I’m thrilled to celebrate Oxebridge’s 25th anniversary this month! It’s an incredible event that I could have never imagined achieving.
I released the first version of the Oxebridge website in December 1999 but did not officially launch the company itself until I had all the legal bits lined up. It was literally the first week in January of 2000 that I announced we were open for business, and when I began pounding the pavement in earnest for my first client.
Before that I had worked for two companies over a span of 11 years. For both, I helped implement the version of ISO 9001 that was available at the time, going as far back as the original 1987 version. When the 2nd company I had been working at was sold, I jumped and formed Oxebridge. I pursued ISO 9001 consulting because, at the time, I truly loved it; I understood that a QMS standard could revolutionize how businesses operate not only internally, but also how companies interact with each other.
First Clients
The latter of those two companies had hired me as a non-degreed Chemical Process Engineer. (There’s no such degree as “chemical process engineering,” or at least there wasn’t back in the late 1990s.) The boss then told me that in addition to my powder metallurgy duties, I’d have to get them ISO 9001 certified, and he told me I had three months to do. Not knowing any better, I spent all my off-hours working on the QMS and got them certified right on time.
So when I left to form Oxebridge, I just copied what I already knew how to do: I set up the controversial Rapid 40-Day ISO Program and intended to replicate what I had already done at my last job. For that first client, TSI of Florida, I implemented an ISO 9001 system and — as promised — got them certified after (literally) 40 days of work.
I continued to hit the streets, visiting companies, knocking on doors, and sending formal introduction letters and proposals by mail. I offered free ISO 9001 gap analysis audits and began forming dozens of them to win potential clients and improve my auditing skills. Finally, a second company signed me up: Axon Circuit. Unlike TSI, which later was bought out after the owner died, Axon is still up and running, one of the few US circuit board manufacturers to have survived the market’s exodus to China. Axon also got its certification after my 40-day program was completed.
At that point, things began to look bad. Finding a third client was proving difficult, and I kept doing free audits for anyone who would have me. But this meant I was burning up money on expenses and not getting anything coming back in. I remember going a full six months without any client, and it looked like Oxebridge was going to die in the cradle.
Surviving Marc Smith
At the same time, the late Marc Smith of the Elsmar Cove website (then called the Cayman Cove) had launched a defamation and harassment campaign against me, starting in on the old Usenet newsgroup misc.industry.quality. (You can literally still see his stuff on Google groups, where it’s archived.) I couldn’t figure out why this complete stranger took it upon himself to try to destroy my company before it even could get going, but later found out that Smith suffered from a wide variety of mental issues and depression. To compensate, he had a habit of trying to make his own flagging consulting business look successful but trashing anyone who came onto his “patch.” Even though newsgroups were public in those days, Smith had declared the MIQ group as his, and he acted as the tin-badge sheriff. (I recall Smith started his attacks two weeks into January of 2000, so I hadn’t even found my first client yet.)
(Smith would go on to continue the harassment until his death in 2022. Yes, it lasted over two decades. As I said, he was not well. Now the site has a bonkers auto-feature that if you type “Oxebridge” it replaces it with “REDACTED” because the moderators are still assholes.)
So, between the harassment and lack of a third client, Oxebridge came very close to shutting down before the end of 2000. Then, finally, a third client popped up: Multilayer Technology of Irving TX, another circuit board shop. And a fourth: Applied Manufacturing Concepts of Rockledge FL. And a fifth: OFAB Inc. of Ovideo FL.
In 2001, I got my ISO 9001 Lead Auditor certificate, and I thought it would be good to work for a certification body. I partnered with International Management Systems (IMS… not the certificate mill with the similar name “IMSM”) and we had a deal: I would steer all my clients to them for audits, and they would let me audit other clients so I could fulfill my audit log and meet all the requirements to work for a CB. I got along great with the IMS folks and its head, Steve Pearson. But IMS wasn’t booking any audits for me, even though they were getting all my clients. When I finally realized I had been sitting in a giant conflict of interest and told IMS I wouldn’t rep them — or any CB — they no longer invited me to holiday parties and stopped calling. It was my first lesson that you really can’t trust a certification body. (IMS was later bought by NQA, so I was lucky I never worked for them. Imagine me in the same room as Arlen Chapman. LOL.)
With my reputation in Florida growing, the clients kept coming: Conelec of Florida, Creative Games International, Electro Energy, Inter Bio Lab, Jet Machine, Magnus Hi-Tech, Puch Manufacturing, and many more. I was swamped. I abandoned the idea of working for a CB as an auditor because … well, why bother? Consulting makes more money and has less stress. I realized it was a stupid idea from the start, but I simply hadn’t known better.
