Hilary Palmer celebrates her amazing 25-year milestone at KFA Connect.
Hilary started with the company back in 1994 when there were just 6 employees.
A stark contrast to the much larger team of 27 we have today.
Back then the company was based in Wimborne St Giles (known then as Kingfisher Associates), where it remained until 2015 when the ever-expanding team forced a move to larger offices in Ringwood.
Hilary has seen many changes including how only having a connection to customers via modem was restricting compared to how easy this is now in 2019.
Today life is quite different, we didn’t have the great flexibility of being able to work from home like we do now and majority of our work had to be carried out on-site for our customers, whereas now we can do everything remotely – and ultimately offering a much quicker response time.
Hilary Palmer
For 10 of these 25 years, Hilary spent the majority of her working day looking after KFA customers such as Centaur Grain (now Openfield), Mitutoyo, Deublin and Nutland Carpets – amongst others. Then also helping the Vodafone support team, which includes offering out of hours support and development work when needed.
Hilary has always been first to offer her time for any KFA charity activities including getting stuck in with the Naomi House & Jacksplace Gardening teams (in 2017 and 2019), and taking part in the Test Team’s annual charity walks in 2017 for Ataxia UK, 2018 for Barth Syndrome UK and 2019 for Hampshire & IOW Air Ambulance.
Hilary also took part in Tough Mudder Half challenge with the team in 2016 to help raise money for Help for Heroes. She attacked that gruelling 5K obstacle-based mud run with the same enthusiasm she gives everything… with sheer determination!
There have been many fun times over the last 25 years, made even better for working with such a great team. Work can get stressful, but that’s easier to manage when the people around you are so lovely and care about our customers as much as I do. It just works!
I like a challenge, such as when we have carried out all-night implementations of new systems or deployments for our customers. I like the team spirit and being part of such major changes for our customers – it’s exciting!
KFA have always been (and still are) very supportive of all of us – through good times, but also (more importantly) the bad times too. I guess that is one of the main reasons why I have been here so long!
Hilary Palmer
Some of the team celebrated Hilary’s 25-years at KFA with lunch on Tuesday and congratulated her for this amazing achievement!
