Experienced sports marketing & communications consultant, credited for working on award winning campaigns for some of the world’s most famous brands. Expert at helping businesses grow by maximising their return on sponsorship and partnership investment. Most recently served as Global Head of Sports Marketing for WPP firm H+K Strategies and International Head of Brand Consulting for Creative Artists Agency (CAA). As well as being a trained NED, Andy now runs his own consulting practice, specialising in partnership strategy and reputation management. Motivated by leading high performance teams to create ideas that ignite human passion through the power of sport and entertainment.
How do you think you will be able to help others as a PBSL mentor?
- Defining personal brand: Raising self and social awareness
- Building resilience: Handling conflict, seeking resolution, overcoming adversity. Ability to bounce forward
- Career planning & business innovation: An independent perspective on fulfilling individual and collective potential
What type of knowledge and experience are you looking forward to sharing?
Drawing upon personal experience and knowledge to coach and mentor around the three topics mentioned above:
Defining personal brand: My experience of building high performance teams across different cultures in different geographies, with everyone subscribing to an uncompromising set of values and common cause. Each team was made up of a diverse set of individuals with different skills and personalities. Each person understanding their role and value. Proof points include leading a team that won Sports Agency of the Year in the most competitive year of all (2012) and lecturing on business leadership for InSport Education. Proud to have featured in ‘PRWeek’s Global Power Book’ in recent years and in 2018, was named as one of the UK’s Top 5 sports communication professionals. As a key opinion former, I am also asked to participate in conferences, judge awards and contribute to news programming in international and national broadcast media, national print, online, trade magazines and journals.
Building resilience: At a client level helping clients through high profile issues and adversity; such as HSBC’s sponsorship team during the financial crisis; P&G’s Olympic campaign ’Thank You Mum’ during the zika virus; and Carling in the midst of headlines about alcohol induced football hooliganism. On an individual level, helping colleagues through personal hardship in the work place (from bereavement, to bullying, to harassment, to racist allegations) – some of which I have unfortunately endured on a personal level, too. Also, the challenges and knock-backs of starting up your own business during a global pandemic! I sit on the Advisory Board of No Turning Back, an equality, diversity & inclusion social enterprise; and serve as a NED to a tech consulting business called Alethia, who provide digital tools that promote a healthy speak-up culture inside organisations, leading to its ethical transformation
Career planning & business innovation: I have had a total of five jobs. My last three have been newly created roles. Today, I have my own consulting enterprise. I recently trained to become a NED. Questions I’ve always like to ask myself: How do I evolve my current role? How can I put myself under healthy pressure to become better? How can I be different? What are the unmet needs that I can solve – for myself, my team, or my clients? Passionate about raising the career aspirations of school and college leavers, and serve as an Advisor to the Careers & Enterprise Company, who work with Local Education Authorities to advance the provision of Careers Services for young adults.
What were the key things you learnt from the mentor training?
- Loved the overarching premise that our role is to improve thinking
- Loved the acronym, WAIT
- Loved the relationship between Think, Feel, Do
- Loved the coaching & mentoring continuum
- Loved the PAMO model
- Loved the “Five What’s”
But if pushed to call out one thing, the real epiphany for me was the importance of psychological ownership and the ‘no monkeys’ rule.
How do you think your career would have benefitted if had a mentor when first starting out in the sports industry?
Easy. Accepting vulnerability can be a strength. A good mentor would have identified my shortfall A’s in our PAMO model and personal pride wouldn’t have been a barrier to a more accelerated path in the first half of my career.