“My clients tell me it helps that I’ve been in their position, appreciate what they’ve been through and know what to expect around the corner.”
An enterprising thinker, with a thirty-year track record of delivering entrepreneurial success in Unified Communications by challenging the status quo. My core strengths are across sales, marketing and business enterprise in the telecoms and, subsequently, Unified Communications (UC) marketplace.
My formative years were spent in and around the established telecoms market. I was then at the birth of the alternative telco marketplace in the early 1990s, spending 10 years in the emerging sector before forming my own company, Protel UK Ltd in 2001. In under a decade, the company grew to become the pre-eminent, industry voice supplier. Protel’s innovative service challenged the conventional carrier offering, with an approach that championed real client needs. The company was successfully sold to the Six Degrees Group in July 2011. My 10 years’ experience of running Protel – and growing it year-on-year from scratch to £7 million in revenue with high-end EBITDA – means that I have hands-on experience of what you and your business are going through.
Once you’ve had a taste of running your own business, you never go back to the corporate world, so my next natural step was to form another company. There was a real opportunity in the confusing UC field to address the short-term nature of industry solutions, as well as the lack of personalised attention to client needs and strategic objectives. With this opportunity in mind, Crestwave Solutions was launched in late 2013 with the same market-challenger ethos. Again, starting from zero, I built the company to the point of it being revenue established and profitable, with a strong customer base.
Over the last few years, I’ve often found myself with the same thought: If only I’d known back then what I know today. The idea of business enterprise and mentoring was one that had been burning away inside of me for a few years so I decided to sell my interest in Crestwave in May 2017. As a business owner, I needed someone like my future self as a mentor. That thought inspired me to set up Citrus, using my wealth of knowledge and experience as a forward-thinking entrepreneur to help others. By providing business and entrepreneur coaching, rather than consulting, I can share what I’ve learned along the way and help like-minded entrepreneurs realise the success they deserve.
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