Chief executive, Stone Group
Career so far After graduating, I started my career as a chartered accountant with KPMG. I then went on to become finance director of Andrews Sykes Group for five years - one of the fastest-growing smallcaps on the London Stock Exchange. In 1999, I moved to the Longville Group, an £80m buyout, as finance and commercial director. I then held a couple of roles in Aerospace. For the last eight years, I have been at Stone Group where I started as finance director and have held the role of chief executive since December 2012.
What was your first job and were you any good at it? Discounting the paper round, my first job was door-to-door sales of security products to earn a few pounds as a student. As with all sales jobs, when you're on a roll you're great and the rest of the time you need perseverance.
Who was your top teenage pin-up? The Athena tennis poster was all the rage at the time, mixed in with a few England cricketers. But to pull one out of left field, I'd go with Felicity Kendal as Barbara Good in the Good Life.
My colleagues won't know this about me but... unfortunately my colleagues already know most things about me, but perhaps not what a cracking curry I can conjure up.
What is your favourite snack? Definitely salt and vinegar crisps.
What has been your career high point to date? I relish my current role. We have such a strong team now; I'm looking forward to seeing where we can take the company.
Has 2013 been good, bad or ugly? 2013 has been a good year, as we will exceed our record revenue year of 2012. We have achieved this by consolidating our route to the UK public sector market with some great framework wins and building a team capable of taking us to new heights.
Also our burgeoning Professional Services division has shown its teeth with great projects that are due to be announced shortly, services we wouldn't have been typically associated with previously.
What do you say when asked at a party what you do for a living? I work for a computer company.
If I wasn't working in the channel I would probably be... climbing mountains or playing golf.
What will be the channel's biggest challenge in 2014? There's plenty of talk around solutions such as cloud, BYOD and so on, but a major issue that's often overlooked is an organisations' legacy investment. I think the challenge is to create great IT solutions to support business strategy while utilising legacy systems to future proof IT investment. Stone Group manages the whole lifecycle of IT infrastructure from cradle to grave as a manufacturer, repairer, recycler and refurbisher as well as innovative infrastructure solutions specialist.
