FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

… when it’s a family business, every little bit of it matters; and no detail of it, and no person within it, is too small to pay attention to.

lashed down the scaffolding and the Portacabins, so we were OK. The cars that had been left in the quayside car park were swept away; they looked like someone had gone at them with a large sledgehammer. The bad weather’s still with us, at the start of 2014, but the job is going well. And who can tell what new doors it will open for us? T hat’s the big story. It’s ‘big’ because it involves a large contract, and because it shows our people achieving success in the face of adversity. It’s the kind of story that we all, quite rightly, enjoy. I want to end, however, on a ‘small’ story, the kind of story that it’s easy to overlook. This story is also about people, but it’s about a group of people that we don’t often talk about. Much of the success in the Conway story is due to innovation. But we should never confuse innovation with technology: they are not the same thing. There is nothing exclusive to Conway about the technology we are using. The innovation comes not in the technology itself, but in the way that we apply it. Where we lead, we can be sure that our competitors will follow. Over time, our innovations will become standard practice within the industry, because that is what innovation is all about: improving service for the customer, improving the work ‘experience’ for the operative, and improving overall efficiency for the company. But it is also about improving the Conway ‘experience’ for one other important group of people: the ordinary person in the street. Thirty years ago, back in 1983, we won our first ‘considerate contractor’ award in Croydon. Today, this aspect of our work remains just as important to us as it ever was. Now that we have a substantial fleet of lorries of our own, we know that we have a duty to use them

Nearly a hundred cars were damaged in the cruise passenger’s car park at Dover by the violence of the St Jude’s Day storm on October 28 th 2013.

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