Appointed to develop, from concept to trading, an exciting new business to provide Payplan clients with affordable finance for essential purchases, including home electrical items, cars, boiler finance & big-ticket furniture.This new venture uses an extremely innovative credit scoring system as conventional credit scoring wouldn’t work for clients in a debt management plan. The new system assesses both affordability and risk.Affordability is based on a client’s detailed Income & Expenditure records which is detailed enough to include allocations for haircuts and school lunches as well as more typical commitments such as secured and unsecured finance, housing, etc.Risk is assessed based on a client’s payment history into their debt plan, other secure and unsecure credit commitments together with more traditional credit reference agency reports and also considers potential future changes to a client’s circumstances including any significant payments due to end such as HP agreements, loan or credit card repayment as well as forthcoming increases to expenditure such as CSA judgements, etc.The business comprised of two companies, a trading arm called Red Potato that managed the sale of the goods and a lending company called Premium Plan Ltd to assess and manage the loans. My key responsibilities included:• Business planning & execution• Set-up lending company – Premium Plan Limited• Set-up trading division – Shopping Mall Online Limited trading as Red Potato• Legal & technical development, including HP Agreement, APR Calculation & accounting • Credit check, credit scoring, lending criteria and internal assessment process• Website build and systems integration• Supplier negotiations• Staff resource planning & recruitment• Brand development and marketing plan development• PR planning & objection handling• Company process planning & business integration• Internal consultation, pilot and successful launch

Responsible for the product management of Group assets including Payplan Financial Services, EnergyCare, PayplanPlus and other brands but with particular responsibility for the growth and performance of the core debt solutions business from a customer recruitment and acquisition perspective. Under the leadership of a newly recruited Marketing Director, a core facet of my role was to introduce the discipline of Product Management to Totemic in a way that engaged the whole business and demonstrate that we could grow our client base profitably whilst maintaining our defining free-to-client pricing model. I led a newly recruited product management team and was responsible for devising a product strategy to utilise this new staff resource.Capitalising on my technical knowledge and proven product management track record at totemic I began to establish the team as the centre of expertise for the debt solutions market within totemic and use this to identify opportunities, define strategy and drive marketing initiatives across the business.

Recruited to totemic in summer 2009, my brief was to develop an online CRM strategy with the twin aims of driving efficiencies to the case management process and generating new income streams.Principally, I achieved this with the launch of a cutting-edge, online account management system to allow clients to set up and manage their debt repayment plans online called PayplanPlus. This web-based system interfaced in real time with the central case management system giving clients up-to-the-minute information about their Debt Management Plan or Individual Voluntary Arrangement while allowing Case Officers full oversight and control. An innovative timeline app lay at the heart of the system and combined the website with SMS, email, outbound calls and direct mail to guide clients through setting up and managing their debt plan.The system drove significant savings across the business by markedly reduced admin hours and case set-up time while aiding customer retention and reducing postage & payment processing costs. Within a year of launch, nearly half of all Payplan clients were active users of the new system, exchanging over 13,000 messages and making 11,500 payments grossing £2.5m each month.In order to create new income streams I established a new multi-channel, database marketing team to plan and implement co-ordinated marketing campaigns across the group and I developed a number of non-regulated, complimentary products including energy switching, telephone & broadband and a discount club.In the team’s first year, 1.9 million targeted emails were sent generating over 6,000 client referrals to mortgage and insurance products, over 3,000 energy switches and contributing significantly to £3m of lending by the new secure lending division and to the acquisition of 30,000 clients of the PPI claim handling unit.Latterly, we looked at ways to harness the Payplan system to grow the core business and began development of a smartphone app (case studies posted soon).

ONEOFONEHUNDRED was established to discover, mentor and nurture exceptionally talented designers and artists and to provide them with an environment where they can create the most beautiful and exclusive work.My role is to provide technical and commercial guidance to the artists and then develop their concept to the point of manufacture. Involved; rapid prototyping, 3D printing, pattern making (loss wax, sand), foundry casting (gold, silver, bronze aluminium), cabinet making, metal work, polishing, product engineering, assembly.

Mobility4U Ltd retail mobility scooters, wheelchairs and other mobility aids both through a small network of shops and online. I introduced a substantial programme of expansion for the company’s online business, doubling turnover in the first year and increasing it 33% in the second year to £1.2m. I achieved this by redesigning the online retail space, various SEO work (including both paid and organic search engine optimisation), PPC and other online promotion. We also launched an eBay shop and listed our products in a variety of directories and price comparison sites.Turnover was only part of the story. We also broadened and deepened our product range to increasing profitability and level seasonal troughs to reducing risk in a highly specialised market segment.

Co-ordinated online and offline promotion of goods and services to member-based organisations such as professional associations, trade unions and common interest groups.

WWWATT.com acted as an incubator for new web ventures during a very exciting time to be working in the internet sector!Amongst our many projects we provided one of the first subscription-free Internet service (vISP) which we branded for various membership groups such as the Police Federation of England & Wales. I was a senior member of a web development team delivering over 100 websites and web strategies for a broad base of organisations with the emphasis on financial services organisations, public sector, trades unions & police federations.