FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

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Joseph Jarvis, Rob Lyne, Kwasi Mensah, Alan Perrin, Martin Phipps, James Ruddy, Graeme Smith, and Paul Williams. And over the next couple of years, the other London Boroughs came to us in a flood: Southwark, Lambeth, Islington, and many others. When we moved from Oakfield Road, we had six Term Contracts – and those were smaller contracts with a lifespan of only two years. Today, as I write these words, we have Term Contracts with seventeen London Boroughs. The impact on us at Rochester Way was phenomenal. In the period covered in this chapter, from 2000 to 2007, our turnover rocketed from £17 million to £70 million. As anyone who worked here at the time would tell you, we were beginning to find out what ‘busy’ really meant! Dave Boorman, who had joined us in 1993 to set up a proper Credit Control Department, describes those years as being ‘a series of twenty hour days’. Until Dave had joined, the Credit Control functions had been managed by Dennis Kearney, the Accounts Manager, who chased customers for money, and by Sean Geraghty, the Finance Director, who chased the ‘retentions’ (money that was held back for at least twelve months by the Boroughs as a form of guarantee against the work we did). The retentions did get paid back eventually, if you chased them; but you had to have somebody on the case, or the repayments would slip. And at the time Dave started, some of those retentions had been owing to us for up to ten years. So, now that we were getting bigger, we had to get on top of Credit Control. And these were exciting times. We felt like tigers; we were unstoppable, and we moved quickly. I remember Nick Burman,

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