#250 Driving ISO Implementation – Meet the Consultant: Steve Mason

How often have you heard someone say they aspire to be an ISO consultant? Likely not at all! That’s not surprising as it’s quite a niche world to find yourself in, yet despite that, there are still thousands of ISO professionals worldwide.

We’re continuing with our mini-series where we introduce members of our team, to explore how they fell into the world of ISO and discuss the common challenges they face while helping clients achieve ISO certification.  

In this episode we introduce Steve Mason, a Principle isologist® at Blackmores, to share the journey of how he went from intern, to ISO Assessor, to ISO consultant and the challenges he’s faced while working with clients.

You’ll learn

·      What is Steve’s role at Blackmores?

·      What does Steve enjoy outside of consultancy?

·      What path did Steve take to become an ISO Consultant?

·      What is the biggest challenge he’s faced when implementing ISO Standards?

·      What is Steve’s biggest achievement?

 

Resources

·      Isologyhub

·      ISO 14001:2026 What’s Changed And How to Comply Webinar Registration

 

In this episode, we talk about:

[00:30] Episode Summary – We introduce Steve Mason, a Principle Isologist® here at Blackmores, to discuss his journey towards becoming an ISO consultant who specialises in ISO 27001, ISO 27701, ISO 27018, ISO 27017 and ISO 20000-1.

[02:40] What is Steve’s role at Blackmores? Her role primarily involves supporting clients in two key areas: maintaining and continually improving their existing ISO management systems and helping them establish and implement new standards.

As part of that support, he:

·      Makes Standards understandable and accessible to clients

·      Conduct internal audits

·      Reviews and updates management system documentation

·      Facilitate management reviews

·      Train internal teams and prepare them for certification audits.

Steve is the Standard champion for ISO 27001, ISO 27701, ISO 27017, ISO 27018 and ISO 20000-1 at Blackmores, but he also deals with ISO 9001, ISO 41001, ISO 22301 and ISO 42001 related projects and support.

Steve’s other main role at Blackmore’s is as a Mental Health First Aider, which is shared with Minoo Agarwal. Together, they provide resources and offer support to the team.

[06:00] The importance of Mental Health management in the workplace: Steve had faced bullying in previous roles, so preventing others from experiencing the same had become a big motivator for him taking on the role of Mental First Aider for Blackmores.

He emphasizes it’s importance, and highlights 2 key Standards that you can use to help support mental first aid within your business. This includes ISO 45003 Mental Health in the Workplace and BS 30480 Suicide and the Workplace.

[09:10] What does Steve enjoy doing outside of consultancy?: Steve has a wide variety of interests and hobbies, including:

Lay Minister: Steve is a Lay Minister in the United Reform Church and mainly based at the URC Chapel in Walkern, but can be found leading worship and preaching at Ashwell, Baldock, Stevenage and Knebworth chapels.

Poetry: Steve enjoys writing poetry about anything and everything, racking up an impressive 190 poems so far. Some of his main inspirations include Wordsworth and Keats. If you ever see a poem on the Blackmores LinkedIn page, odds are, it was written by Steve!

Classical Music: He’s a fan of classical music, anything by Beethoven, Mahler or Shostakovich specifically. He likes these composers in particular due to their stretching of the rules of music for the time.

Exploring hidden London: Steve often goes on hidden London tours which explore disused underground stations which may have been shut down as long as 100 years ago!

Buses and Trains: Steve was lucky enough to drive a bus in his past, of which he has the licence plate of sitting in his office. He collects bus and train models and will go out to snap a photo or two of their real world counterparts when he comes across them.

History: Steve is a huge mystery buff, with a particular fondness for Richard III and the War of the Roses and the Anglo Saxon period of history.

Family Tree: Steve has been tracing his family tree back as far as he can on his mother’s side, which extends as far back as 1547! Interestingly enough he found out that relatives from way back then got married in the church that he currently lives nearby and got qualified as a Lay Minister for the Church of England in Stevenage!

Cats: He’s owned his fair share of feline friends through the years, with one particular tabby holding the name ‘Spartacus’.

[22:35] What was Steve’s path towards becoming an ISO Consultant?:  Steve was once told in the 1980s ‘There is no future in Standards; find another career, perhaps in Sales or Purchasing’. How wrong that turned out to be!

He’s always worked with standards, from the first day he started work doing inspection in Goods Inwards, he was referring to them. The direction towards Management systems came in 1983 when he started implementing BS 5750. From that day onward he had been involved in Management Systems.

Steve completed a management apprenticeship at Racal-Guardall where he was able to do 3 months’ work experience in all departments, which helped him appreciate how companies function and how important it is to maintain good communication channels. He was at the end of this apprenticeship that the opportunity arose in the QA department to work on BS 5750.

