10 QUESTIONS WITH…
Each month, we ask a flooring industry professional 10 Questions. This month, we chatted to Richard Harris, Marketing Manager, F. Ball and Co. Ltd.
Q1 Q2
Q3 Q4
What was your first job? My first job was as a Marketing Assistant for a
paper manufacturer.
How did you get into the industry? With a background in chemistry, I worked in the
marketing and selling of adhesives and paints for nearly 20 years before joining F. Ball in 1998.
What do you think are the positives and negatives of the flooring trade?
A huge positive is that everybody will always need flooring, so it’s got a long-term future.
And a negative is the skills shortage – there aren’t enough skilled floor fitters in the industry. This is partly because there aren’t enough young people coming in to flooring and partly because people aren’t always properly trained.
If you could hire any one person to be part of your team, who would it be
and why? F. Ball has got a pretty good balance in terms of staff and a good sense of where we’re going as a company. So, if we did bring someone in, it would be someone who buys into our philosophy and values, rather than someone who would try to shake things up.
Q5
What’s the best advice you could give to someone new coming into the industry?
If you join a company like F. Ball, which plans for the long term but is astute enough to adapt and develop in a competitive marketplace, you stand a good chance of having a long and fulfilling career.
Q6 Q7
Q8
If you could invent any product what would it be and why?
It would have to be the antidote to social media, to get back to a state where we have real relationships with each other.
If you could have a dinner party with any three people, dead or alive, who would
they be and why? Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un and a referee. They could then settle their differences without starting World War III.
What do you think the future holds for flooring design?
As a chemist, I believe in entropy, which is the natural state of things tending towards disorder. Things change all the time, new things occur; old ones die out or become redundant. I think that will happen in flooring design; it will evolve and develop and something will come in that suddenly disrupts the state of things that we know today. It’s
50 | 10 QUESTIONS
already happening in many other industries and I don’t think the flooring industry will be any different.
Q9
What would you like to see in a future issue of Tomorrow’s Contract Floors?
More technical advice and help. Q10
Jason Reid, National Sales Manager, UltraFloor asked: If you could live one
day as any person in the world, dead or alive,
who would it be and why? Genghis Kahn, just for the heck of it.
www.f-ball.co.uk
Check out next month’s issue to see what Richard asked our next industry professional…
www.tomorrowscontractfloors.com
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