As a Director of Mentor Group, together with Neil Kelly and Jim McManus, Chris specialises in Business Development including sales, customer service and operational coaching.

Chris is co-author of 'Bareknuckle Customer Service' and is a Master Practitioner and Coach in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). He has a passion and belief in coaching and development to achieve results with people in technical, service and sales roles, and manages a wide range of projects for FTSE clients.

Chris originally worked with Honeywell as UK Head of Customer Services heading up a 300 strong division. This was followed by a move to Dell, helping to evolve their distinctive technical and customer services model, leading to his appointment as Sales and Account Director with responsibility for UK, European and Global operations.

His experience and consultancy expertise has helped major organisations make improvements to their customer satisfaction index and customer retention rate, as well as achieve testing revenue growth targets.

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Neil is one of the original founders of Mentor Group, establishing this unique organisation in 1996. He is also one of the three directors of Mentor today, alongside Chris Norton and Jim McManus. As Director of Mentor Group, Neil provides direction, sound governance and access to the latest thinking for clients.

As a consultant, he leads and develops Mentor's capability in Organisational Leadership.

His substantial experience has been gained in the IT industry, in sales and general management including time served as UK Sales Director and International Operations Vice-President. Much of this was spent in Western Europe, the Far East and the USA.

Neil provides heavyweight support to FTSE and specialist clients in strategic Talent Management, global Leadership Development, Assessment and Development Centres and Change Facilitation Programmes.

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Jim is an experienced leadership & sales professional who provides a common sense and practical approach to helping organisations and people succeed.

Jim's early career spanned senior sales and management roles in the IT sector, including positions in Nokia, ICL and Fujitsu. This initially involved working across a range of vertical sectors in the UK and Irish markets, and progressed to running the international sales function for these multinational organisations - primarily in the USA, South Africa and SE Asia. This experience helped Jim to gain a deep understanding and knowledge of cultural and regional variations in business practice, which benefit Mentor's global client businesses.

As one of Mentor's three consulting directors, Jim is responsible for managing major international clients, developing Mentor channels to market and forming strategic global partnerships. This role also involves the introduction of leading edge learning application and environments, to enable Mentor to lead and keep pace with our customers and market demands. In addition, high levels of relationship management ensure that Mentor provides our customers with consistent delivery excellence on a local and global basis, achieving trusted advisor status.

Jim is passionate about delivering tangible returns on investment to customers, through people performance improvements that focus on applied skill and behaviour changes, aligned and related to role(s). Often asking 'why would you do this?' ..... and 'how will you know if it has been a success?'.

Two of Jim's specialist areas are Coaching and Business Development, working strategically to help both individuals and companies secure major and strategic revenue streams. In this role, Jim has helped our customers with transformation projects, on-boarding projects and the design and delivery of a range of development interventions that are on-site, virtual and client based. This often entails working extensively with clients on a global basis through large-scale, long-running and highly successful Mentor programmes.

In addition to being our Finance Director, Phil Hollyhead also oversees the overall back office function, including our IT and CRM systems, and is responsible for implementing our Sustainability Policy, especially the reductions in paper and unnecessary travel.

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Simon has extensive international experience of leadership and talent development at all organisational levels. A particular interest is the link between effective leadership and organisational performance. With 15 years experience in senior sales roles in the FMCG industry, Simon brings a strong commercial understanding and focus to his clients with experience across the public and private sectors.

He has an MSc in the Psychology of Performance, is a Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP, a qualified Myers Briggs Practitioner and a Fellow of the Institute of Sales & Marketing Management. Simon is a regular speaker at conferences and is a member of the Professional Speakers Association.

He is the bestselling author of 3 books ('Bare Knuckle Selling', 'Bare Knuckle Negotiating' and 'The Inner Winner') and co-author of 'Bare Knuckle Customer Service'. Simon has a high-energy, inspirational and practical "down to earth" style and approach.

For more information, please click here to check out Simons LinkedIn profile

Debby is a specialist in the areas of Personal Effectiveness and Business Development. She spent 13 years in the pharmaceutical industry within the commercial arena working with key opinion leaders.

Her particular focus is High Impact Communications and Service Excellence. Her emphasis is on enabling managers to get the most from their teams by helping them with the 'people dimension'. With bespoke Mentor programmes, Debby has created and delivered advanced communication skills capability that meets clients' required key performance measures.

Her world-wide delivery of specialist programmes has transformed the communication between non-technical people and highly specialist individuals such as scientists and engineers in numerous high profile organisations.

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As a senior consultant with Mentor, David works with organisations to develop their commercial skills. An inspirational leader, his particular areas of expertise are in Business Development and Organisational Development, with an emphasis on sales, account management and communication skills. After seven years with the Army, much of it with the Gurkhas, he became Sales Manager with Proctor & Gamble achieving marked success whilst developing coaching and development expertise. David brings these proven skills to Mentor where he has enabled clients to develop technical sales teams, achieve sales growth of over 30% and gain market share. He maintains his obvious passion for quality, whilst driving performance towards the achievement of strategic objectives.

Carina Newton ensures that each dedicated Client Support team provides expert back-up and streamlined programme co-ordination.