Rod Flavell, Founder and CEO of FDM Group, discusses his journey from wanting to be a professional footballer in Sedgley, West Midlands, to founding FDM in Brighton in 1990.
Initially an IT recruitment agency, FDM evolved into a FTSE 250 company using the Recruit-Train-Deploy model. FDM group today is a global leader in tech and business talent solutions.
Rod was born in the West Midlands, to a mining family. His school years were spent chasing the dream of becoming a professional footballer, until a discussion with his father about his future made him rethink his career plans. He took A Levels at night school, and attended Sussex University, reading Human Movement and Human Biology, which later influenced his career in technology. Studying psychology and mathematical analysis, and learning about the world of work through university friends led him to the IT industry and his first job as a Sales Executive in the publishing firm Haymarket, which was being taken over by a Dutch company called VNU.
I found myself through – and this is the key thing that university still does for you, and it certainly did for me – it gave me a social circle. It introduced me to people who had gone to work for Haymarket on a journal called Computing…And that was how in ’82 I entered the IT world.
The Haymarket company was owned by UK politician Michael Heseltine’s family. Michael had visited tech firm IBM in the 1970s and impressed by their training scheme, did the same in Haymarket:
The Haymarket/VNU training programme that I went on was phenomenal. And it really was a testimony to those training programmes that IBM created back in the ’50s and the ’60s, and Michael brought over to the UK. I’m sure there were other people who saw the value of this, but you know, I owe Michael that and and his organisation, and also the many friends that that I made, there people who came from different socio economic and academic backgrounds.
One of the publications that Haymarket/VNU had was a journal called Computing, which introduced Rod to the world of IT and the people who worked in the industry. After spending 2 years in publishing, this experience inspired Rod to have a career in IT and he moved on to consultancy work:
it was my time working for a small, Southern-based IT consultancy Eurolink, where I came in contact with banking, finance, technology, and also the first flight simulators that were responsible for training pilots on A320 Airbuses when they were originally launched in the late 1980s.
This gave Rod experience in both IBM platforms and training, and he started to think about how this could work as a business venture of his own.
Rod co-founded Flavell Divett International (FDI, which later became FDM) with the Divett family in an attic office in Brighton in 1990. It started off as an IT recruitment agency, with £60,000 of share capital raised from remortgaging and family investments – which was lost within the first 12 months. However, they persevered:
I don’t think we ever had some grand, grand vision. What we wanted to do was just do what we’d done very well, which was make relationships, get the confidence of the client to give us the opportunity to do business, and go from there.
FDI continued to grow as an IT recruitment company until they acquired Mountfield Software in 1995, which preceded a change in direction. The new FDM Group (the ‘M’ standing for Mountfield) had the idea to take on graduates and train them, before making them permanent members of staff and placing them as consultants with companies. These graduates became known as ‘Mounties’. FDM’s model became known as ‘Recruit Train Deploy’ or RTD. Rod considers this to be a misnomer not entirely reflective of FDM’s working model, but something that was necessary for market positioning at the time when their ethos was a new concept. In time, FDM needed a second partner. Rod’s now wife, Sheila Flavell, current president of techUK, helped them get the second training licence from Sun Microsystems for Java and set them on their path to further expansion, including going global into Europe, Australia and the USA.
Rod counts particular successes for FDM being its expansion of RTD to include ex military veterans and people returning to the industry (as well as graduates), and the company’s early efforts to achieve a 50-50 gender split in leadership and inclusive hiring practices. Despite current sector challenges, Rod is optimistic about FDM’s future, and highlights the company’s strategic focus on new technologies, particularly in areas like robotics and quantum computing.