Welcome to the first blog post on the new The Ferryfield Group website!
I'm sure that many business owners agonise over how they want to represent their brand or company, but I think there's also an argument for just getting something written down and published on a new blog.
So, here's an abbreviated overview of how I've come to be writing this post, and where TFG have come from.
Although formally incorporated as a limited company in Jan 2021, in many ways TFG is a company that's been in the making since July 1994, which is when Craig and I first became friends. We'd attended the same school together in northwest London, in a place called Northwood, but as he was in the year above me we may as well have lived in different countries for all the interaction we'd had. That all changed when a geography teacher called Steve Richman arranged a trip around India for pupils past and present, with an itinerary that used the Indian train system to tour around Delhi, Agra, Pushkar, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and Varanasi. On that trip we became firm friends and have remained close ever since.
From 2000 to 2008 I worked at a recruitment company that specialised in SAP recruitment, but after eight years, I decided it was time for a change of scenery, and handed in my notice. I left, got married, and then after a honeymoon trekking in the Himalayas, I came back and started looking for a new job. Craig was the managing director of Palisade, the company who make the @RISK software, and was keen to get me on board in some capacity. I'd done a bit of database administration work previously, and so he offered me a role cleaning up their mailing/customer database.
I did that for a while, then was asked to help out with a few bits for the marketing team who were all based out of the USA & needed someone more local to arrange events and so on. At that point, no-one was looking after the Middle East region for Palisade from a sales perspective and Craig wondered if I'd like to give it a crack as well. We duly headed off to a big oil & gas show in Abu Dhabi, and so began my love affair with the region, which was my sales territory for the next 11 years at Palisade, until I left. I also took care of India, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the UK at various times as well.
After leaving Palisade, Craig and I both ended up at the same companies (InPhase, a performance management software), and riskHive (ERM software), but towards the end of 2020 we decided that it would be good to use our combined expertise and experience to set up a company specialising in providing services to organisations and individuals working in the field of risk in some way. The name "Ferryfield" was born out of a combination of our surnames: Ferri and Oldfield. We decided against Ferrifield as it's not the most intuitive of spellings. I'm particularly pleased about that decision now, as when you scan it quickly, I think it looks like some weird combination of frightened and terrified.
We'll make sure that we publish blog articles regularly, so please subscribe to the feed if you want to read more musings. If anyone has ideas for articles - risk related or otherwise - please let us know. We're both big believers in building relationships first, then business later, so these blog posts will perhaps look a little different from standard corporate-speak content. Hopefully you'll get to know us a little better through these posts, and maybe, at some point we'll end up doing business together.
And if we don't? That's okay, because in the words of many of the shop owners that we met back on that trip to India back in 1994, the most important thing is to "come as friends, go as friends"