As today is International Family Business Day, we wanted to celebrate our family heritage. Back in 1908 George Frederick Holding formed G F Holding, and to date the Holding family is still firmly involved with the business, with the fourth generation, Simon Holding, being our Chairman.
Simon started working in the business 30 years ago whilst on his holidays from university. His first role was working on site, sweeping up and making the teas. After graduating with a civil engineering degree in 1993, Simon undertook a number of roles within the business, including working on site. He held a Contracts Manager role for 20 years, whilst he shadowed the Directors so he could learn all aspects of the business. Simon became the G F Holding Chairman in 2018.
Simon commented: “I am the custodian of our family heirloom, a role I take very seriously. However, I see my responsibility for the G F Holding family wider than the Holding name. Every member of our team is part of the G F Holding family, and my role is to ensure that all team members are fully supported in their day-to-day work and their overall development.
“My responsibility to G F Holding is to ensure that we continue to move forward; identifying opportunities and challenges and innovating to enable us to grow and develop. Sometimes this requires difficult decisions. In the past we undertook all of our bespoke joinery in-house, building a new manufacturing unit to enable our specialist joinery team to be as efficient as possible. However, I realised that such an in-house team would never be efficient, because of the peaks and troughs of their work in support of our delivery of high-end leisure contracts. I took the difficult decision to close the manufacturing unit and outsource this work. Looking back, this decision has helped us become more efficient, and this has contributed to our growth from a £3million turnover business to £40million.
“I am incredibly proud of what we have achieved, and will continue to achieve, as G F Holding. This is down to the skills, experience and ultimately can-do approach of our excellent team. And having celebrated recently our 18th team member to reach their 25th work anniversary with G F Holding, it is clear that the family values, ethos, spirit and passion of my great-grandfather, George Frederick Holding, remain fully intact.”