HOW I CAN HELP

ABOUT ME

There’s a downloadable profile below with the facts on, so rather than offering some dull career history, perhaps I can try to state something about me that could help you decide whether to pick up the phone or not.

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I did Civil Engineering as a degree but realised that I was at best average at complex maths and engineering, so switched my final year into project management, law, psychology, finance, and subjects requiring more verbiage and less sums. From there I joined ICL, working with customers on mainframes and new fangled programmes called “applications”, and soon realised that I wanted to do IT plans and business cases and organisational change – and so became an Account Manager. Which actually turned out to be a sales job in reality. But you had to be quite good at it so as not to get fired.

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In fact I think I did fairly well, picking up a few awards and some respectable bonus, until someone decided I was so good, that I should take on selling to organisations that we had little hope of selling to. Tough times, some occasional fantastic results separated by months of failure and a life-course on resilience.

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From there I joined a small exciting IT company, hoping to make a difference, but that went bust in a matter of weeks – so, together with some colleagues, I bought it and leaped from structured corporate life to owner-director roller-coastering. I stayed in that sort of world for a while, but stepped back into corporate life when my kids were born – and quickly realised that I’d become entrepreneurial and so set out to revolutionise my new employer. To be fair, I had a good go, creating a SAP practice that grew from 4 to about 250, and coming up with a proposition for delivering a managed SAP service on a £/user basis to Councils, that became quite famous. That business floated and was acquired and I was made redundant – good in retrospect as is often the case – and I then spent a year helping others with propositions, start-ups, offshoring and contracts until getting involved in a SAP risk management start-up based in Belfast that I ended up running, opening up in Dubai and Bangalore, winning multiple innovation awards, and ultimately selling to EY.

I was at EY for about 2 years, latterly leading the UK Advisory disruption and innovation drive, passionate about asset based consulting, until leaving to have a break and set up this, my solo mentoring business.

Along the route I gained a Private Pilot’s licence, trained as a reflexologist, took after my Dad as a chef, divorced and re-married, to an ex-international rugby playing horse-rider, inheriting her 3 children to get a total of 5, and somehow ending up with 8 horses. And 3 dogs.

And my purpose? Helping others – as a Princes Trust mentee, in the local hospice, as a husband and Dad, and as a business mentor.