FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

We had entered the big league on equal terms with the rest of them. And from the start, we were able to bring innovation to the contract.

was able to take on someone with years of experience of working in the City, John Holliday, who had worked for the City Corporation as a lad, and who was now working for them again, indirectly, as a consultant. Winning the City felt like coming of age: we were no longer ‘South London boys doing a bit of work down in Merton’. We had entered the big league on equal terms with the rest of them. And from the start, we were able to bring innovation to the contract. The City Corporation had put together a detailed set of policies and guidelines in a manual called ‘City Street Scene’, which was aimed at improving the quality of the City’s streets and public places year on year. One of these policies was an insistence on using the best materials in all maintenance and development work, e.g. York stone for paving, Cornish or Scandinavian granite for kerbs, etc. In our tender, we had based our granite prices on what we would pay English merchants for it. But John Corcoran had been doing his homework; he’d discovered that we could get really good prices on Chinese granite if we bought direct from China. So we tried the idea out on the City. They liked the quality of the granite, and they liked it even more when they heard the discount they were going to get on it. Working for the City helped to broaden our reputation for quality in addition to the reputation we had already established for reliability, good value, and good practice. John Holliday and his team did such great work for the City that when the five-year contract drew to an end in 2007, the City extended it for another five years.

John’s recruitment interview, back in 2002, had been highly unusual even by F.M. Conway standards. The first part of the interview took

106