something long known by the transport sector. Panes says, “There is this honesty and this experience that travelling by train brings that actually those other forms of transport don’t. We’re lucky in the southwest with First Great Western that we get to serve some of the very best, most beautiful places on the network. And that’s a key driver as well. It’s about recognising where there are failures, because there are, but at the same time, making sure that people know of the investment that you’re putting in and the improvements that you are making where you’re able to.”

For Panes, the end of the day may bring a train journey home – as he often works in London – but daughters of two and four keep him busy as does his alternative calling as a wedding band keyboardist. “At weekends I don an afro wig and a sharp purple suit and I play for the crowd,” Panes says. “Everyone that’s in communications, somewhere inside them is the performer.” His A-level drama teacher may have imparted the lesson of confidence on this musician-cumcommunicator, but a history in journalism and a love for the job has proved just the ticket. “I’ve always worked for organisations that mean something to people, that have a real connection at some level with the normal man on the street. I’ve never been going down the fluffy PR route where you’re selling widgets on a daily basis. I think that would not suit me at all...If you’re going out there and you’re defending your business and the people who do such a good job on a regular basis to deliver for customers, you can’t go out there and not in some way enjoy that sort of a challenge.”