What has been your business/work highlight of 2024 so far?

Getting back to travelling.

Having spent the best part of 20 years travelling in my various consulting roles, I have genuinely missed being out and about, quite as often, for the last 4 years – it was a big part of who I am. So spending a few weeks in the Nordics for the first time in almost 10 years, meeting lots of new people, in lots of different organisations, with lots of different challenges has been great.

And yes, I had every airline, hotel and car hire reward scheme, each ticking over a few points here and there every year!

Who is your business hero and why?

Sir Richard Branson.

He built businesses he was passionate and interested in! Who in their right mind would see the jump from record stores, to airlines, to holidays to telecoms, to rail, to healthcare…

He has an amazingly engaging personality and has built a great and marketable persona, which has resulted in a huge amount of positivity from the people that work for him across the businesses as well as the general public.

Whilst I don’t envisage Purple Square moving into retail fashion or space flight in the next few years, I hope we demonstrate a similar level of passion about our work that Sir Richard does for his projects.

What’s the biggest business mistake you’ve made and what did you learn from it?

Coming to the realisation that we put a lot of time into our work life and even though money might be good, toxic relationships are simply not worth it.

As an individual, I stayed at an organisation for two years longer simply because they offered me a bit more money each time I tendered my resignation. The work and culture themselves didn’t change – the hardest 2 years ever.

The same applies in business to supplier<->client relationships. It doesn’t matter how fruitful the commercials are unless you’re both aligned and willing to work together for a mutually successful outcome, then, it becomes very hard to do business. Yes, it’s hard to sack a client, but sometimes for everyone’s sanity and well-being, it’s worth doing.

What’s the most inspirational book you’ve ever read and why?

Traction by Gino Wickman.

I first read this in 2016 and refer back to it time and again to focus on the fundamental components of our business. Taking fairly simple activities, but framing it within an organisational operating system has helped us time and again.

Every business leader, from small to large will see aspects of their organisation being represented and the common challenges faced for consistent and maintained growth.

What’s the biggest challenge you face in your role in 2024?

Keeping on top of the continued growth (or tsunami) of AI capabilities and integrations in MarTech.

Each tech vendor will promote it’s own unique capabilities, so it will continue to be a challenge to identify what is real, what is slideware and how our clients will get the best out of it. The biggest risk to organisations will be the drift towards a potential homogenisation of their activities – if everyone else is using AI to create great CX – how will they stand out!

What technology will have the greatest impact on your business this year and why?

Also AI.

The potential to streamline so much of the day job, not only for our clients, but also for ourselves. The ability to rapidly build out new ideas will open up huge amounts of opportunities for test and learn activities. We will see individual roles develop to manage their AI toolkit, whilst also ensuring they can add the true human touch.