Meet the Team
Our team at Ardvernis includes everyone from directors to fire risk assessors, consultants and a smaller team at Riskhub. Every person is crucial to Ardvernis’ success and we love to work as a team.
Sarah Herbison – CEO
Sarah’s background as a trained accountant provided an excellent grounding, but it was decades in marketing and HR in the construction industry, helping revamp struggling businesses that led her to this. Ardvernis grew organically from her husband’s career in fire engineering. She helped him organise and manage his growing team of surveyors and quickly identified a gap in the market. She enjoys nurturing existing client relationships, creating new ones, strategising and finding opportunities to develop and grow the business.
Dearbhail McParland – COO
Dearbhail has over 25 years accounting experience and deals with all areas of financial planning and advises us on savvy ways to grow the business. She is ACA and CTA qualified in both the UK and Republic of Ireland. Dearbhail also oversees the Operations team ensuring all client programmes are on track and delivered on time.
Stephen Montgomery – Technical Director
Fire safety is Stephen’s passion. He holds an MSc in fire safety engineering and has over 30 years’ experience in the construction and regulatory sectors, including developing and implementing fire strategies and ensuring building control compliance for social housing and commercial properties. He combines his extensive technical knowledge with considerable senior management skills gained in the private sector and in local government, so he understands the governance and accountability issues that exist for both. He oversees the training of our assessors and the validation of their reports. We are unique in validating 100% of the reports generated by our assessments, and in this way can ensure a uniform approach to remedial works.
Kate Thain – Riskhub
Kate Thain heads up the software support and systems management team. They road-test the software and implement it, fixing any issues that arise and training clients and surveyors on how to use it.
The fire risk assessors receive ongoing support from our software team to complete their online assessments.
The Fire Risk Assessors
Our large team of trained assessors range from very senior retired fire fighters to young upstarts. Between them, they have over 150 years experience in the industry and we provide in-house training and CPD schemes to ensure they remain on top of any new legislation, industry developments and our evolving company processes. We are committed to IFE accreditation across the board.
Our surveyors can only be as good as the people behind them, and operations are managed by the office-based team, who liaise with our fire risk assessors to ensure the programme is delivered on time and to the requisite standards. Our clients are dealing with vulnerable tenants, and ensuring good communication between everybody is vital for the smooth running of the business.
Consultants
We work with a number of wide-ranging consultants, from HR, business development and tech, to writing and artistry, and their combined skills and specialisms help us to remain at the cutting edge, not just within our industry, but in the wider world of business.