Simon is a natural leader and a serial innovator. The driving force behind the creation of Ceros in 2007 within its parent agency FMG, he helped guide the platform’s direction and maintained its strict adherence to the importance of user experience.
Simon spent 19 years at family owned FMG, completely reinventing the business and eventually becoming its CEO before successfully selling the agency to one of India's most respected Private Equity firms. The investment house went on to capitalise the business to the tune of $100m. Along with co-founder Paul Fifield, Simon spun out Ceros in early 2011 and is now focussed on building business into a globally admired technology company.
At the age of 24, in the dotcom boom of 2000, Paul opted out of the last year of his Computer Science degree (he's still yet to complete his final year!) and joined the startup team of a fashion and entertainment site. The site and business quickly morphed into an online video production company and went on to pioneer brand funded short-form entertainment in the UK. The agency grew to over $5m in annual revenues working for brands such as Sky, MSN, Yahoo and Wrigleys developing content across online, mobile and TV.
The agency merged with FMG in 2007 and Paul went on to become Commercial Director of the $15m combined business with joint responsibility for over 250 people. He then grew a $3m digital marketing agency within FMG in just 18 months - leveraging FMG's internal technology Ceros and winning clients across the US and UK including Sears, Staples, IBM and Thomas Cook. Along side FMG's CEO, Paul then successfully sold FMG to a PE firm that took his blueprint for growth and capitalised the business to the tune of $100m for aggressive global expansion. As part of that transaction Paul successfully spun out Ceros, secured $1.5m in seed funding from the same investors and launched the business as an independent subscription based technology company in January 2011.
Paul has overall responsibility for responsible for sales, client services and strategic partnerships.
After gaining a 1st Class Honours Masters Degree from Bristol University in 1996, Steve joined the global consultancy services firm Perot Systems, and was involved in the planning and delivery of several large scale international projects at blue chip clients, including M&G financial services and Baker & McKenzie the global legal firm.
Four years later, realising that he couldn't fight his entrepreneurial genes, Steve co-founded software as a service business PROJECTminder, which specialised in delivering web-based business management software to professional service organisations such architects, engineers and management consultants. PROJECTminder was quickly grown from scratch to 25 staff, $3 million turnover and sold to the UK's largest privately owned software group, IRIS Software in 2007 (www.iris.co.uk).
Following 2 years as a Director at IRIS, a $200 million revenue business, Steve now has the experience of creating and running a startup, has felt the growing pains that startups have as they grow, and has seen first hand how a very successful blue chip software business is managed. By taking the best bits of each of these elements he is able to apply these to Ceros during its phase of high growth. Steve is also an Angel Investor and Board Advisor to other fast growing internet businesses. In his spare time Steve loves spending time with his family, windsurfing, surfing, mountain biking and road biking.
Stuart is a sales professional with over ten year's varied experience helping 'technology for marketing' companies create and improve their sales operations. Stuart has displayed the drive and entrepreneurial flair needed to create success in small startup organisations, alongside the structured and process orientated approach necessary when building 'C Level' relationships on behalf of a leading global management consultancy.
In 2004 Stuart joined Emailvision and quickly took on sales leadership responsibilities for the UK. Over four years, Stuart was instrumental in growing sales revenue's and the sales team as Emailvision prepared for an Initial Public Offering. Year on year growth of over 70% saw Emailvision achieve a dominant market position and initial capitalisation of nearly €50M in 2007.
Subsequently Stuart joined Accenture Interactive, the digital centre of excellence within the management consulting firm. Responsible for the development of CMO function relationships within Accenture's clients, Stuart helped to define opportunity around a number of Accenture's strategic software assets and solutions.
Stuart is an avid cricket fan (England and Surrey), a long suffering football fan (Fulham!) and enjoys occasional trips to the Rugby (Harlequins). He enjoys travelling, his kindle, fine wine and steak.
Tom is a rare breed of technologist that not only codes but also pushes product development to new innovative solutions. Tom has built a career of streamlining development and finding efficient production workflows for large media agencies. From day one, Tom's voracious appetite for working with the latest devices to hit the market and a number of programming languages including HMTL, CSS, Java, PHP and ActionScript to list just a few, has kept Ceros ahead of the curve.
Prior to becoming CTO for Ceros, Tom was a Solutions Architect delivering complex systems for well-known brands such as Specsavers, Renault and O2. Truly an expert in his field, Tom's pioneering, often visionary approach to technology is fundamental to the considerable growth and success of the Ceros platform.