Ladies to the fore...

It seems like ages ago that we committed to exhibiting at Ifra Expo in Vienna, but it suddenly came home to us this week how close we are to the event.

And whether it’s in organisation, creativity or liaison, it’s a case of ladies to the fore as things begin to come together.

That’s been emphasised today as our formidable events manager, Michelle (the one in the middle), brought the team together for a trial run on building the stand for the first time since Publishing Expo at the start of the year. We’ve had plenty of planning meetings, but to start pulling things out of boxes and putting them together again literally makes everything more tangible.

The stand was designed by our Graphic Artist, Rachel (that's her on the left), to be flexible enough to fit into a number of configurations. Our location at Ifra – stand A651 – is big enough to accommodate the whole thing. It has three demonstration pods, a front desk and plenty of space to mingle.

It’s also flexible enough to allow us to customise it for whichever event we’re attending. Hence, for Ifra, we’re tipping a nod to our hosts and potential visitors by internationalising some of our marketing messages.

That’s meant a lot of work for Rachel in preparing new multi-lingual brochures with help from our friends at UKTI and one of our international suppliers. We’ve also broadened our overall marketing strapline to ‘Create Anywhere...Publish Everywhere’, which sums up our belief in providing solutions that break down boundaries and increase possibilities for any organisation that publishes information, whether that be in print or on digital channels.

For Ifra we’re planning to unleash our by-now not-so-secret-weapon, Rita (yes, the one on the right), a German intern from near Frankfurt who joined us a couple of weeks ago and is already starting to make an impact on broadening our horizons.

The other day she sat the exhibition team down in the PCS boardroom for a brief language workshop. She’s followed it up by turning the lesson into a video we can use for reference. As you can imagine one, shall we say ‘firm but fair’, German watching a group of self-conscious Brits in one room mangling her language was interesting to say the least. Still, I think we made excellent progress and Rita’s actually too polite to laugh out loud.

At the moment there’s a group of us walking around PCS muttering German phrases to ourselves in various English accents. It’s confusing everyone else in the office but at least Rita’s amused.

Rita’s also become part of the marketing team’s effort to build awareness of an event we’re running for an invited audience at the British Embassy early evening on Tuesday, October 11.  She’s been making some follow-up calls to invitees. The benefits of having a native-speaker making that kind of personal contact is obvious.

All three will be with us on the stand at Ifra, so if you’re there, come and say ‘hello’. Or ‘guten tag’ as we like to say at PCS.

A Life Changing Experience...

University – it’s a life-changing experience they say. What they don’t tell you is how quickly that happens.

We’ve just exported No 1 Daughter to Dundee where she’s going to learn how to be a brain surgeon. No, really, she is. I think her other choice was rocket scientist...

Now she’s always been a sensible kid, pretty down to earth and capable of looking after herself, but this is a bit different.

Our baby – and she’ll hate me saying that , so it’s worth repeating – is leaving home for the first time and disappearing not only to another town, but to another country. And not the one 50 miles to the west, the one hundreds of miles to the north. Somewhere near the Arctic Circle.

She couldn’t have gone much further if she’d tried and her other choice was Brighton, which isn’t exactly close, either.

So we loaded up those items of her worldly possessions that would fit in our pretty robust and spacious four-by-four (ie: not half enough) and with a stoic Mum providing added support, headed for bonny Scotland. And there, we delivered one precious daughter to her digs. Our young adult ‘little one’. Home. Alone.

Perhaps surprisingly from No 1 Daughter, who sometimes gives the impression that she’s way too strong and cynical for that kind of nonsense, there were real tears when it came time for us to leave.

 And the more she cried, the more anxious her Mum became. But at times like that, you have to ‘Big Up’ and ‘Be Dad’ so it at least looks like you’re still nominally head of the house despite all the evidence to the contrary. We had to go.

Two minutes down the road, Mum wanted to phone to see if No 1 Daughter was ok. Stern Dad had a plan. Leave it two hours, I said. That way, we’ll be too far gone to turn round and she’ll get a chance to settle in.

We abandoned the kid and drove south with the sound of our baby’s fitful sobbing ringing in our ears. Cruel Mum. Heartless Dad.

All right, it wasn’t that bad, but you get the point.

The clock ticked by to one hour, 59 minutes and a few seconds. Cruel Mum is on the phone. Poor Baby. Is it really awful?

“Sorry, speak up” says poor Baby. “I’m in the uni bar. I’ve met four new friends already and we’re drinking shots... They’re dead cheap... It’s great...”

Apparently it was great until gone three in the morning. It was Saturday night, after all. For the teenager, the action was just as it would normally be. Only the venue was different.

No such fun for Miserable Mum and Disheartened Dad. For us it was a long trip home, the first of many ‘oldies’ nights in and one daughter fewer in a significantly quieter house. So that’s what they mean by a university being a life-changing experience. It’s not theirs, though. It’s ours...

Here's to the 'older heads'

There’s something about the pace of change in an industry like ours that would make you think most of the people in it are, or at least seem to be, on the ‘young and thrusting’ side.

After all, as a company we’re less than 40 years old, so the opportunities for people to have built a long career are relatively few compared with other parts of the organisation that have been in business for well over a century in some cases.

We have our fair share of young guns on the books for sure, particularly among our support staff. In fact we’ve just taken on another apprentice developer, a young accountant in our administrative office and we’ve also welcomed a student from Germany who’ll be with us as an intern for a year.

It still doesn’t mean we put the ‘oldies’ out to pasture once they hit 30... Thirty-one, maybe.

I’m joking, but even so it maybe shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it seemed to this week when we were asked to put together some information about three of our employees who are each celebrating – or at least I’d like to think they’re celebrating – at least 25 years service with PCS.

It’s a tradition in our parent Claverley Group that long-serving employees are recognised with the presentation of a gift and a mock-up newspaper front page with a picture and a short biography of them in pride of place.

Our latest trio includes two 25s in gentlemen by the name of Howard Lane and Derek Gardner and a 35 in Steve Whitbread. Derek’s a member of our management information team while Howard and Steve are front-line coders who are still working their magic among the nuts and bolts of some innovative new products after all this time.

A statto and two code jockeys – it doesn’t sound very rock and roll, does it? But every organisation needs their Steves, their Dereks and their Howards. They help to shape the way a company like ours develops and put a piece of their experience and know-how into everything we do.

I suppose, too, it’s part of the nature of the IT business that it keeps the brain young even if the knees start to go after a while.

There’s always something new around the next corner and it’s the experience and knowledge of our respected ‘elders’ if I can give them that tag, and their willingness to keep meeting those challenges that helps to channel the enthusiasm of those of us who follow in their footsteps.