THIS YEAR SO FAR...

The year started off with a bang at our first event of 2023, the Leeds Regional Event. With a whopping eight speakers, 11 exhibitors, and 116 people attending, you were sure to meet some new faces and catch up with some old ones too. The day relvoved around best practice in passive fire protection, and what it looks like in terms of two key elements, design and installation. The event was held at the beautiful Headingley Stadium in March and was a great way to start the year. Thank you again to our two sponsors, OneTrace and SFS.

Next we travelled back down to the Midlands to attend the Fire Safety Event in Birmingham. This event was bigger and better than any previous year for us, and we had heard similar from our members. With a large footfall throughout most of the event, we were able to rack up 611 new people added to our CRM. This year we hosted three areas, first was the ASFP Pavillion where you could find us to enquire about membership, training or anything technical. Right next door was the Passive Fire Theatre which held four talks a day. We are proud to say that these fully booked up as eager listeners gathered to hear discussions on improving standards, the passive fire culture, and the ASFP Competency Pathway. Finally was the Passive Fire Experience, our new venture involving a mobile classroom that houses the new ASFP virtual reality training course. Our goal was to use this year's trade shows to gain information on what the market wants to see and how much interest there would be. We will be releasing more information on this course later in the year.

Three weeks later we travelled further south to London and carried on the Trade Show hype at Firex. For Firex we only had one stand to host but that didn't stop us gathering a further 450 additions to our CRM. During the show we also partnered with the FPA to create a new type of debate where the audience could send in their votes as the debate was happening, giving the panel live feedback from the "industry" on what was being discussed. This was a very interesting discussion and will hopefully be something we continue in the future.

For our fourth event of the year we went just north of London to Hertfordshire for the ASFP AGM.

This year we announced our newly appointed Chair, Clive Miles of CLM Fireproofing, As the successor to Chris Miles after his two-year term. We also introduced Sharon McClure of Avesta Scotland as the ASFP's first female Vice Chair. We look forward to seeing how they lead the ASFP for the next two years.

Finally, the latest event we attended was the ASFP Regatta Challenge. An exciting race with a valient effort from all 12 boats. In third place was member company Minster, Second place went to a team comprised of companies Consort, R Lewis, and Revolutionary Systems. And in first place was Corrosion Resistant Products Limited. A huge congratulation to them and a well done to all teams that participated.