Talking to Frank Aldridge, I get the sense of someone who has travelled on a journey, following a diverse, but clearly thought out, pathway and has now returned back home to his roots.
I’m with him at his Shepherd’s Hideaway training and workshop facility, built on the farm at Ruakokoputuna where he worked for Rex Thomas in his first job after leaving school. He tells me of the amazing journey that he has taken from when he was born at what is now Wharekaka, to running his highly successful consulting business in Martinborough.
After leaving school, Frank worked for several years in a variety of outdoor jobs such as shearer, bulldozer driver and jackeroo. Then one day when he was cutting scrub with a hand slasher on the top of a hill, he had an epiphany. He thought “What am I doing working here like I’m in a chain gang? There must be something better.” Inspired by a maths teacher he had at Kuranui College, he made the decision that he would become a teacher. First, he enrolled at university and completed a Maths and Physics degree. However, this didn’t lead him on to teaching but instead, into the corporate world. Having always had an interest in energy he worked first with the Ministry of Energy, then Shell Oil and finally with Transpower where he was a specialist negotiator. When that organisation restructured in 1998, Frank decided that he would go out on his own and form his own company. In 2001 he set up the Integral Group, a consulting business which specialises in procurement, project management and contract management. His office is just behind
Kitchener’s Café, but you’re more likely to find Frank working in the café where he constantly comes across people he went to school with and has worked with. Another connection with his past is that the space his office occupies was once the lounge of his step-mother Daisy Lake, who owned Lake’s Bookshop (now The Grocer).
The majority of Frank’s clients are local councils and he has worked with sixty-six of them to date. Of course, a lot of the work is done online now and his next aim is to have more impact world-wide with an online support community for Project Management. Frank tells me that he never wants to stop learning and he has a coach and an advisory board to keep him on track. In the past he has been both an endurance motorbike and endurance horse rider. He tells me that he learnt how to facilitate through being an aerobics instructor for five years. “My big passion now is dancing; Modern Jive, line dancing and a bit of ballroom, Frank’s home now is on thirty acres in Ruakokoputuna. Last year he built a group facility on the farm “to let others enjoy the environment here.”
From this building he runs training and business strategy workshops. It also provides him with a better working/lifestyle balance. He smiles contentedly as he muses, “I want to have the grass under my feet more.”
