Our Team
Our top team is made up of people who are leaders in their fields.
Geoffrey Bennet; Gavurin Management Group
Paul Miller: Managing Director
Mike Shaw: Sales and Marketing Director
Mike Lowenstein: Operations Manager
Professor Ron Martin: Gavurin Management Group
Geoff Bennett
Geoff is a member of the 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
Paul is Managing Director of Gavurin. Until July 2006, he was Managing Director of Trends Business Research – a company that he co-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.
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Mike Shaw
Mike is Sales and Marketing Director of Gavurin, he joined Gavurin in October 2009.
Mike spent the first ten years of his working life as policeman with Merseyside Police. He became a member of the Operational Support Division in the immediate response team (force-wide major incidents such as murder, riots/disorder, targeted serious crime). He was also a member of the Royal and VIP protection team as an armed officer. He then joined the Armed Response Division and was selected for the Tactical Aid Unit responsible for firearms training and hostage situations. Mike became the first ever officer to qualify as a British sign language interpreter.
Mike then emigrated to Madrid, Spain after qualifying as an English teacher. He secured a contract with Bank of Spain and started a business that put 85 teachers into the Bank, 6 days a week. Additionally, he started Europe's second biggest skydiving drop zone with two Spanish partners. (This business remains successful).
In 2001, with a friend, Mike started Evolution Aqua and became Sales and Marketing Director. EA is a manufacturer of filtration systems for high-end garden fish ponds as well as associated goods such as pumps, food etc. The company is trading in over 50 countries and has sales of around £5M.
Mike remains a shareholder in EA.
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.
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.
