Advisory Board

Paul Plant

Paul Plant is Cofounder and Director at BigFive Digital. He is an experienced Strategic Marketer, Digital Thought Leader, and Entrepreneur. Paul is also the Founder and Chief Listening Officer at Radicle Consulting, Cofounder at PostTag, and Director at the Mindset Department.

Paul has been privileged to have worked with some of the world’s largest media and telecom companies. He gets excited about the opportunities presented by new and emerging technologies.

BigFive Digital provides thought-leadership, news, networking, research, and insights to companies that are actively engaged in the fast-moving and rapidly growing digital local commerce ecosystem across Africa and the Middle East region. Their aim is to provide meaningful news, networking, and business development partnership opportunities for the diverse range of media and technology companies delivering Search, Social, Mobile, Location, and Payments solutions to SMEs.

PostTag, a startup Paul cofounded with a former Creative Director of BBDO, is an innovative solution providing “front-door accurate” navigation to drivers via a simple online application. It is an address lookup and validation solution that gets delivery drivers and riders to the correct front door, quickly and efficiently. More people than ever now rely on home delivery, for goods and services, for food and groceries, or just to ensure that the minicab or private hire car they ordered arrives on time, and at the right address.

Since 2010, Paul has been the Founder and Chief Listening Officer at Radicle Consulting. He provides strategic Thought-Leadership in Business Transformation, Customer Experience, and Organization Design to help overcome the challenges of a constantly changing digital-dominated environment.

Watch Radicle Consulting Webinar: Reaching the Growing Number of ‘Digital First’ Consumers.

Paul serves as Director of International Partnership Development for Vendasta, a multi-award-winning Saskatoon (Canada) based software company, providing an end-to-end commerce platform for selling digital solutions to local businesses.

Paul is a contributing author for the book Aftershocks and Opportunities – Scenarios for a Post-Pandemic Future. This book explores a range of different scenarios and shifts for our post-pandemic world constructed around four core themes: Critical Shifts & Scenarios, Society & Social Policy, Government & Economy, and Business & Technology.

This book draws on the expertise and insights of 25 respected future thinkers from around the globe with the goal of providing individuals, leaders, and organizations with a vision of what kind of world we might be facing. The verdict is largely optimistic with many contributors seeing the pandemic as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for positive change.

Previously, Paul was the Director at The Mindset Department since 2014, the non-Exec Chairman at LaingRose between 2014 and 2020, and Professional Mentor at Wayra, a division of global telecoms giant Telefonica Group that provides investment and incubation to new digital startup enterprises.

Paul served on the Board of SIINDA (The Search & Information Industry Association), a pan-European nonprofit organization that serves media publishers and companies operating within the local commerce ecosystem. He is also an advisor to The Asian Local Search & Media Association in Asia and has worked for PwC as a subject matter expert in the directive media and telecoms sectors.

Paul tries to keep up with the latest new technology developments by being highly active in the Digital Startup and Incubation arena. The first startup he got involved with was mexgrocer.co.uk in 2009. This specialist online food retailer, which has been a great success, was named by both The Times and The Independent as one of the Top 50 food websites in the UK.

Paul’s entire career has been in the media, telecom, and technology sectors. His passion for local media and communications started the day he left school when he landed a job in his local newspaper. After ten years working in the regional press, he joined British Telecom, starting out in sales, before moving into management. Paul went on to spend more than two decades in the executive team at Yell Group, working in both the UK and US.

Paul has always enjoyed operating at the forefront of transformational business change. He was part of the team that launched yell.com in 1996, and he went on to head up Yell’s New Media Sales & Operations teams. He spearheaded BTYP’s international growth strategy, which began with the industry-altering acquisition of Yellowbook USA in 1999.

Outside of his main business, Paul is as an unpaid marketing ambassador for The Cape Winemakers Guild and its annual auction. Formed in 1982, the Guild is an association of some of South Africa’s finest winemakers and presently has 48 members. Every year, they each produce up to two “special” wines which then get tasted and voted on by their peers (via blind tasting). On behalf of the CWG, Paul organizes a number of pre-auction tastings each year at selected venues in London and Edinburgh, where guests are invited to sample these exceptional wines prior to them going under the hammer.

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