And so the business continued, with nearly all of my clients coming from Florida. I served most of my clients via car, driving as far as two hours each way to save hotel expenses. My day rate back then was $500. I kept it low because I knew I still needed to build a large stable of clients to use as referrals. I was not getting rich, but I was working at my own pace and no longer had to worry about a company being sold out from under me.
You Get the Chris Paris You Deserve
Then, in 2005, something happened that would alter everything … and not just for me, but for the entire ISO certification scheme. One of my clients received a letter from BSI, the certification body, but they were offering training services. Customized training, too. I thought this didn’t sound right, and it violated what I had been taught during my Lead Auditor class, so I wrote to BSI and asked them if they were sure they should be doing that. A few letters later, I eventually got a phone call from Ron Mathis, BSI’s VP for the Americas at that time, and he was angry. So angry that he threatened to kill me.
I’m not joking. I hung up the phone, shaking. I could not figure out why a CB representative was so thin-skinned that just sending a polite letter — not even a formal complaint! — would trigger a full-on death threat. I called the cops and then the BSI home office in the UK. Mathis was fired shortly after.
Around that same time, I got a cease-and-desist letter from an attorney representing the Florida Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP). I don’t remember what triggered them, but I think it was either an article I wrote for the Oxebridge blog or a marketing piece. However, I had claimed that the MEP was engaged in a potentially illegal grant fraud scam. At that time, the Florida workforce development agency was offering “Incumbent Worker Training” grants through Federal funds Florida received as a part of the Workforce Investment Act (WIA). The MEP managed to get Florida to set aside some of the grants for their clients specifically, but the rest of the grant fund was available to anyone. The MEP was doing shady shit on two fronts: first, they were falsely claiming that only the MEP could obtain the grants (a full-on lie), and then they cooked the books, setting themselves up for potential criminal violations.
They approached me, asking me to join their stable of consultants. Their scam worked like this: I would find a client, do the sales legwork, and then determine the price for ISO 9001 implementation. Instead of quoting the client, however, I would send the quote to the MEP, and do all the work under them as a subcontractor. They would quote the client themselves, under the (false) claim that if they went through MEP, they could get a grant which would reimburse them 50% of my fee.
But behind the scenes, the MEP would double my rate on the grant application without telling the client. So if I quoted $15,000 to do an implementation, and worked the grant directly with my client, the client would end up only paying $7500, and the State grant fund would eat up the other $7500.
But running this through the MEP, they would submit a grant for twice as much, falsely telling the State that my cost was $30,000. Meanwhile, the client was told the cost was only $15,000. So the State would issue a reimbursement check for half of the $30K MEP was asking for (or $15,000), and the MEP would only pass on $7,500 to the client, keeping the rest for itself. Meanwhile, the MEP folks had done exactly nothing at all. Meanwhile, the grant fund got ripped off paying for a service that should have cost half as much.
The grant folks didn’t care, because they were in on the same. The administrators underwent performance reviews based on how many dollars they gave away, so the more they gave the MEP, the better it was for them as individuals. It looked like the Florida IWT program was working, when it was just handing Federal dollars to a few MEP scammers. This had been going on for years, so I estimated millions of dollars of the grant fund had been handed to the MEP under this scam. One guy bought a house on a golf course with the money he made.
Somehow, my view on that got out, and they threatened to sue me if I went public. Coming on the heels of the Ron Mathis thing, I was still a little shaken but stood my ground. I figured this would never go to court since the MEP couldn’t risk having possible Federal crimes revealed during discovery. Sure enough, they went silent, and I never heard from them again. I continued to get IWT grants for my clients without any MEP involvement whatsoever, and at half the cost of what MEP was charging. No one was ever arrested because, well, it’s Florida. Eventually, the Florida MEP was scuttled entirely, although other MEPs in other states continue to pull the same scam to this day.
(Never work with an MEP. Never.)
These two events were shaping me. I realized the ISO world was full of scammers and lunatics, and my skin was toughening.
TAG, You’re It
But despite all this, I was still trying to work the system as it was intended. Around 2004 or so, I began filing formal complaints, and started to see how CBs reacted to them. It wasn’t pretty.
