One of the many positives about a career at Masterfix is the close ties the organisation fosters between its staff. This doesn’t come about by accident, it’s built into the fabric of the business going back to the very beginning. Our Building Services Operations Manager, one Rob Gallop, has been with Masterfix for ten years. Starting as, in his own words, ‘a glorified administrator’ when the company was much smaller, with five or six staff on the operational side. Rob joined Masterfix having previously worked for Circle Britannia- with our founding members Chris Ball, Matt Freeman and Lawrence Green- going back almost twenty five years now.
It hardly needs saying that his current role is a busy one. He is responsible for overseeing the operational side of building services- managing service team managers, who then manage their teams of engineers and office staff. Rob reviews and checks their workload and ensures the day-to-day operations are running smoothly. In addition, he is also responsible for monitoring sales targets. He ensures that the sales message is consistent across all teams and explains why each target is essential so that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. He makes sure that the handbook is adhered to and has a hand in technical services, ensuring that certification is always followed up. At Masterfix our engineers are the very heart of our business, and being able to support them in doing their job as best they can is what everything boils down to. Being able to manage a team of diverse individuals and skills sensitively and effectively is a big task but central to both Rob’s success as a manager and our own success as a business.
Rob lives in Belvedere but was born in Sidcup and brought up in Thamesmead which makes him a South East London native. Rob balances his busy job with an even busier family life. The secret, he says, is an ‘understanding wife’ – they work as a team to balance their schedules with Rob more office-based and his wife who is full-time but based at home. Outside of work Rob has another important, if not more so, job: managing his son’s football team with his best mate. This is his first season, and he says it’s going well. At the end of the last season it was decided there should be another team in that age group and Rob and his friend, who used to play football together, stepped up. As Rob himself has said, you work hard to provide nice things for your family, but the time you spend and bonds you foster with them require just as much dedication.
It's no surprise Rob learnt how to embrace challenges and nurture individuals, in his younger years he worked at the Camp America summer programme where he specialised at a camp for adults and children with disabilities. He did a week of training for different requirements of each individual camper in the cabin. He was in the US for six months, and travelled around the country after the camp. Taking in sights from Colorado to New York. Rob still sees and speaks to the friends he made across the US- including giving a talk to Chicago schoolchildren about life in the UK! He says many of these children would never visit the UK, and struggled to grasp the difference in size between the two places, so it was rewarding to shine a light on something brand new to them.
Of the many things Rob enjoys about the role, there are two standout motivations. One is the trust clients place in you to sort out their problems- many of our clients have been with us for a long time and get to know the Masterfix team. To be trusted to understand their needs, their business contexts and how important all their issues are is a big achievement in such a demanding industry. The other big plus to the role is the strength of the team around him and the trust they place in each other. A team is only ever as strong as its weakest link, and knowing people get on well, can overcome challenges and embrace growth encourages positive thinking and forward development.
For Rob personally this development has been a huge part of his career, having spent so long in the industry and been an organic part of the growth of Masterfix as a business. He has the confidence of experience to pass on advice and fill in the gaps for newer members of the team, meaning each generation of the team can rely on strong foundations to do the best job, and as an equal opportunities employer that they will be able to flourish and succeed on the basis of their talent and personal capacity. More than this, he has the knowledge of a rich lifetime of experience to pass to his three young children as they discover the world for themselves- hard work pays off, but it’s the life you live that makes it all worth while.