hello

I work as an individual. I work with management as the missing piece of the team jigsaw to ensure that all the team are a part of finding and implementing the future. Involvement and enlightenment are a vital part of getting the whole company to buy into what needs to be done.

This is very different from using a company that may consult with the team, but who work at arms length before returning, somehow magically, with a solution.

The job I do is about aligning the company strengths and skills to the most important needs that drive their market. It is a balance of interrogation, investigation, researching the options, setting intentions, challenge, creativity and innovation. And working closely with all the key players.

From this comes new knowledge and certainty that in turn gives the whole company a true sense of purpose to then confidently deliver the future.

Finding the future for many of my clients is just the beginning. I am often the bridge to executing that future.

It helps that I have been the creative head and owner of several top twenty advertising agencies and a founder of one of the UK’s most influential behavioural and marketing science consultancies.

This allows me to act as a coach, advisor, an innovations source or help for companies to find specialist resources to answer questions like...

• How can we quantify the bottom line effect of this new direction?

• How do we reach and influence our end user?

• What influences should we take account of in developing our product?

• How can we make the company as well as the products more appealing?

• What role can design play in communicating who we are and what we do?

• What should the website be saying, what is its role, what should it look like?

• How do we utilise digital and social media?

• How should we measure success?

Finding the future is satisfying but delivering that future by bringing it to life for both customers and employees alike is for me an important part of creating a successful, sustainable future.

• Over a five year timespan I worked on both strategy and execution that saw Maximuscle go from an £8m purchase by Piper Private Equity to an £85m sale to Darwin Private Equity and then on to a £186m sale to GSK.

• The creation and launch of Upbeat for Volac, one of Europe’s fastest growing international dairy nutrition businesses, not only saw them successfully move into consumer products, but also won them the European Dairy Launch of the Year.

• I currently work in the prestige travel market as part of the team that has seen Vancouver based Fresh Tracks Canada enjoy a doubling of sales and profit over the last three years.

• Trade sales are often a profitable exit. The success of my strategic and executional work for Lee Cooper, the jeans and clothing company, for the Devon based Gro Company, makers of baby products and more recently Fabris Lane are good examples of that.

• For Fabris Lane, the UK’s leading sunglasses company, that meant developing their existing product portfolio, putting in place research to help them become category champion and creating a spectrum of innovative new products designed to use the company’s existing skills to take them into a growing, higher margin market sector.
These easily implemented, innovative developments, fully quantitatively researched, proved to be highly attractive to new US owners, FGX. The purchase will be a cost and time effective way for FGX to move into areas of the market, across their international network, that they have hitherto not had the skills or the knowledge to enter.

• I also worked for ten years with the management of Ernest & Julio Gallo wines in California to help them expand both their US and international brand portfolio and was a founder and consultant with Mountainview a company specialising in training companies in the neurosciences. Clients include companies like Ford, First National Bank, Mars and Tesco.