His career path has included other organisations such as Tektronix, BOC Ohmeda, Cirkit, Deta, TDK and BSI, all of which earned Steve a lot of experience in Manufacturing and Service and Distribution, mainly in Quality and Customer Service roles.

Steve has always felt a bit like a closet consultant, even when he worked as an assessor at BSI. He feels as if Blackmores has enabled him to fully flourish and develop his portfolio of standards – not bad for a career where there was apparently no future in standards!

[28:45] Born to be a consultant – Steve mentions that consultancy is a skill that many are born to be. You can train and learn the skills of course, but for some it comes very naturally and it can be hard to replicate that skillset in others.

[30:15] What is Steve’s favourite aspect of being a Consultant? Steve loves talking with clients and working with them to explore solutions that can address the requirements of the standards. His motto is ‘Mould the Standard to the organisation and not the organisation to the standard’

This means, always producing a management system that benefits the organisation first and then adjusting it to meet the requirements of the standard. Organisations that mould the business to the standard usually end up with a management system that is a ‘bolt-on’ and an uncomfortable, sometimes irrelevant, fit. Everyone in the organisation needs to feel that the management system is a natural fit to what they do.

He also enjoys supporting his colleagues at Blackmores. We’re a business built on knowledge sharing, and there’s no point gatekeeping anything we’ve learned as a team. So consultants often get together to discuss lessons learned and ensure best practice is a shared experience.

Ironically enough, one of Steve’s least favourite aspects of being a consultant is auditing! Mostly since he’s been doing it for some 40 years now, so he can be forgiven for finding the exercise a bit tedious at times. However, he never let’s that affect the end result of an audit.

[37:00] What Standards does Steve specilaise in and why? Steve initially started with ISO 9001 but was steered towards ISO 27001 and ISO 20000-1 during his time as BSI. This was based upon his career path up to the point he joined BSI as they align assessors to familiar business and technical environments.

In Blackmores, he has been able to develop these areas of Quality, Service and Risk by adding standards related to Business Continuity, PII and Cloud Security, Facilities Management and AI Management.

Steve’s favourite standard is ISO 20000-1 which started off as an IT Service Management System but can also be used effectively for all services. He always refers to ISO 20000-1 as ‘ISO 9001 on Steroids’ because it is much more specific and focuses on the subject of service management.

Sadly, ISO20000-1 is under rated, under sold and in some cases, never heard of – this is usually because contracts require IS O9001 but the people writing those contracts don’t actually know or understand what they are asking for.

In simple terms it is a Service Quality Management System and Steve has come across organisations which have shoe-horned ISO 9001 into the business instead of using the natural fitting standard ISO 20000-1.

Steve would advise any company that is providing a service with helpdesk support to look at ISO 20000-1, especially if they find that ISO 9001 isn’t working well for them.

[43:00] What is the biggest challenge Steve had faced during a project and how did he overcome it?: Creating a management system in 10 days for a client which was due to lose a major contract because they had let their certification to ISO 9001 lapse between the 2008 and 2015 versions. Quite the undertaking in such a short amount of time!

Steve refuses to claim full responsibility for the success however, as the client was totally invested in getting the system up and running and put in a lot of effort to work with Steve to get it done in time. If it had been any other standard, it would have been impossible, but because it was ISO 9001 and wthey were drawing on what had been in place previously it was possible.

Generally, problems arise when there is limited or no Leadership support and commitment, because without this management systems can’t be set up in a way that benefits the organisation.

All management systems must align with the Business Strategy and should be used to ensure that the strategy is achieved.

If you’d like to learn more about the importance of Leadership and aligning your management system with strategic direction, check out a few of our previous episodes.

[50:10] What is Steve’s proudest achievement?  Steve isn’t really one to collect achievements, so he cites winning 1st Prize at 6 years old in a fancy-dress competition, dressed as a Snowman was a proud achievement for 6 year old him.

He is also proud of becoming a Lay Reader initially in the Church of England at 37 and latterly in the URC.

Another highlight is appearing on The Chase back in 2017, successfully passing the auditions which saw 40,000 applicants. If you want to go see him go up against the Chasers, he was in Series 10 episode 119.

He can’t point to any one ISO related project as he sees them all as an equal success. He puts all his effort into every project, and his success track shows this to be evident.

[54:35] ISO 14001 Transition Webinar:  If you currently hold a 2015 certificate for ISO 14001, then the countdown has already started to transition to the latest 2026 version.

We’ll be covering the changes and what you need to do to comply and complete your transition in a webinar on the 29th May. You can register your place here.

 

If you’d like any assistance with implementing ISO standards, get in touch with us, we’d be happy to help!

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