Mike is a columnist, entrepreneur and brand marketing guru. He will, through storytelling, show audiences how to have better ideas by thinking easy rather than thinking hard. Mike adds fun to facts in a very entertaining way, delivering profound insights with wit and humour.
He is not only a magazine and newspaper columnist, but also a regular after dinner speaker and director of a number of private and public companies.
Mike started his career as an advertising copywriter and early on, won the Trenchard-Smith trophy for the highest aggregate marks in Australia and New Zealand in the Advertising Institute exams and the Reader's Digest Scholarship as New Zealand's Most Outstanding Young Advertising Man, which saw him working in Sydney with Lintas Advertising.
He has co-founded a number of leading advertising agencies, including Colenso Communications and Hutcheson Knowles Marinkovich Advertising. He has been part of teams that have produced many of New Zealand's memorable campaigns. He also spent a couple of years with TV and film production house, Communicado, producing and writing for television.
In 1997, Mike joined Saatchi & Saatchi as Executive Director and was appointed Managing Director in 2000. He also set up 'The Hive', a Saatchi and Saatchi think tank.
In amongst all this, Mike also ran a family building company for a few years, set up Replica Homes, a franchise building chain throughout New Zealand, worked on the team that established the first Lifecare Retirement Villages in New Zealand and his own real estate company.
Mike left Saatchi & Saatchi to co-author a book on "helping people to have ideas" and early in 2003 launched The Lighthouse Ideas Company, to "dress up people and products up in their Sunday best".
In 2008 he and his partners undertook a management buyout of Image Centre Ltd (having been on the board for a number of years.) He’s now having more fun than he’s ever had – helping launch Ice Interactive, a new multi-channel division to expand the company’s strategic digital offering.
Mike writes a regular innovation column for Unlimited magazine, following his penning a humour column in The Independent for many years. Collections of some of Mike's liveliest, most articulate and funny columns have been published in book form, the first entitled "No1 Best Seller"! The second, Beethoven's Banker and other stories was published in 2006. He also co-authored “Kickstart Your Creativity with psychologist Rebecca Webster. He is a regular television guest and commentator.
Mike is an entertaining and insightful speaker, with a strong focus on branding, creativity and innovation. Mike inspires with humour and surprise – and as with a good joke, he will "lead you up the garden path then yank you off into the bushes".
