PROGRESSION WITH THE ASFP CAREER

ASFP Membership & Finance Executive Sona Chandi reviews her three years with the Association

As one of the first members of staff to join the ASFP HQ in 2020 upon the change in secretariat, I have seen the Association grow massively in the last three years. I feel proud to be part of this growth and excited to see the upcoming changes in the passive fire protection industry.

When starting my role, I had the challenge of implementing new processes that would make the management of membership and finance of the association cleaner, more structured and accurately organised. After getting on top of this task, I decided to get involved in other ventures within the industry.

In 2021, I became a Women in Construction Ambassador for London Build, a construction industry exhibition. This gave me the opportunity to learn about breaking the barriers to women working in the roles. Seeing the work put in by these networking groups has been inspiring. I have since been involved with the Women in Fire Safety Awards, following their excellent work and recognising the change in gender equality in fire-related roles. Most recently, I was part of the first Women in Fire Engineering Conference in February of 2023, where we first showcased our ASFP Passive Fire Virtual Reality Experience.

An ongoing learning curve

Working at the ASFP has been an ongoing learning curve. All our team put in a great deal of hard work to implement a high quality and membership-focused Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, which we launched in March 2022. This has helped me immensely in both the membership and finance side of my role. I can gather member data more accurately, help our members more quickly, obtain financial reports more easily and overall, shorten the time previously spent on tasks before we had the system. In turn, this has helped our member engagement and member retention – a win-win for all involved!

The ASFP have also allowed me to further my education. I have started my AAT Level 2 Certificate in Accounting, which is of great assistance in helping me better understand the finance side of my role, while progressing my career, and helping with the more complex financial elements of work for the Association in due course.

My day-to-day tasks, tend to be varied, depending on whether we are running events or training. Being a small in-house team, we all help each other behind the scenes in all the various elements of work, to keep the ASFP strong and engaged. I can generally be reconciling bank payments and chasing invoices one day and the next, be travelling to support our successful events...

I generally aim to keep the costs of running the ASFP low, so we can put more into our member services, training, and technical support. Our greatest cost currently is the purchase of our own building, which will be a huge asset for the Association and its future.

I have a new role that seems to be approaching very quickly which will probably be my most challenging to date – that being motherhood. So, I will be heading off on this new venture at the end of August, before returning next year (However you may still see me at a few events until then!).