After serving 6 years in the British Army, Tony chose to pursue a career in Civil Engineering. Although initially promising, his early successes were cut short after just 4 years when sustaining an industrial injury. The immediate impact was the loss of sight in one eye, followed by a sympathetic immune system attack on the remaining good eye which, over the ensuing 2 years, resulted in total sight loss and no remaining light perception whatsoever. After a short period of adjustment, Tony then knew it was time to consider his career options.
Being blind presented many new barriers, but more significantly than any, the period of this re-emergence was placed against a backdrop of political manipulation of employment figures where the trend was to encourage anyone with a disability to go into long term incapacity, rather than even try to return to employability. Nevertheless, Tony embarked upon a course of formal training, becoming the first student in Lincoln to study at degree level. He also set new landmarks when becoming the first qualified blind vocational learning assessor and also Microsoft Certified Professional status. Even after several years of education, the employment trend (now in the early 90s) was still very much against disability, and so Tony decided to start his own business, seeing that as the most accessible and viable prospect.
The first venture saw Tony providing IT solutions to local business owners, but a chance encounter with other visually impaired entrepreneurs led to the creation of an informal network of mutual inter-trading and service delivery. This collaboration of 5 companies led to massive growth for all over a short period and firmly established the positives that arise from effective networking. The first company grew in size and revenue over the next 8 years, but in 2000, Tony closed the door on IT provision to focus solely on consultancy services, which had latterly become the more revenue positive aspect of the existing business. The new business went from strength to strength, attaining government contracts in almost all regions of the UK for the provision of Access to Work assessments. This is a Department of Work and Pensions scheme to help people with a disability achieve or maintain employment. The assessments involved the analysis of the business needs, the physical built environment of the workplace, what adaptations might be applied, and often, delivering sensitive independent arbitration to ensure ongoing employability and reasonable adjustment between employees and employers. Since then, Tony has delivered European funded projects to engage people with a long-term disability into sustainable employability, often through self-employment.
Tony also worked for two years for a leading UK charity in the provision of bespoke consultancy. The primary focus was to support and develop opportunities for their clients to create their own businesses and find viable re-engagement and self worth. It was in 2007 that Tony finally turned to online opportunities, seeing it as a highly viable and accessible business model. This became full-time in 2010, when Tony decided to embark upon a more transportable lifestyle, change his lifestyle a bit and to enable a more mobile lifestyle. Since then, Tony has had several successes, including a product launch that netted $50k in its first week (in the days when 5 figure launches were still an exception). Despite having a relatively high online profile, Tony was shocked back into action recently when being asked to view a newly created business site that had been developed by a leading local web dev company. He was shocked to see how the site broke almost every marketing rule in the book, and apart from being visually stunning, would very unlikely ever deliver any sales. After further investigation, Tony realised this was endemic of an industry that was wholly misaligned with the needs of its clients. Site after site was seen to have major errors, such as not including contact data, calls to action, never even mind the total lack of optimisation. This apparent lack of expertise within local ‘expert’ companies extended to social media and even paid ads, where businesses were blindly throwing money into paid ads without questioning the returns on investment. So, after such a long story, Tony has now established Local Global Marketing. The intention is to bring good practice to online marketing for local business. While he fully recognises that he cannot change a tarnished industry alone, at least the steps that he takes will impact on change. The future for Local Global Marketing is ambitious, but today is not the place for that.
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