‘Way back at the beginning of my career,  as a trainee manager at Sainsbury’s, I came across a guy who influenced my direction to such an extent I can pretty much blame him single handedly for where I find myself today.

He was a Department Manager at the time and he had a huge and deserved reputation for his retailing skills and his high standards but most importantly his staff loved working for him.  I started to learn from him (and blatantly copy him) and over a period of time started to get the same results.  This was noticed by the powers that be and I was quickly promoted to Department Manager.  As my confidence grew I decided (his idea) to apply to Tesco for what I thought was a similar level job but they offered me Assistant Manager of a £1m per week store and very quickly promoted me to Store Manager.  I was then lucky enough to be head hunted twice in 4 years so by the time I was 28 I was an Executive at Somerfield with a staff of about 3,000.

From there I took the unusual leap into consultancy and the rest, as they say, is geography. So what?  Well last week the ‘guy’ , Lance Oliver, joined the team at Rambutan – a company he inadvertently was part of creating.’

David

ps. His mug shot is now on our ‘get in touch’ page and we’ll be doing another photo shoot soon for ‘the team’ page.  Watch this space…!