Interview with Ron Griffin, FERCAM London Branch Manager

Hello Ron! Let's start with an interesting one... What would you say makes your branch unique?

That's a very tough question! We're only a small branch, there's just three people here! The most relevant thing would probably be that we also used to work together in a different company before FERCAM, like 10 years ago, so we have known each other for very very long. And we get along really well, we can surely say we have got good teamwork.
 

What is your day-to-day like?

The majority of our work has to do with subcontracting, and we have a lot of quite demanding customers. Gerard and John are dealing with the operations, Gerard does a lot of administration work as well and I do administration and manage the accounts. But since it's just us, everyone needs to know how to do a little bit of everything, if a person is away one day we need to help ourselves out, there's no one else to cover for us!
 
Our office is located inside the CEME Innovation Center, a very modern and interesting location, the most picturesque area is the pond with fountains. A short time ago they even shot a film with Richard Gere: they took down all of the signs and replaced them with fictional ones, and shot some scenes outside and in our cafe!
 

We've heard you had very good results last year...

2018 was a very good year: we've done better than our budget, with the month of November being the best month since I've been here, so the best in 7 years. Actually January 2019 was even better than that, it was our new record. We have a lot of seasonal work, one of our customers especially is very busy around Christmas time so we were busy too. Overall, work-wise everything is going fine, we didn't encounter any major problems, we are very happy. We had a small celebration for Christmas by having nice food delivered to the office.
 

What do you think is going to happen after Brexit?

Of course with Brexit happening we have a lot of uncertainty, two years ago for example was one of our worst years: our customers stopped trading and we had significant issues. But now things are getting better and better by the day. From FERCAM's point of view Brexit could be a good business opportunity, since we have relevant knowledge in handling customs documents. Although it's really hard to say what will actually happen and when, I am confident that we have a worthy expertise to show if needed. We are ready for whatever happens.