Insight Factory

Alan is Chair of the New Alchemists and CEO of The Insight Factory, with over 35 years of international business experience. He has chaired confidential business owner, CEO and MD peer groups since 2005, and has been CEO of The Insight Factory since 2000. He is a C-level executive performance coach and mergers & acquisitions consultant whose work covers building company value, corporate strategy, mergers & acquisitions, asset finance, leadership development, executive performance, and identity & culture transformation.

As Chair of the New Alchemists — a high-performance confidential peer group for business owners, CEOs and MDs — Alan’s role is to chair, guide, coach and facilitate greater decisions, greater leaders and greater performance. As CEO of Insight Factory his role is to coach, facilitate, consult and guide: greater questions, greater insights, greater decisions. Alan also chairs the board of the Canoe Association for Northern Ireland (a charity).

Before founding The Insight Factory in 2000, Alan worked for international organisations including Avis Europe, Fore Systems (now Marconi), Druid Systems (now Xansa) and Beenz.com (the first digital currency). His roles have included business analyst, European data centre manager, European director of IT, operations director, senior consultant in CRM and eCommerce, CEO, managing director and chairperson.

Alan has been retained to support organisations internationally as well as across NI, ROI and GB to develop and deliver leadership, cultural transformation, corporate growth and exit strategies — including Avis Europe, GSK, B9, Accenture, BT, O2, government agencies, Hay Group, the Irish Football Association, Bank of Ireland, Reuters, Panasonic Avionics, Datactics, PwC, Edwards & Co, Novosco, Inonology, W5, Belfast Met, Danfoss, the LEGO Group and Invest NI.

He is a certified executive performance coach, Certified Value Builder System advisor, and Inner Game and team coach (Working Together) trained with Timothy Gallwey and Sir John Whitmore of Performance Consultants. He has been a Certified LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® partner and master facilitator since 2003, is certified to deliver The TAS Group sales methodologies, is certified in the Hay Group’s Emotional Intelligence Competence Inventory, and is a certified NLP practitioner. He holds an MSc in Coaching and Organisational Development and is a member of the Institute of Directors and the Sales Institute of Ireland.

Steve has over 30 years of international business experience in sales, business management and management development, drawn from a number of different multinational companies.

In management positions in the eighties and early nineties he played a major part in changing company culture, learning and developing his coaching skills and applying them directly, achieving powerful results from various sales and business teams.

Steve operates at the leading edge of coaching in the UK. By engaging executives and teams in a powerful programme of one-to-one or team coaching, they are encouraged to focus on goals and challenges and create the self-responsibility to implement the necessary action to achieve results.

He has studied with the School of Coaching, Inner Game coaching and team coaching (Working Together) with Timothy Gallwey and Valerio Pascotto of IGEOS, and performance coaching with Sir John Whitmore of Performance Consultants. He is a Certified LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® partner and facilitator, is studying for an MSc in Coaching and Development, and is a member of the Institute of Directors.

For the last 12 years Vic has been Europe’s leading proponent and practitioner of High Performance Management. Prior to independent consulting and coaching, he spent 20 years in human resources, including the role of European HR director with both British and US multinationals.

He has a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.