My career has centred on helping clients to use technology to improve results. I initially worked at IBM (where I trained as a Systems Engineer after graduating) and subsequently worked my way up from salesman to director at Data Logic (a Raytheon software development and projects subsidiary). Later, I worked at CapGemini (where I established and ran their international consulting and technology business in the Media Sector) and Perot Systems (where I was UK Sales Director and led large scale business transformation and outsourcing deals). Corporate clients have come from a variety of sectors with a significant proportion from technology, media and communications (Microsoft, HP, IBM, BskyB, BBC, BT...).
More recently, I have run my own business – focused on improving top line results by best practice in sales, marketing and use of the web. I take a hands-on approach, providing strategic advice, troubleshooting and turnaround guidance that I am happy to follow through into management assignments running sales, marketing and various web-related improvement projects. Clients still include high technology firms (recent projects in optical networking, CCTV and CRM software) but now include a range of smaller businesses and professional practices in various sectors.
I bring a creative mind to the art of the possible – but one tempered by a wealth of real world experience of positive change involving people, processes and technology.
I am married with a son and daughter currently at university. I love the outdoors, am a keen falconer (flying peregrines at game), an occasional shooter and golfer. I read widely and also love to cook.
You probably guessed it; eshape does a lot with clients to help them on the web.
But what we really do is to help organisations build their story of growth – which entails quite a lot more:
Directing energy to building value
Winning backing for your enterprise
Evaluating markets and competition
Expressing your brand excellence and emotion
Optimising your customers’ experience
Exploiting the power of the web
Excelling at sales
Empowering and enthusing your people
Employing the right tools
Doing what you enjoy
In all the above we seek to innovate, facilitate and then provide sustained support so that insights from results are fed back into continued improvement.
A strategy, a brand, a sales technique, a team … is as good as the results it produces. So we believe in participating and guiding rather than pointing and report-writing. There hasn’t been a strategy that hasn’t needed tuning in the light of real people, processes and results.
Ultimately, it’s not the tools but the human element we have to get right. After many years of implementing technology-led change, I have learned to reach the edge but not to go beyond the individual and organisational limits to technological and process innovation. Without people focus you get nowhere.
I place great emphasis on facilitation and collaborative working as generators of value and I and my colleagues work as part of our clients’ teams, often in conjunction with specialist partners and associates. There’s more about some specific services which can provide a start point here.
All projects are different but my work usually has a pattern:
Stage one challenges and clarifies thinking, equips people with objective analysis, diagnoses what may be in need of fixing or putting in place – and produces plans to move forward. All that is equally applicable whether you are seeking investment, marketing to prospects, selling to customers or hiring new recruits.
Stage two puts in place the necessary change plans. I may act as part of the executive team. I usually help to craft persuasive communications.
Stage three is seeing things through to results – as a consultant, interim executive or possibly as a non-executive director.
