Meet The Board Member: Steve Crocombe, Tabler Experience Officer

Hi, I'm Steve from Caterham & District 274, and I'm in my second year as your National Tabler Experience Officer.

My Round Table story starts with a beer festival. We moved to Caterham in July 2019 and had barely met anyone locally before COVID shut everything down. By the time the Caterham Round Table Beer Festival came back as one of the first local events to run again, I was thoroughly bored of being at home and just wanted to get out. I got chatting to the Caterham Tablers that night and had signed up to the next social before the evening was over. Fast forward a year and I was helping to run the festival. A few years after that I was chairing the committee, a role that came with the unofficial but entirely accurate title of Beer King.

The day job

Away from Table, I'm a founder and director of Imperium, a business I started in 2014. In short, we install technology that automates buildings (environmental control, lighting and AV) to make them more comfortable, more efficient and better to live in. Most of our work is luxury residential in central London, though I'm usually to be found at our office in Carshalton.

I began my career straight out of school as an apprentice electrician, then moved to a BMS company where I learned my trade properly: programming and commissioning the systems. Starting Imperium came after that.

Being on the RTBI board and my job feed each other more than I expected. Running a business has definitely allowed me to be more effective in my Table role: managing people, budgets and getting things over the line. But the traffic goes both ways. Table has given me confidence in public speaking I simply didn't have before, and sitting around a board table with people from completely different industries has made me better at my day job too.

The role

My job as Tabler Experience Officer is to develop and host the workshop programme. The aim is to take things back to basics: making Tables easier to run, easier to grow, and ultimately making sure people have a better time in Round Table.

This year my big project is developing a short series of workshops that regional and area chairs can host themselves. If the content can travel without me having to be in the room, it reaches far more Tablers, and that's the whole point.

I stood for the role partly for the personal development and partly for the chance to get around the country and meet Tablers at the workshops. But mostly I wanted to give back to the association while I had the opportunity to do it properly.

Those experiences are the bit I'd struggle to explain to anyone outside Table. Running the beer festival. My first workshop, in Dundalk. Hosting our 74 Club numbers meeting, with Tablers over from Denmark, Sweden and Norway. And my first tabling trip abroad, to Moldova. None of that was on my radar when I walked into a beer tent in Caterham.

Outside Table

Home is Caterham, in Surrey, with my wife Sally and our dog Monty, who is thoroughly spoilt and knows it.

I've ridden horses for about seven years and currently share a horse called Milo. I'll have a go at most things, dressage included, but jumping is what I enjoy the most, show jumping and cross country both. I'm just as happy watching the professionals go round too. My love of horses comes from growing up with family in Devon and loving spending time at my grandad's farm; it's really a love of the outdoors and animals.

My other hobby is Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I train at Koba in Dorking, mostly no-gi, and picked up my blue belt a couple of years ago, though training has been slower recently as life has got busier since I’ve been on the board. Otherwise, I enjoy running, open water swimming, long dog walks, a barbecue at any excuse, a serious weakness for craft beer, and an Xbox that gets more use than I would like to admit.