As a former Karate national champion, who also represented the country in Kickboxing, Kestrel ‘s Rich Amison has made use of his fighting spirit to push forward operations and logistics in a challenging year.
Covid has caused disruption to all aspects of life, but the director of operations is proud of how Kestrel departments pulled together to build back better.
“The past year has been challenging personally and professionally for all of us, but it has also brought the team closer together,” Rich explained. “The initial lockdown gave us the time to step back and really look at how we could drive efficiencies and improvements.
“We took that time to bring different departments together with Teams and Whatsapp, which helped to create greater understanding, really examine how we are doing things and come up with improvements that will benefit customers.”
Those improvements include changes to tooling and logistics with a focus on the Kestrel ethos of reliability.
Personally, Rich said that dealing with challenges ‘we do what is required’ but he has been grateful to have the focus on work during the pandemic.
“Covid has highlighted the importance of work, the discipline of it can help us to stay positive and I’ve been really thankful for this role,” he added.
That discipline continues outside of work where his love of the traditional Martial Arts have given way in part to mixed martial arts. Rich continues to train, but more now to maintain fitness. The desire to fight started in his childhood, when years of tiredness and lethargy were eventually discovered to have a physical cause – Rich had one functioning lung.
Years of physical therapy followed with him inching forward over a period of six years, to the point where he could carry out martial arts and begin to compete at a high level. It’s this early experience of pushing himself to make daily improvements that has created the resilience and culture of continuous improvement that he’s helped to instil in his team.