Tell us about AFC Fire and Security and the services your company provides
When we first started we began working with the smallest level of small to medium enterprises – single shop or HMO owners, and single property landlords, and that is still what we typically look after.
We do now also work with a real mixture of people and organisations, with a larger portfolio of businesses, including housing associations with three to four hundred properties on their books.
What challenges do you face as a business in the fire safety industry?
The first challenge, which is one of the biggest ones, is operating in an industry that is opinion based. If you put twenty fire risk assessors in a room and asked one question, you’d get twenty different answers and at least five of those people would change their answers ten minutes later.
I think both the industry and the country as a whole is quite reactive. Everybody has now reacted to Grenfell, which is obviously the right thing to do, but I think a proactive approach should have already been in place before that tragedy happened.
The final challenge is around appropriate skill sets. There is no approved training route to somebody becoming a fire risk assessor or a business owner in the fire safety industry. It is one of those things where everybody has an opinion on what this route should be.
We are a small business, and as individuals and as assessors we need to be recognised as having the right skill set in this industry.
What does a typical customer look like for you?
We don’t really have a typical sort as we work across a real spectrum of clients, from those small single landlords up to corporate businesses. We operate predominantly in the housing and social housing sector, where we do a lot of fire risk assessments.
Given these challenges, how do you try and resolve them for your clients?
From dealing with my small to medium sized customers it is clear that there is not only a lack of awareness in our industry, but also a lack of awareness about our industry. Not many people want to do anything about fire safety and there is an attitude that “it won’t happen to me”. I think the way that we try and raise clients’ awareness is through a soft approach.
We tell them what we know and what our experience is, and then we show them some of the wider knowledge out there in the industry. This hopefully gives them a grounding and then we can go forward from there. We can’t force anybody to do anything, we can just advise.
Could you share why you became an FPA member?
I became a member of the FPA because I want to make sure that AFC is aligned with probably one of the best leaders in our industry. I believe in surrounding myself with people, organisations, and companies that are smarter than I am. I don’t know it all and I never will know it all.
AFC’s motto is ‘if you think you know everything there is to know in this industry, you shouldn’t be in it’. Therefore, I surround myself with smarter people wherever I can, and that’s why I became an FPA member.
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