A day in the life of our Regional Operations Director
- Terry Robinson
Joining the team back in June 2021, Terry has made a huge impact in mentoring, guiding our staff, developing & improving our operations. Terry joined Sowga as part of our senior team, with his 30+ years of knowledge in terms of Mechanical Engineering (M&E) proving to be invaluable during his time with us so far. From the role of apprentice all the way to Director, at both regional and nation levels, Terry really has excelled in his career and provides great leadership to his teams.
His responsibilities here at Sowga are that of leading the strategic, operational, and commercial performance of the service for our South and South-West regions.
As well as this, he is also known for overseeing client relationships with a focus on building strong positive connections, ensuring that our company are delivering the best possible experience for our clients.
With plenty of activities on a day-to-day basis being particularly varied, this keeps things interesting for Terry. If he's not helping the operations teams within the various business units across the regions, meeting with clients or attending tender interviews, you'll find him reviewing systems, processes, and procedures with the senior team.
Working closely with Business Development (BDM), Health & Safety (H&S), Technical, Project, HR (Human Resources) and Finance teams, which provides him with a "fantastic holistic overview" and assists in making considered strategic decisions.
Since joining, Terry has been instrumental in optimising our process for managing our job pools, offering direction and guidance to the teams to ensure there is a clear strategy to staying on top of their workload and to push jobs through our CAFM system simPRO for invoicing and uploading to our customer portal for client review.
However, after a productive day at work, you'll find Terry spending quality time with his family, out walking his dogs and training Muay Thai. Though if the weather permits, he does enjoy a nice cold pint in the beer garden.
When it comes to sports, Terry is a big supporter of Chelsea Football Club, although we don't hold that against him!
Enjoying all aspects of his role; from an internal point of view, he does have an appetite for mentoring people and passing on his experience to them. One thing he finds extremely satisfying is spotting talent and helping them along a journey, watching them develop, grow, and succeed.
Being a big fan of empowering his team and ensuring that they grow in confidence is hugely rewarding for Terry, especially when they improve the client's experiences with the company, as this fills him with pride.
Meeting with the clients externally is something he really enjoys doing, as well as collaborating and working in partnership to achieve the goals and objectives set for the properties he works with. With examples of these collaborations being anything from making a simple flexible tweak to operations on a specific site to help improve our service delivery regime or supporting and proposing market leading innovation such as our IoT initiative.