FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Building for the Future 7

I don’t like looking back. I’m not good at that. What I have come to realise is that my strength has always been in looking ahead and seeing what is coming round the corner. So, when I used the opportunity of our 50 th Anniversary to announce some changes to the Board, it wasn’t about rewarding people for good work in the past, it was all about building for the future. The biggest change was putting Andrew Hansen in charge of running the day-to-day operations, as the new Chief Operating Officer. Andrew has worked closely with me for a dozen years. He understands the business, and most importantly he understands the way that F.M. Conway does business, which is different from other companies. We take the hard road, because we choose to do the work ourselves and not to farm it out. After all, that’s what our business is about: hard work. There’s nothing complicated about it. If there’s a philosophy that Andrew and I share, it’s this: keep it simple, be honest, and work hard. I had never imagined that I would allow someone else to take over the reins; that had never been part of my vision of the future. I have always said that this business is my ‘train set’, and I haven’t much liked the idea of sharing it. I still don’t. But I had been running the day-to-day side of the company for thirty years (the company’s 50 th anniversary was my 30 th anniversary as MD), and it was taking up too much of my time. I wasn’t bringing any benefit to the business by going and checking whether a bloke had done a pothole or not. I wasn’t helping by looking back at what had already happened: my contribution to the business was to look forward. So, that’s the task I gave myself as Chief Executive Officer: developing the business for the future. There were two other changes to the Board. David Donnelly

Joanne Garwood, my daughter, joined the Board as Director of Central Services in 2011.

Mike Betchley joined the Board as our new Operations Director in 2012.

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