Kathryn O'Neill: My job is to work with the construction employers to help them identify their training needs for the business and individual training solutions for them. We can also support them financially through the grant that we have available through our grants scheme. It's particularly important now in a time of potential recession for employers to look to train and develop their work force.
Martyn Price: It basically started in 1999, a very difficult time to start business and working through or waking up in an recession one morning to say, as the business got going -- I wouldn't say it was easy but we recognized that training was going to be a key ingredient. I never really wanted to be working on site, I wanted to look at the strategic management of the company and put the company forward through marketing.
So we knew we needed to bring in skilled operators, we knew that we needed to look at training needs to put the company in a preferable preferential position to attract which was new work. Every client was a new client because we got no previous trading history. I wouldn't be blasé about the fact of where we are today, and what we can do to succeed and work away through things, but we always knew through the early 90s that training was key to the success of the business going forward.
Kathryn O'Neill: I seen a lots of companies who have family members working with them. From very small companies, where it might be a wife, who is working along side her husband to a large associate where you might have extended family members within the company.
Kathryn Price: Because I work in the business, albeit part-time, I think that gives me an insight and an understanding as to some of the issues and challenges that Martyn faces which allows me in the back office, our home to actually support Martyn and so I think that is a good partnership.
Kathryn O'Neill: There is a lot of benefit to them in terms of, they have someone close to them who they can talk to about their business. For smaller companies, I think sometimes, they don't have anybody to talk to about their business, and how the the business is doing and what competitive edge they might have or how to market themselves, because they would be talking to their competition. So having family members does gives them an opportunity to talk about those things within their family group. And I also suppose there is a lot of loyalty that they get from the family.
Martyn Price: We started the business with a clear vision of what we wanted to achieve and I think the fact that we have this -- perhaps the family unity as well as the business unity, it has polarized the vision and the aspirations remain the same today as they did when first we got together. We've also got the added advantage of flexibility whether that's Kathryn or whether that's father or brother, we work around each other, so we balance the work load in terms of the commitments within the organization.
Kathryn Price: It's interesting that some companies do think that this timed recession is when they would cut back the training budget but the reason -- small companies are the ones that are thinking that this is the time when they will actually go and train because they want to make sure that they are the companies with the competitive edge at the end of the day.
Kathryn O'Neill: Training as I have said is part of our culture. We cannot just leave that behind. We have to invest in our work force and we have to continue with the training. It might be slightly tougher but that is our key belief, really is that training, really does make a difference.
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