Meet the VE: Martin

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 Martin

Area of expertise: Business strategy and transformation, e-commerce and digital, retail operations, client experience, acquisition integration, coaching and mentoring.

When and why did you join Get Ahead: I was at the kitchen table when Get Ahead was conceived! For the first few years I cheered and helped from the sidelines whilst remaining in ‘corporate’, and then brought my independent consulting work into the Get Ahead fold. Over the last year my focus has shifted toward helping scale the business itself: developing propositions, supporting the Regional Director network, and working on the operational and digital infrastructure that holds everything together. It turns out that running a growing business is its own kind of consulting project.

What did you do before you joined Get Ahead: A long and varied career that started in retail (Superdrug, Kingfisher, Argos) and moved through e-commerce, technology, consulting, and client services. I spent seven years at eCommera, part of Dentsu Aegis, building the services team that delivered multi-channel commerce platforms for brands including Asda, House of Fraser, Disney Store, and Jimmy Choo. After that, a series of consulting engagements covering digital strategy, acquisition integration, client experience, and business turnaround, across sectors from hospitality technology to health and beauty. I have also been coaching and mentoring business owners and leaders for several years, and am currently completing ILM Level 7 certification.

Career highlight to date: The first one that comes to mind is opening day for big W in Edinburgh – a 100,000 sq ft store which only existed as a high level concept seven months previously. Brilliant team, great fun and a massive learning experience. Winning Multichannel Retailer of the Year for Argos is up there. So is growing the services team at eCommera from a standing start to 50 consultants and a 250-strong engineering function, and watching that become a key part of the acquisition case. But if I am honest, the highlights that stick are usually the moments when something that was stuck became unstuck: a team that found its feet, a business that found its direction, an integration that went better than anyone expected.

Plans for the future: To keep learning, which at this stage means getting properly under the bonnet of digital, SEO, and the kind of content strategy that actually drives business growth. And to make Get Ahead’s RD network as strong as it can be, so that more growing businesses can access the kind of support that used to be available only to the big players.