How do you judge a man’s achievements? By his salary, by his accolades, by the power he wields? These are of course all metrics but like the amount of clicks I get on a Facebook post with an amusing cat gif they are ultimately vanity stats in the tapestry of life. I think most of us would wish to be well thought of by your friends and colleagues, so if we’re working on that basis of how you’re seen being one of life’s KPI’s then the man I’m going to be writing about is the richest and on target for all. It’s today with both sadness yet great fondness that I see the news that Richard Tucker is stepping down from his position at the head of Relocation Agent Network (RAN).
For those that don’t know, Richard fell ill with the virus at the start of the pandemic. Let nobody, certainly not 'Karen off Facebook', tell you that this virus isn’t worth everyone’s concern as Richard has struggled to fight off 'long-Covid' which you may have read has left so many thousands chronically fatigued. So I take it absolutely as another great measure of the man that he has taken the decision to focus on getting fit again and not impact the running of RAN.
I mention fit again because I had to witness Richard speeding off down the River Wye in a kayak like Tom Sawyer, I learnt a lot about Richards back as I was always half a mile behind .The kayaking to be fair did have only one slight capsizing incident but I put that down to Dafydd Hardy offsetting the balance of the boat due to the few too many shandy’s he had the night before which he assured me was entirely for ‘constitutional’ purposes.
Richard both personally and by encouraging RAN to get involved did a fantastic amount of work for charity, like both of the above challenges done for one of his member agents and friend Dominic Subbiani who was hit with Huntingtons disease. I know first-hand the difference it made to Dom knowing how many people got involved as he didn’t think anyone would be interested. The likes of Richard ensured he was put right on that front.
I talked about accolades above and I was probably over dismissive because one area that Richard personified was the affection that RAN members had for both him and the Network when they were quite rightly recognised on more than one occasion at EA Masters for the overall ‘Supplier of the Year’. When you are competing with the great and the good of the supplier ecosystem that’s some going and I know that many RAN members will have been thinking about Richard in particular as they put their cross in the box.
On a personal note, even when I was doing my latest Ratner moment at their conferences, Richard was never anything other than the perfect smile and if anything, like Gazza not wanting to let Bobby Robson down, it probably prevented my worse excesses as you simply wouldn’t ever want to let Richard down either.
It will be to RAN’s benefit I’m sure that the team that Richard leaves behind have all been steeped in the same core beliefs that made him who he was, and that can only to be to RAN’s benefit.
Let me round off by completing my point in the opening paragraph - Richard is one of the few people in this industry that I’ve never heard a bad thing said about him, actually unusually for me that’s an under exaggeration because I’ve only ever heard talk about him extremely positively and that doesn’t matter whether its on a private or business basis.
So Richard, from myself, everyone at Kerfuffle and I’m sure more than you can count to mention out there in the industry, we wish you all the very best and look forward to having a drink together when you’re fighting fit again. Get well soon Richard.
