Nicola John, Managing Director of FDM by UAP and Armadillo Metal Coatings

FACTS AND FIGURES:

First job:  I worked as a hotel reception manager in Carmarthen, which was great grounding for the rest of my career as it taught me a lot about customer service. I then went back to university to study business before working in management, and I attained my first directorship in my thirties.

When did you join Armadillo, and set up FDM? I was a consultant for Armadillo before joining the team as Managing Director in 2023. I set up FDM two years ago: we spent the first year planning, testing the market, and building the training centre before we launched properly in February 2024. 

What’s your most useful/favourite gadget? It has to be my mobile phone.

What is your most useful website? gov.uk, the Government’s website. I need to stay up to date with legislative changes affecting fire safety, as they inform what we teach our learners. So, this website is vital for ensuring that I’m sharing information directly from the source. 

What businessperson you admire? I really admire Baroness Karren Brady for her guts and determination, and UAP CEO David Jennings, which is why I work for him: he’s taken the firm from selling doorknockers in his spare room to a multimillion-pound company. I’m Chair of the Institute of Directors’ South West Wales branch alongside my directorial roles, and I have a lot of admiration for the fantastic business leaders I work with, who are driving growth in a beautiful part of the UK. The common trait of all those I admire is that they’ve knuckled down and worked hard — often against adversity — to achieve great things. 

What lesson have you learned about business over the last 12 months? Not everybody shares the same passion as you for your work, and not everybody wants to do the right thing. While many are safety-conscious, unfortunately for some people money comes before safety: people pay lip service to doing the right thing, but they ultimately don’t always invest in their workforce.

What are your other interests? I’m very lucky that my work is such an interest of mine: I get a big buzz seeing businesses get off the ground, and I spend a lot of my spare time working on ideas for FDM and Armadillo. But away from the office I love spending time with my grandchildren in the great outdoors, going to the beach, paddleboarding, and open-water swimming. 

Working Day: About 80% of my day is planned, and a typical day often includes meetings with clients, staff, other UAP directors, or industry professionals from organisations like GQA Qualifications, our awarding body. The contents of my to-do list vary widely, from writing course materials all the way through to strategic planning and review for FDM and Armadillo.  

No two days are ever the same, but this variety is what I love about being a Managing Director: you have to be reactive. Things are always developing in a new business — especially in a landscape like ours, with new regulations that change constantly.  

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THE INTERVIEW:

Fire Door Maintenance Training and Development (FDM by UAP Ltd) officially launched in February 2024, and we’ve enjoyed a successful first year filled with collaboration and innovation. I couldn’t be prouder of the foundation we’ve built for the business. I established FDM to address the growing need for high-quality fire door training after the Grenfell tragedy, ensuring professionals across industries including construction, manufacturing, and fenestration have the skills and confidence they need to meet ever-evolving fire safety regulations. And we’re living and working by this creed as we raise competency standards in fire door awareness, inspection, installation, and maintenance — in these industries and beyond.

We launched our UK-first practical fire door training centre last year, based on the belief that those with practical jobs should be able to gain hands-on trade experience in a safe environment. Before FDM, there was nowhere for industry professionals to learn about fire door best practice. This was a huge market oversight that compromised building safety. After all, you’d never ask a midwife to learn their skills from a computer — why should we ask the people responsible for lifesaving products to do so? 

Since launching, we’ve trained more than 600 industry professionals. More than 350 people have completed our fire door awareness and inspection training, while over 200 have gained hands-on expertise in installation, repair, and maintenance in our training centre. We’ve also partnered with over 50 industry leaders and top suppliers of door sets and components, including Falcon Timber, GGF, Mann McGowan, Lorient, PDS, IG Doors, Sentry, Strongdor, NorDan, and many more, who have been extremely supportive in our quest to provide fire door safety training to the entire sector. Every learner who steps into our training centre — from contractors to builders’ merchants — reinforces the importance of our work. We’ve had great feedback from learners about our course content and delivery that highlights this further. With each new course, I meet more and more people who believe in the same cause as me —wanting new knowledge and wider, systemic industry change.