In 2005, I joined the US delegation of ISO TC 176, the committee that develops ISO 9001, called the “US TAG.) I was immediately thrown for a loop. At one of the meetings, we were scheduled to vote for the new US TAG Chair since Jack West was stepping down. I entered the meeting thinking we would have nominations, but was shocked to find out that West had already hand-picked Alka Jarvis to replace him the night before. There would be a vote, but there was only one name on the ballot: Jarvis. I raised my hand and began asking questions about how this was possible, but was immediately browbeaten by West and his suck-up, Lorri Hunt. When I asked if Javis could at least describe what her plans were as new TAG leader, West shouted at me — red-faced like a maniac — from the podium. “Shut up, Chris!” he screamed, sucking all the oxygen out of the room. Everyone went silent. West had blown an o-ring and likely soiled himself in front of everyone. So, sure, I sat down and shut up. One of us would be professional, and it wasn’t the shit-for-brains Texan.
It was at that 2005 meeting that I think everything changed. I realized the ISO world was not built for a guy like me. I wasn’t going to get hired by a CB unless I scammed people. I wasn’t going to get accepted into the Florida “manufacturing” club unless I committed MEP fraud. I wasn’t going to get anywhere with TC 176 unless I lied to Jack West and told him he wasn’t a piece of shit and the entire TAG was a club of idiot suck-ups.
If I couldn’t fit in the ISO world, I would make my own world within it.
Oxebridge the Reformer
And so, that is when things took on their own life. It was gradual, yes, but by 2010, Oxebridge had positioned itself as the opposing force against the scams within ISO, the US TAG, TC 176, the CB industry and more.
I hired people for a time, but because the work was so unpredictable, I eventually transitioned to using a small circle of 1099 subcontractors who I could bring on as I needed to; that remains how I operate to this day. But we kept growing. I got into AS9100 and cold-called a number of “new space” companies to do their implementations. That included John Carmack’s Armadillo Aerospace, Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, among others. Only SpaceX agreed, and I was hired to implement their initial ISO 9001 system, and later update it to AS9100.
SpaceX wasn’t the only big name Oxebridge had landed. I did training at USAF and NASA sites, and got a contract for an AS9100 implementation for a Northrup Grumman startup. L3 Communications, GKN, Honeywell, JetBlue’s LiveTV division, and Lufthansa were some of the other famous players who became Oxebridge clients.
The more I pressured and publicly called out the scammers, the more the clients wanted to hire me. I realized you can’t be on both sides of the game here; you must choose a side. You can either be a consultant who promotes CBs and ISO and have no clients, or you can support your clients and suffer the hatred of the CBs and ISO.
The more I took bullets for them on the Oxebridge site, on the Elsmar forum, in court cases, or at ISO meetings, the more the clients trusted me. Nobody was doing this stuff. Consultants everywhere were sucking up to ISO and their certification body pals, to the detriment of their clients. Since ISO and the CBs don’t pay the bills, I chose my clients over them.
It’s a shame that the corruption is so rampant that by just doing the simplest thing ever — side with your clients! — you have to become a pariah in your industry. But for me, I simply give no shits.
But then, just prior to COVID, I realized that I knew more about the ISO certification scheme rules than most people, so I should be consulting on those, too. As a result, I launched programs to implement ISO 17021 for new CBs and ISO 17011 for new accreditation bodies. I’m not joking when I say there are only two guys in the US who can consult on those standards, and the other guy is dead. (That guy was Frank DeGar of Pillar Management, and he was a gem. But, yes, he’s gone.)
The Legacy
However, as I age, the challenge will be what to do with Oxebridge next.
I want to start winding down, but sometimes, a brand is too closely tied to its founder. I could sell Oxebridge and work on clients to pay my bills, but let’s face it: without me throwing bombs and making snarky cartoons, the Oxebridge brand will wither within the first six months. There won’t be anything that differentiates it from all the other consultants out there. I’m not sure how the next owner will manage it. Whoever buys it will have to bring their own flavor of kerosene.
But I can’t do this forever. With my only brother having died recently, I’m staring down my own mortality. I’ll have to do something with Oxebridge at some point because, apparently, God or the universe or whatever doesn’t let you live forever. Who knew?
For now, though, I intend to continue as-is. I still enjoy the work, and I’m good at it. My clients are happy because (I guess) the bar is so low in the ISO certification world that if you don’t lie to your clients, you’re a saint. It’s really not that hard a lesson.
Another 25 years, anyone?
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 30 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
Chris, thanks for sharing Oxebridge’s history and I also hope you stay on for some time, at least until I retire *grin*. Your blog and weekly updates over the years has shared your contempt for most CB’s TAG, and ISO but I didn’t realize how much of a “boy’s club” TAG was under Jack West. To use your words, who knew?
Congratulations Chris, I trust and hope you can keep up the good works for many years to come.