Hugh grew up in Northern Ireland, where he was a teenage entrepreneur, first propagating and selling plants, later wholesaling school supplies, and later as a music journalist and promoter with a weekly column in a national newspaper by the time he was 18, and left for the UK to study Electronic Systems Engineering.
He buckled down for a 30-year stretch on a more traditional career path, but the tech degree just made him a more inquisitive sales and marketing guy in BT (the UK telco) and sent him off on a path that would travel through 22 countries, a bunch of M&A and start-up roles, and eventually led after business school to a 19-year stint at 3M Company through a variety of digital, marketing and business leadership roles.
Hugh's simple maxim as a marketer was learned 30 years ago and repeatedly validated ever since: figure out why your customers will buy from you, now, and in the future.
Most recently out of 3M headquarters in Minnesota, Hugh led a team that bootstrapped a $30m program to bring the Net Promoter System approach to 3M, ending up with 1000+ people across functions and continents using customer feedback every day to prioritize CX improvements. He learned a phenomenal amount about experience, but also in driving organizational change and selling investment cases. He also had the incredible privilege to work with some of the original creators of the NPS methodology which came out of Bain and Company, and attend the 20th birthday celebration for NPS last Spring in Boston.
His time in CX is where Hugh internalized the other big part of his philosophy: Treat your team and your customers as you would like to be treated yourself.
Hugh is an active entrepreneur through his regenerative food business Sauce North and his digital advisory firm Grá Works (Grá is the Irish word for Love). He also works as CMO and fractional CMO at Atomic Elevator where he helps clients leverage a powerful syndicate of experienced marketing talent through an innovative 'un-agency' model and some bleeding edge technology that makes knowledge accessible at entrepreneurial speed and scale.
