Michael has been in sales for over 17 years. After completing his degree in commerce, majoring in Marketing and Management and spending extensive time researching the FMCG industry worldwide he began as a sales representative.
Designing and managing field forces in his native South Africa across many FMCG categories he developed key core competencies in both the science of designing large scale forces for different markets and also for managing field teams across diverse markets and geographies.
In 2008 he launched, at the time, the largest dedicated field force dedicated to a single client and successfully ran this for four years delivering significant results in performance and ROI.
From2011-2016 he lived in china and has been the head of the Always & Smollan joint venture servicing china nationally for multiple clients in field sales and retail execution. The field force covers over 450 cities and employs around 14000 people. He has been dedicated to building the Smollan core competency of retail execution in store and perfecting the model for the Chinese market and national rollout. He also graduated his Executive MBA with honors while in Shanghai.
In late 2016 he returned to South Africa to take over as Chief Growth & innovation officer for the group to work on building strategic regional and global client relationships as well as developing the Smollan Digital & Ecommerce service offerings, acquisition led innovation strategy and new services.
