Today is a fairly momentous day for Bite in North America. I’m delighted to confirm that Tom Galvin is joining us as General Manager for North America, effective November 1, 2009. In his new role, Tom will focus on driving the further development of our offices in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Toronto. Tom is going to combine this role with his current position as a partner in Bite’s sister firm 463 Communications, a senior level communications consultancy that helps organizations establish business, technology and public policy leadership. Through his role at 463, Tom has become well known to me, and to Bite; over the last few years he’s partnered with us on a number of occasions on client assignments and has been hugely impressive in every engagement.
Tom is going to be replacing David Hargreaves who is moving within the Next Fifteen Group to create a new organization in the digital space, reporting to Next Fifteen CEO Tim Dyson and working in collaboration with Bite UK’s Nick Rappolt. Both David and Nick have been superb colleagues to work alongside. Knowing how tremendously excited they are by their new venture, given its strategic importance to the Next Fifteen Group, I wish them the very best of luck. The good news is that, given David will also continue to sit on the Bite Group board and will be responsible for helping drive our global digital strategy, we’re not saying goodbye to him completely. Likewise with Nick; we fully expect to continue seeing him involved in Bite client activity albeit through his new Next Fifteen venture.
To give you a bit more insight into Tom, his 20-year career has been spent at the highest level of the political, media and technology arenas. Prior to founding 463 Communications, Tom served as Vice President of Government Relations at VeriSign where he was responsible for driving strategy and interactions with policy makers regarding homeland security, Internet security and telecommunications policy. He also served as Vice President of Corporate Communications and was named by Technology Marketing Magazine as a “Marketer of the Year” in 2002 for his role in shaping VeriSign’s corporate image.
Prior to VeriSign, Tom created a Washington, DC communications office for Cisco Systems just as the company launched a nationwide branding campaign. Tom later moved to California and managed Cisco’s corporate public relations team. In that role, Tom served as a lead strategist on corporate communications initiatives and helped brand John Chambers as an elite CEO. Tom also spent over a decade as a political journalist, participating in more than 10,000 interviews with over 1,000 newsmakers. He started his career as a congressional correspondent for Congressional Quarterly and later worked for the New York Daily News.
I’m also delighted to announce the promotion of Tony Hynes to General Manager, West Coast, North America. In this role, Tony will be responsible for our West Coast business overseeing our SF and LA offices. Since the day he joined Bite, Tony has been relentless in his pursuit of client service excellence and as a result has delivered consistently high client satisfaction scores across his client portfolio. Alongside his commitment to client service, Tony also has a fierce commitment to social excellence within Bite too and is a truly powerful cultural force for our business! His promotion is therefore rich reward for his efforts.
Lastly, I’m really pleased to confirm the appointment of Sean Mills to the position of General Manager, New York. Put simply, Sean is a superb public relations professional – inspirational to clients, media and colleagues alike and it’s testimony to his undoubted ability that he is now officially heading up our efforts in New York.
So, a time of change for our North American management structure but I’m confident that the change will be incredibly positive for our business and for the individuals involved. As the market begins to show signs of a positive rebound, I’m delighted to have Tom Galvin join us and lead our team across North America. I sense good times ahead.
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