Here at Get Ahead our people are everything. Our ever-growing team has a wide range of highly skilled professionals with different backgrounds, expertise and even different personalities to ensure that we can find exactly the right Expert to match our clients’ requirements.
Here’s 60 seconds with our expert Ian
Name: Ian Macholl
Area of expertise: Marketing strategy, CRM marketing, website development, SEO and online promotions, design and print management, webinars and live events, copywriting.
When & why did you join Get Ahead:
I joined Get Ahead in July 2024, after some long-term freelance contracts within the pharma industry. I would like to make good use of my “all round” marketing experience and I am looking forward to some interesting and varied assignments!
What did you do before you joined Get Ahead:
I have worked for companies in a variety of sectors: clinical research, information publishers, software developers, professional services companies (IT and construction), and a firm that runs conferences for the global aviation industry.
Since graduation many moons ago, I have only ever worked in marketing and I love it! Most of my experience is in B2B marketing, but I also have some experience in B2C and selling to the public sector.
Career highlight to date:
I once joined a very mature and traditional business as their Group Marketing Manager. Their biggest market by far was the UK, with sales just under £4 million. The owner believed it had a maximum potential of around £5m/year, plus a smaller contribution from overseas.
Over 6 years, we doubled the Group’s product range and direct mail programmes, introduced online trading, SEO and online promotions, set up telemarketing programmes, merged brands and rolled the entire model out to 4 new countries. The results beat all expectations as we almost doubled UK sales to £7.5m, and overall Group turnover from 8 countries reached £12m. Furthermore, I achieved this with a relatively small increase in the marketing team from 5 to 8 people.
Plans for the future:
I want to continue to develop my skills, especially in use of video and to build more attractive, easy to use and effective websites!
I always get a real kick out of finding a new source of revenue, market niche, product/service development opportunity or promotional channel that can boost sales, then developing and implementing a project to exploit the potential!