Founding F International was founded in 1962 when successful female entrepreneurs and freelance working were rare.
Steve Shirley started the company despite having no capital or business experience, to escape the constraints of working as a woman in a predominantly male working context: The total revenues for the first 10-month tax year were £1,700. F International is an early example: business and industry were short of computer-skilled people, and the nature of much software and systems work was, even at that time, amenable to
homeworking. The company, then known as "Freelance Programmers", was registered on 13 May 1964 and a "panel" of
freelance software and systems specialists, nearly all female, began to work for the company. An early assignment came from Urwick Diebold and this attracted attention from the media. The early days were difficult; at one point Kit Grindley, a recent acquaintance at Urwick Diebold, wrote Steve a cheque for £500 to cover operating costs and payments to the workforce. At the start, in the 1960s, there were no accessible
data communications services and no
Internet, but in the 1970s the business attracted interest from academics and
futurists as an example of
remote work. The
Harvard Business School documented the F International business in a number of case studies. The business was the subject of several other international academic studies of homeworking.
Early history In the 1970s the company's development paralleled the emergence of
feminist thinking and the consequent awareness and pre-occupation with
gender equality; together these led to legislation in the
United Kingdom that was intended to bring equal rights to women but had unexpected consequences; F International was specifically offering employment
to women, and therefore they had to adjust their policies to be
gender-independent. Despite these issues, the business continued to grow until the 1970s, when it encountered difficulties for at least two reasons: the business reported its first financial loss (of £3,815) and suffered its first significant personnel loss, when Pamela Woodman resigned to form Pamela Woodman Associates, working in direct competition to Freelance Programmers. At home, still in the 1970s, spin-off businesses were re-absorbed into the parent business which was re-established in 1974 as "F International". It was in the early 1980s that a wider general interest in
remote work via telecommunications support became evident.
The middle years - Timeline Key dates in the 1980s-1990s include: • 1985 - F International was re-registered as a
Public Limited Company (but not quoted on the stock exchange, an unusual move for a plc) • 1985 - By the end of 1985 13% of the ownership of the business had been taken up by outside interests and 17% was with the FI Shareholders’ Trust • 1986 - A primitive
email service based on
Prestel was introduced • 1987 - In the Times’ Top 500 Companies, 25 per cent of the top 500 were FI Group clients, as were 50 of the top 100 and eight of its top 10. • 1987 - The company held a
Silver Jubilee at the
National Exhibition Centre to celebrate 25 years of operations • 1987 - A further gift of 7% of the shares took staff ownership just short of 25% • 1988 - The company name was changed again, to "FI Group" • 1990 -
Sir John Harvey-Jones (the
Troubleshooter) opened a new FI Group headquarters and commended the company's success, that he attributed to "flexibility and speed" coupled with "decentralisation, delegation and releasing energy rather than [seeking] control" • 1991 - Staff take 44% ownership of the company by means of a workforce share scheme • 1996 - The company was floated on the
London Stock Exchange in March
Later history As the 1990s opened, the company made several strategic acquisitions, for example AMP Computer Recruitment in 1990 and the Kernel Group in 1991, with the objective of providing clients with staffing and training services. In 1997, IIS Infotech Limited, an Indian computer services company based in
New Delhi was acquired, joined in 1999 by a small
London-based project management and IT consultancy group and in 2000 by Druid, a
Reading-based software consultancy. ==Philosophy and method of working==