Our Team
Our top team is made up of people who are leaders in their fields.
Geoffrey Bennett: Chairman
Paul Miller: Managing Director
Michelle Buchan: Commercial Manager
Mike Lowenstein: Operations Manager
Professor Ron Martin: Gavurin Management Group
Chris Moore: Gavurin Management Group
Geoff Bennett acts as Chairman of Gavurin's management group. Until 2000, Geoff was an Executive Director of Courtaulds Textiles plc, responsible for its lingerie and hosiery businesses. These businesses employed around 10,000 people across many countries
While at Courtaulds, Geoff developed the company's globalisation programme. This was about leveraging maximum benefit from the global knowledge base in areas such as design trends, market knowledge, manufacturing costs, raw materials / supply chain information, technical know-and so on. As a result, Courtaulds developed the a significant US lingerie business on the back of product knowledge and credibility associated with both the brand and retailer private label positions in Europe.
Paul Miller FRSA is Managing Director of Gavurin. Until July 2006, he was Managing Director of Trends Business Research – a company that he founded.
Paul directed several significant sector and cluster analysis and development projects. He directed the world’s first comprehensive cluster mapping of a large national economy – for the UK Department of Trade and Industry, the UK’s largest single cluster development activity – for the East Midlands clothing and textile cluster and many others.
Paul has also been heavily engaged in the UK implementation of City Growth Strategies. These are initiatives to regenerate inner cities. CGS is based at ICIC in Boston - a Michael Porter not for profit initiative. Paul has worked with ICIC in the UK and is an invited speaker on many cluster related events.
Paul has directed many economics and economics related subjects for clients that include: Office of Fair Trading, ODPM, DCMS, DTI, UKTI, SBS, Employers Organisation for Local Government, GLA, London Development Agency, One North East, South East Development Agency, Devon County Council, Newcastle City Council, London Borough of Brent, IPPR, Nominet, HSBC, Lombard Finance and many others.
Paul directed the business school and the MBA programme at Newcastle University. He also designed and initiated the UK’s first post graduate programme in Human Resource Mangemement. Under his direction, the School’s part time MBA programme became the largest in the UK outside London. As an academic, he has taught, researched and published extensively in the field of strategy and strategic human resource management; he was a member of the editorial board of Human Resource Management Journal and a post graduate external examiner at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Paul is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Mike Lowenstein
Mike heads up our technical effort and is responsible for developing and maintaining the UK's largest economic development database. He is a Solicitor with considerable experience of general practise and in particular criminal work. He has a law degree from South Bank University and (almost) a degree in Maths and Physics from Sussex University. (Mike says that it was all a bit much!). He decided to change direction in 2000 and took an M.Sc in Computing Science at Northumbria University. He then studied for a teaching certificate and for a while taught IT at a school in Durham.
Michelle Buchan
Michelle heads up the Gavurin commercial operation. She has extensive experience of working with the public sector and previously worked with the IDOX Information Service and the Planning Exchange where her key responsibilities were promoting information projects and services with specific responsibility of building and servicing client relationships. Michelle is a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
Professor Ron Martin
Ron is a member of the Gavurin Management Group. He is Professor of Economic Geography at Cambridge University. He is also a Fellow of the Cambridge-MIT Institute, Professorial Fellow, St Catharine's College Cambridge and a Research Associate with the Centre for Business Research, Judge Business School, Cambridge University.
Ron has a number of key distinctions. He was
- Elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2005
- Selected by the American Economic Association in 2003 as one of the World's Most Cited Economists
- Elected Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2001
- Awarded the British Academy's 'Thank-Offering to Britain' Senior Research Fellowship in 1997-1998
Ron has played a key role in the development of a new economic geography of money. His research under this theme covers global financial centres, the spatial structure of financial systems, venture capital markets and the role of finance in regional economic development
Ron regularly provides research advice and consultancy to Government Departments (for example DTI and Regional Development Agencies) and has undertaken various studies for them.
Chris Moore
Chris is a member of the Gavurin Management Group. Chris has as over 10 years senior marketing experience working for a number of brand focussed international companies including Thomson Publishing, Argos, Whitbread, Harrahs and AXA. During this time he has been responsible for the creation, launch and re-launch of a number of different brands and the development of a number of new business opportunities, all achieving significant commercial success.
Chris has extensive brand marketing experience, both strategic and tactical, and has exposure to a number of different sectors and organisational cultures. Chris has created 3 new brands and one new European brand category. He was responsible for two start ups, a successful IPO in 2000 raising Euro230m and he has managed large marketing teams and agencies across Europe and US with budgets in excess of £10m.