Author: Mike Southon

Mike Southon was educated at Papplewick School, Ascot, and Wellington College in Crowthorne. He only lasted one year at Imperial College, preferring to drink beer and chase women rather than go to lectures. He then had a variety of jobs, including helping British Leyland assemble trucks and buses and making sugar into detergent, before just about completing a degree in Chemical Engineering and Management Economics at the University of Bradford. It was there, in 1984, that he met Mike Banahan and Andy Rutter, who, along with Peter and David Griffi ths were founders of The Instruction Set. He joined them as Director of Sales and Marketing, and the five of them built the company to one that employed 150 people and was sold to Hoskyns Group in 1989. Mike then set off in a different direction, pursuing a full-time, and very successful, performing career in colleges and theatres as 70s disco legend Mike Fab-Gere. Then he went back into the business world, working on 17 start-ups, some of which later went public, others of which went broke. The latter were as informative as the former, he comments. All these experiences went into creating The Beermat Entrepreneur, which was published in 2002, and later The Boardroom Entrepreneur and Sales on a Beermat, all co-authored with Chris West. Mike is now one of the worldÆs top business speakers and conference moderators, a Fellow of the Professional Speakers Association. He appears all over the world, from events in schools to major international conferences. When not speaking live, he provides free mentoring to entrepreneurs. He also writes a column, My Business, in the Financial Times every weekend.