Partners
Stephen Neill
Stephen is a founding partner of VBM Associates, a management consulting firm that specialises in helping organisations worldwide to develop and implement pragmatic business solutions designed to maximise and sustain value creation. Since establishing the practice in 1996, Stephen has led project teams across a wide range of sectors, applying ‘value based’ principles and methodologies to strategic, organisational and operational business issues in both large multi-national companies and smaller private equity backed organisations. He has worked with a range of leading companies in various sectors across Europe, North America, Asia and South Africa, including Coca Cola, Cadbury Schweppes, Mars, British Telecom Adidas-Salomon, Pearson Group, Boehringer Ingelheim, Alliance Boots, Barclays Bank, Barclaycard, WH Smith, and Avon Cosmetics, Karo Pharma and HRA Pharma. Stephen is passionate about working with clients to deliver challenging value creation goals. He has developed a unique and powerful set of methodologies to help senior managers better understand the company’s key value drivers in a systematic way, and then to mobilise the business around these. He strongly believes that an understanding of a businesses’ key value drivers and top management consensus about these is an essential basis for the development of successful business strategies and for value maximising commercial decision making and performance management. Stephen is co-author of ‘The Value Mandate’, a leading shareholder value development guide for top management. Stephen is also co-author of a book on Internet companies, their valuation, and efficiency implications for net-responsive companies, Net Value (2001). Prior to establishing VBM, Stephen was a senior associate at Marakon, a leading international Managing for Value consultancy and was Chief UK Economist at the Henley Centre. He completed a B Com (Honours) degree (first class) in Economics at the University of Cape Town and an MPhil degree at Cambridge University
Pete Vernon
Peter is a partner of VBM Associates who held several senior positions in the corporate world before establishing himself as a highly experienced strategy consultant in 2006. Having graduated with a PhD in Chemistry Peter has over 25 years of involvement in Healthcare and Personal Product businesses. Earlier in his career he had senior roles in R&D, Marketing and Commercial Operations at Unilever and Boots Healthcare International including Global Head of Professional Marketing and Managing Director of Boots’ Italian business. Since entering the consulting world Peter has led projects globally for both major multinationals and private equity backed enterprises. He has a consistent track record of finding value-based pragmatic solutions to complicated business problems. He has worked with a range of leading companies in various sectors across Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, including Novartis, Reckitt (RB), Unilever, Boehringer Ingelheim, HRA Pharma, Karo Pharma, Futura Medical and PZ Cussons. Peter is passionate in helping partners drive top and bottom-line growth and uses his broad experience to help various functions within the client to communicate more efficiently. With Stephen, he has developed a highly effective consultancy model where experienced consultants that operate in a lean, networked fashion bring in relevant experts as needed allowing the team to be flexible as the project develops