What are the current general industry conditions? We’re especially proud of our successes in the current construction and fire door market, because conditions are economically tough. With budgets being squeezed constantly, we’re working in difficult conditions for selling courses and providing training opportunities. Unfortunately, when businesses need to divert more funding to salaries and increased NI contributions, training can fall by the wayside — despite best intentions. Getting people to invest in staff development is a challenge, and everchanging regulations also make things very tricky. 

The widespread industry struggle to adhere to the Building Safety Act 2022’s “golden thread” requirement encapsulates these industry challenges perfectly. Last year’s Phase 2 Grenfell report drew attention to failings by both the Tower’s materials and those responsible for its care. The primary recommendation of the 2018 “Building a Safer Future” report, commissioned by Dame Judith Hackitt, was moving towards digitising product information, known as the “golden thread” approach.  The golden thread encourages effective and accurate storage and management of information surrounding buildings’ designs, construction, and uses. This increased ease of access to product information prevents building knowledge only existing in siloes and is essential for a building’s stakeholders, who can use and update safety information when needed and alert necessary parties when building issues arise. But nearly seven years on from the report, product inspection and maintenance practices on sites haven’t improved enough. 

A survey by the Construction Leadership Council found 92% of product manufacturers did not see digitisation as a major concern, and more than half “see no need to digitise”. Just over half of respondents felt they were digitised to some extent, but even when provided with the definition of digitisation, few fully grasped and understood what it meant in practice. And even those who considered themselves digitised equated digitisation with using computers, rather than understanding it as a comprehensive approach to maintaining and integrating critical safety information throughout a building’s lifecycle.

Clearly, industry professionals are still not meeting post-Grenfell regulatory requirements to digitise product information, and there is a cultural lack of understanding about digitisation and its benefits. We’re at a turning point where we need to embrace digitisation to improve our industries, and widespread training to understand the golden thread is needed before it can be used effectively. But because digitisation forms part of the requirements of the Building Safety Act 2022, construction industry professionals urgently need to implement the golden thread approach to ensure they are complying with the new laws.

What are your expectations for the next 12 months of trading? With industry-wide challenges like these in mind, we have many plans in the pipeline this year to boost fire door safety competence. This includes the launch of our industry-first online training platform, which we’ve designed to support industry professionals’ lifelong learning and continuous professional development. It contains many tools that we’ve curated to help people do their job as effectively as possible, including streamlining course bookings and providing CPD-accredited training to further enhance industry skills. We also launched our innovative new app at the Fire Safety Event: another industry-first, this supports professionals in ensuring compliance when installing and maintaining fire doors. We hope both platforms will be fully established and used widely by many fire safety professionals over the next 12 months.

We’re also introducing several new courses to improve understandings of fire door safety for people in many different roles. With training available for fire door inspectors, installers, and maintainers, as well as architects and those involved in specifying door designs, we’re reaching more of our target audiences and providing holistic tutoring throughout the sector. The new Inspector qualification is very comprehensive with 12 detailed units: we believe this is the level of detail needed in the industry, and we’d like to see this become the standard over the next 12 months. Through these course launches, we’re enabling industry professionals of all kinds to work cohesively and safely, achieving fire safety best practice together.

All our activity supports our mission of bridging knowledge gaps in the industry, addressing the shortage of workers within construction, manufacturing, and fenestration trained to understand the entire lifecycle of safety products like fire doors. We’re advocating for a central register of qualified operatives — engineers, inspectors, maintainers, and installers — so we can ensure fire doors consistently meet the highest safety standards and prevent future tragedies. 

And in our practical fire door training centre (the UK’s first), every learner is taught about the trade preceding and following their own. This prevents the siloed activity that caused information blockages in the past, establishing a golden thread of best practice across the industry.

What advice do you have for fabricators/installers? Don’t assume you know the answers, and don’t be afraid to go into the wider environment and ask for training and guidance! Make sure you know your own competency and where your knowledge starts and ends, so you know where and how you can fill in the gaps. This, in my opinion, is the best way to improve your work and yourself. Admitting you don’t know something and committing yourself to expanding your knowledge is a sign of immense strength. If everyone working in construction, manufacturing, and fenestration adopted this attitude towards lifelong learning, we’d create a powerful industry where we’re all constantly striving to better ourselves and make our industries safer.