Ken is an active member of the Knutsford Rotary Club along with being a friend our founder Matt Townsend, and has for a long time expressed an interest in our business. Ken spent his career in senior sales roles with a number of global organisations, including General Motors and Caterpillar.
While now retired – although still as active as ever – Ken and Matt have enjoyed many a discussion about modern marketing techniques. So Matt invited him to join our creative team for a day to find out more about what we do.
After an initial briefing from Matt, Ken’s first port of call was to sit with our designer, Lisa Birchall. Lisa talked Ken through some of the projects we have recently completed, and gave him an insight into some of our work in progress. She explained how the key to successful design was in understanding the complex and interpreting it in a simple, straight-forward way.
He then sat with web developer Adam Beaumont who talked about web site functionality and how companies can use the internet to grow sales. The briefing included an overview of timescales in building web sites, cyber security and testing regimes as well as content management.
“I’ve always believed it’s important to be active and interested in the world and I suppose that’s where I get my energy from,” explained Ken. “The Rotary Club keeps me very busy and I meet all sorts of people through our fund raising work and meetings. Since my days in sales I’ve remained interested in how business works so when Matt suggested a visit to Ultimate I was keen to take the opportunity.
“It was fascinating to meet the team and find out who does what role and how work is delivered to customers. I use the internet a lot but hadn’t quite appreciated what goes in to designing a website and how it works behind the scenes, so learning about coding was particularly good.
“I’ve always enjoyed looking at how companies use photography and images for promotional purposes and so that linked nicely with the sort of work Ultimate does,” he said.
Matt said that Ken’s visit was equally valuable to the Ultimate team:
“Ken impressed us all with his zest for life and enthusiasm,” said Matt. “The fact that he was so positive and wanted to learn all about what we do and how we do it was surprising for someone in their 80s. There were lots of links between us and Ken’s experiences in the world of sales, so we gained much from the experience too.”