Meet The Team
Mark
Speciality: Internet Marketing & SEO
Born into poverty in rural Northamptonshire, Mark pulled himself up by his frayed boot laces and joined the RAF as a boy pilot, before becoming a pacifist and then leaving the RAF to write poetry. After a completing a degree in Economics, he got headhunted by The Daily Telegraph and worked in Fleet Street before setting up a theatre company and touring Britain with a string of productions ranging from Pinter and Beckett’s finest to lascivious and raunchy comedies. Graduating to stand-up, he made the nation howl in such award-winning comedies as Phoenix Nights and the lesser known John E Blagg. Mark was at the cutting edge of Internet Marketing in the late nineties and was single-handedly responsible for the dot.com boom. And bust. In typical Mark-style, he pulled himself up by his (by this time) well worn boot lace and set up his own marketing agency in 2000 (which is still going strong without him). He launched Topskips.com in 2003 and taught himself the mystic art of SEO. Mark has lectured at Manchester Metropolitan University and the British Library and has coached scores of business owners in how to take control of their own marketing. He lives a quiet and modest life in Cheshire with his wife and their five little children.
Steve
Speciality: Chief Technician
Steve has worked with Mark for millenia (well, ten years and counting). He is our technology geek. Cutting his technical teeth in Indonesia, a period of his life about which he remains strangely silent, he returned to Stockport, the place he now calls home. Steve sees websites like car engines and loves nothing more than sticking his beak into someone’s source code and having a good old rummage. His other interests include putting up shelves. Basically, if anyone round here has to do anything slightly technical, you can always hear them wail ‘Steeeeve????’
Katy
Speciality: PPC & Keyword Research
A degree in Modern Languages from Jesus College, Oxford opened the world stage to Katy when she graduated in 1998. After a year in Japan, she went to work on the Japanese desk of what was then Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu in the City before nearly dying with boredom. So she made the obvious career change and became a tour guide on a bus round Europe. After an exciting season in a second-hand Wallace Arnold DAF 3000 (56-seater!) she settled down in shipping in Northern France where her sole responsibility was wrestling empty containers off homeless Nigerians. Those were the days. She moved back to Blighty in 2002 and met Mark whom she coerced into marriage in 2003. Katy’s interest in semantics and language equip her admirably for the keyword research and maintenance of Adword accounts as well as helping Louise with content creation.
Shaun
Speciality: Web Development
Eschewing a university course at the age of 18, Shaun instead thought he would put his A levels in Business Studies and Psychology (not as bizarre a combination as you might think) to use and became Junior Burger Manager at McDonalds. What has this to do with Web Development you might ask? Well, very little except his experience gave him an overarching (geddit?) desire to not work at McDonalds. Shaun has actually been designing websites since he was a pimply fourteen-year-old and at the tender age of 16, his website featured in the august publication Computer Music Magazine. Shaun’s knowledge in web development is profound. Not only does he have a fantastic eye for design, his coding abilities are first-rate. He has been working with Mark since 2008 and lives in Bolton with his wife and kiddies. Apart from t’internet, Shaun like horror movies and baking.
Louise
Speciality: Copywriting
Graduating from Goldsmiths in 2004 (Eng. Lit) Louise did her apprenticeship in a skip yard, an experience which qualified her admirably to be the Face of Topskips.com. Despite rumours to the contrary, she really does work here. Now her literacy sets her up for much of the content writing and website creation in our business. Her interests include cake-making, falling asleep in pubs and The Arts.
Stole
Speciality: SEO
Stole (pronounced Stolly – don’t ask) graduated in software engineering in 2006 and immediately got a career break as a systems administrator, a move he was soon to regret as he found himself running out of matches to prop open his drooping eyelids. So bored was he with his job that he made the perhaps hasty decision to get out of systems and into land administration. The only positive outcome of the 2 years he spent administering land (?) was that he ended up being headhunted by Publicis Groupe (that’s Saatchi & Saatchi to you and us) and earned his marketing stripes in the media planning section looking after blue chip clients such as T-Home. From his time spent in traditional advertising, Stole can clearly see that the internet is the future of marketing and so jumped at the chance to work for Mark. He is our SEO engineer and loves footie and dweeby computer games.
Sam
Speciality: Data
Sam is a Suffolk lass turned good. She made the sensible, and in retrospect, obvious decision to head north in 2003 and has made the north-west her home ever since. No stranger to the world of finance, she is also our data analyst and responsible for the maintenance of our databases. Funnily enough, she gets really, really excited by this stuff. She is also brilliant at scripting and telling people what to do. Her interests include biking, gambling and hip-hop dancing. And she only eats yellow food.
Dane
Speciality: Website Design
Dane graduated in Business Administration in 2008, a peculiarly dry choice of study given his rather obvious artistic bent. Not only is he gifted musically (a little known fact about Dane is that he can play and sing every single South Park song in character) he is also very at home with a paintbrush and easel. Not fancying the life of an impoverished itinerant artist, Dane turned his hand to professional web design following his studies although he has been designing websites for seven years. He is now our second in-house designer with the added benefit of being able to whip his guitar out at the drop of a hat and get the party going. He needs little encouragement… Our resident minstrel-cum-web dev.
