Role

Non-Executive Director

Location

United Kingdom

Ric works in collaboration with our Chair, Richard Steer, fellow Board members and colleagues to ensure Gleeds continues to excel in the years ahead.

In addition to participating in various Board and Committee meetings, he looks forward to seeing what fresh challenge or interesting opportunity each day will bring to his inbox.

Although Ric pursued a career in finance, he grew up in the construction industry, with his father working as a carpenter at a small building business in Sussex. Ric spent his pre university gap year as a carpenter’s mate. 

In the 1990s, he worked at Atkins alongside John Newall, now a fellow Board member, who introduced him to Richard Steer. He knew immediately that Gleeds was his sort of company, appreciating our approach of professionalism with personality and our values of being creative and realistic.

Working on the world’s most exciting projects means giving our clients solutions above and beyond their expectations - that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning!

Ric would tell anyone joining Gleeds that they’d made an excellent choice.

He also recommends setting a BHAG, or “big hairy audacious goal”, and then setting out to beat it. His own BHAG for 2024 is to walk the equivalent of 100 marathons, by doing an average of 15,000 steps per day. He enjoys staying active, which he largely does by taking daily walks with his loyal companion, Mylo, a seven-year-old black labrador.

In 2017 and in his mid-60s, Ric set out to walk the Camino de Santiago, from the Pyrenees across northern Spain and out to Finisterre, the most westerly point in continental Western Europe. Despite being told by someone that he would never be able to complete the 865-kilometre walk, Ric persevered. He texted daily updates to his doubter and reached the Finisterre Lighthouse according to plan. The moral of his story: don’t allow others to limit your potential. No one knows what you are truly capable of achieving except for you. On s'engage et alors on voit - give it a go!

Looking back over his career in finance and the built environment, Ric has loved his professional life and feels incredibly fortunate to have found such a fulfilling career.