GEOFFREY Walter Ball, great-grandson of Francis Ball, who founded F Ball and Co in 1886, delivered an emotional speech after winning the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2025 CFJ Awards in Dallas Burston Polo Club, Warwickshire.

Geoffrey was integral in establishing the company’s standing as a leading UK manufacturer of flooring adhesives and subfloor preparation products, ‘known for quality, innovation, exceptional service and unparalleled technical expertise, as well as a conscientious approach to business’.

Says the company: ‘He’s always led the company with the intention that it should be a truly world-class manufacturing operation and the viewpoint of a custodian, ensuring its sustainability for the benefit of future generations and retaining its values of honesty, fairness and integrity.’

Career beginnings
Geoffrey joined the family business in January 1965, after training as an accountant, at a time when the company was consolidating its shift from manufacturing products for the shoe industry to ones for the commercial flooring trade. This coincided with the proliferation of different floorcovering categories and designs and the introduction of cement-based ‘floor levelling’ products.

He moved to Leek, Staffordshire, to manage the general commercial office in 1971, became a director in 1972, joint managing director in 1979, before being appointed sole managing director in 1982.

The Leek site was expanded to meet increasing product demand through the acquisition of an adjoining administration and warehouse facility in the 1970s. However, even with the additional buildings, the company’s rapid expansion meant that a larger manufacturing facility was eventually needed, and the search for a new, larger site commenced by the previous financial director concluded with the move to its current location in Cheddleton in 1989.

Benevolent values
The new site offered a massive increase in distribution and warehousing capacity, but new production facilities meant fewer people were needed to run the plant, so a number of jobs effectively became redundant.

Testament to his belief in not treating people merely as means to an end, Geoffrey refused to end their employment and instead created new roles for these workers, supporting them to retrain and reskill to take on these new roles and secure their futures and livelihoods.

This benevolent and fair approach is reflected in remarkable employee loyalty. Virtually half (49%) of F Ball’s employees have worked for the company for more than 10 years, and a quarter have been employed there for over 20 years.

Geoffrey’s foresight to take the bold decision to consolidate the shareholding of the company under his sole ownership in the ‘80s and ‘90s has enabled him to continuously reinvest profits for the future growth and success of the business. This has included the construction of a new £8m production facility at the site, which was officially opened by the Duke of Kent in 2010.

Investing in industry
Similarly, Geoffrey has always wanted the business to have a positive impact on the wider flooring industry and to maintain the reputation of flooring as a professional trade by helping close the skill gap within the flooring industry, including advocating for the provision of free training.

For this reason, he was strongly supportive of the idea to transform a disused building on the Cheddleton site into a state-of-the-art training facility, now the F Ball Centre of Excellence, which provides training courses, free-of-charge, to all levels of expertise in the industry.

This represented an initial £1m investment, along with ongoing costs of running the centre and the salaries of two, full-time professional training officers.

In line with this aim, the company has created apprenticeships across its engineering, technical services and safety, health, environment and quality (SHEQ), as well as marketing, operations, and business administration departments. This has recently been extended to a new floor fitter apprenticeship programme.

Giving back
F Ball’s customer reward scheme, which was initially set up in 2010 in response to Geoffrey’s desire to help contractors through the difficult time of the recession, continues to this day and has returned over £8.5m to contractor and retailer customers.

Geoffrey is also keen that the company plays a positive role in the wider British manufacturing sector, including mandating the purchasing of products and services from British suppliers where possible.

It was his idea, in the 1970s, to produce a reference chart detailing the compatibility of the company’s Styccobond adhesives with floorcoverings produced by different manufacturers, the first of its kind.

More than 50 years later, what started off as just a few pages has evolved into the industry’s most comprehensive guide to floorcovering-adhesive compatibility, the F Ball Recommended Adhesives Guide (RAG), featuring over 6,000 branded floorcoverings from over 200 leading international floorcovering manufacturers.

Uniquely to F Ball, each recommendation is only included in the guide after a rigorous seven-week testing programme overseen by a dedicated division of the company’s technical service department, facilitated by purpose-built laboratories, and subject to the endorsement of the relevant floorcovering manufacturer.

Community consciousness
Under Geoffrey’s guidance, F Ball has also remained committed to having a beneficial role in the community in which it operates.

A sponsor of local, non-league football club Leek Town FC, F Ball recently increased its support for the club by becoming Leek Town’s official stadium sponsor with the ground now known as the F Ball Community Stadium; the title highlighting F Ball’s and the club’s own commitment to grassroots sport by providing access to its sporting facilities and all weather pitches to young people and children in the local community.

Encouraging F Ball employees who have been inspired to follow Geoffrey’s lead in their local communities, F Ball is always keen to support employee charity fundraising activities.

To the future
Geoffrey remains a well-known and admired figure in the flooring industry. Today, he has transferred the day-to-day running of F Ball to senior management, but he still takes an active interest in the company, and his legacy continues to shape the future of F Ball.

www.f-ball.co.uk