Notable Achievements
In 2022, remote from Slovenia, I worked together with a consultancy in The Netherlands to support a EUR 20m funded French startup launching their smart foodservice business in the UK. I also worked with a London-based ad agency to deliver the planning strategy for the next TV campaign for Hello Fresh, the EUR 6bn per year recipe box provider.
In 2019-2022, I moved to Slovenia during a pandemic, on the cusp of Brexit, to launch a food-tech start-up focused on pan-European retail for artisan farmers and food makers. I secured investment from the managing director of a UK investment bank JP Morgan, backed up by Canadian-based venture capital firm Loyal VC. I created the brand, directed the identity and packaging design, designed the mobile app, and led the off-shore development team to build it. I created the logistics model and built the e-commerce site selling products and food travel. In our first month our EU pilot had over 1000 app downloads. Unfortunately, sudden unexpected mental-health issues affecting my US-based business partner severely impacted the project.
In 2018-2019 I was the strategic brand advisor to the CMO, CEO, and board of a £ 1.2bn UK-based international engineering group.
In 2017-2018 I was interim Executive Strategy Director for the seventy-people internal agency of Specsavers, the Guernsey-based £ 2.1bn optical and health group for 12 months, with an annual communications budget of £140m - I turned down full-time employment at Specsavers to move to the North of England and open an award-winning street food truck (this was not my best idea financially)
In 2016 I led the strategy for a twenty-person pitch team for the London office of the New York integrated agency R/GA on the global account for SEAT. Working in London and Barcelona over a 5-week period the work was regarded as some of the best strategic work the agency had seen.
In 2015 I became Chief Strategy Officer at The Partners, the leading brand consultancy for WPP the world's largest communications organisation. Whilst the culture of WPP was not for me I did lead a project across WPP that determined a data-driven model to justify the ROI of investment in branding vs advertising.
From 2014-2015 I took on a voluntary role as Head of the Chef Alliance in England for Slow Food, the Turin-based NGO, and largest food NGO in the world.
In 2014 I moved back from Amsterdam to London and went from being the chef of my restaurant to being a freelance strategy director for the world's leading social media agency in London. This was a culture shock. Work included social media strategy for HSBC that their European Marketing Director called ‘the most comprehensive social media strategy he had ever seen’.
In 2012 I opened my first bricks-and-mortar restaurant that went on to win TimeOut's Best of Amsterdam in its first 6 months and debut at Number 1 on Amsterdam’s Restaurant Review site among many others and generated 500k revenues in its first year. I closed the restaurant in year 2 because, despite awards, reviews, and great revenue it’s almost impossible to make money with a small restaurant from the heart and after 5 years of cooking the stress meant enough, I’d proved my point.
In 2011, I wrote a TEDx talk on the tipping point to electric cars and mobility and created the brand positioning, identity, and marketing strategy for a Dutch start-up in electric charge networks.
2010-2011 I became interim Strategy Director of the Amsterdam office of Design Bridge, the oldest and most respected global agency in brand and packaging design (after a year I turned down a full-time offer in order to keep cooking).
In 2009 I became a chef and created Amsterdam's first pop-up restaurant, which introduced the concept of ‘brunch’ to Amsterdam and went on to serve 150-person sell-out weekly events over 3 years generating masses of press coverage, awards, and was at the vanguard of the modernisation of the Amsterdam food and drink scene.
In 2008 I helped lead a team of 35 people from across the global Omnicom network to the winning pitch for Adidas’ EUR 10m digital portfolio in doing so creating the world’s first global social media agency.
In 2005-2008 I created Amsterdam's first integrated media agency and generated EUR 1m of professional services work in 3 years with the likes of Carhartt and Mattel.
1998-2003 I moved to Amsterdam from London and co-founded the first European office of the worlds leading dot com consultancy, Razorfish, and built a EUR 5m professional services portfolio in 2 years from nothing, with Benelux's largest banking and private banking group at the time, Fortis / MeesPierson, and with Vodafone/D2 in Germany. Along the way, I led the creation of the first global internet and intranet sites for both brands. In 2001 I created Vodafone’s customer journey, in doing so creating one of the first in the communications industry, and defined their first-ever brand guidelines for mobile devices.
In 1996 I managed my first commercial website development as project manager of a tech consultancy with a team of 8 developers.