Exhibition News March 2019 | Page 19

My Working Life time when nationalism is on the rise, I hope kids like mine will be the antidote to the intolerance we see across the globe. I left my first job at Habitat for one at Heathrow. I worked alongside guys who had been engineers at British Aerospace but saw the Kingston factory close in the late 1980s. They went from building planes to cleaning them and I knew I had to get out. My cousin worked for Show Presentation Services and put me forward for a job on the loading bay. It was a tortuous wait of seven weeks from interview to hire but I knew it was the place for me. I could not have started at a better company than SPS. Andy Williams The general manager of Euro Presentations on having an international family, his 25-year career in AV and the power of industry relationships I was born in Kingston-Upon-Thames and have lived there my whole life. I have seen the world both through travel and work, but Kingston will always be my home. I am half British and half Portuguese. My mum came to Britain in 1966 as an au pair and met my dad just weeks before she was due to go home. They recently celebrated their Golden Wedding Anniversary and have been my greatest influence in life. I have been married to Belinda for 16 years. I still have no idea why she gave up life in the USA to live her life with me. We have two kids: my daughter Tayanon (15) and son João (13). I take pleasure in my kids knowing they have roots around the world. They have roots in Liberia through their grandmother, they are US citizens, they are British with a huge love for their Portuguese relatives. In a I went to our new office at Earls Court and Olympia in 2000 as equipment manager and got my first taste of the exhibition world there. In 2003, I moved to the Business Design Centre and got my grounding in project management. I found myself and my client base joining Euro Presentations in early 2009. It was the perfect place for me to develop my career and I will be forever thankful to Tony James, John Copestake and Michael Wood for giving me a role in their venture. I like that there is a tremendous value placed on relationships in this industry. When I left my previous role, I told my clients my plans and they said, ‘where you go, we will follow’. I have been in the AV business for 25 years and in and out of exhibition venues for 19 of them but I have always been merely an enabler. I am one of the many thousands of people who know their stuff, have good organisational skills and quietly work in the background but I would be surprised if more than a handful of people who read this know me. As an AV company, when we leave an event, we take everything including our waste with us. I am staggered at the sheer amount of waste on shows, particularly printed material. There has to be a better way with all the technology available today. March — 19