Kestrel’s prize fighter takes up the challenge

As a former national karate champion, who also represented the country in kickboxing, Kestrel‘s Rich Amison has made use of his fighting spirit by pushing forward operations and logistics in a challenging year.

The director of operations is proud of Kestrel’s departments for pulling together, to build back better amidst COVID disruptions.

‘Challenging personally and professionally’

Rich explains: “The past year has been challenging personally and professionally for all of us, but it has also brought the team closer together.

“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.

‘The importance of work’

Personally, Rich says he has been grateful to have the focus on work during the pandemic.

He adds: “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.”

That discipline continues outside work, where his love of traditional Martial Arts has partly given way to mixed martial arts. Rich continues to train, but more now to maintain fitness. The desire to fight began in his childhood, when years of tiredness and lethargy were eventually discovered to have a physical cause. This was that Rich had only one functioning lung.

Years of physical therapy allowing him to inch forward over a period of six years eventually led 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 given him the resilience and culture of continuous improvement that he helps to instil in his team.