Mike O'Riordan
Mike's career began with a city firm of chartered accountants. Shortly after qualifying in his mid twenties, he moved into industry taking up the senior positions of Chief Accountant and Financial Controller.
Bitten by the sales bug in his early 30's, to the surprise of some, Mike took a sales position in the computer industry where he achieved great success and many formal awards in sales, account management and Branch Management roles-culminating in being appointed Marketing Director of Sperry Ltd in his late 30's.
After the merger of Sperry and Burroughs he was appointed Marketing Director of Unisys, and, as a key member of the UK management team he was instrumental in creating a new company with a new mission and new products which grew sales and profitability by 20%. In 1988 the company's revenues exceeded £300m.
Mike's entrepreneurial nature took him away from Unisys at the end of the 80's to the board of ITL where later he supported the Chairman in the sale of the company.
Mike subsequently joined Acorn Computers Ltd as Sales & Marketing Director - playing a pivotal role in moving the company from a computer manufacturing base to the position where it capitalised on its strengths in technological know-how and education services. He was closely involved in the creation of ARM Limited-a FTSE 100 company now worth £7.0 billion.
Mike was also Managing Director responsible for the creation of a software services company focused on the education market which was later sold to Apple. Picking up responsibility for International Operations, Mike was the prime mover in the Tesco 'Computers for Schools' initiative which achieved over £30m in sales for Acorn.
After 6 years at Acorn he joined Technosys Ltd - a start-up professional services company which specialised in implementing the full suite of Microsoft products. In under 4 years as Sales & Marketing Director he took the company to a revenue position of £6.6m and £880,000 pre-tax profit concluding with the planned sale to IT Net for £9.1m in 1999 achieving significant capital gain for the directors of the organisation.
Mike has worked independently since 2000 capitalising on his considerable general management and sales & marketing exposure. He has been a Non-Executive Director at Quantum for a number of years.
Mike has worked with Quantum’s clients in IT, telecoms, professional services and BPO in areas such as:
• Salesforce assessment
• Account development planning
• Sales management and front line coaching
• Recruitment
|
|