Meet Ian Clark
Vice President, European Sales
Hometown: Southport, England
Family: Married to Nadine with one grown son, Ryan. Having been a golf widow for many years Nadine decided to give the sport a go and is now a golf nut and a pretty good player. She recently won a 36-hole tournament at our club, which is fantastic. When not working for Network Rail as a Maintenance Planning Engineer, Ryan plays bass in a rock band from Leeds, Hawk Eyes. The band has had some good success in the underground scene In Europe and played some pretty big gigs opening for Metallica in Milan and Foo Fighters in Hamburg amongst others some years ago. A new album, Advice, Hawk Eyes fifth, will be released in September.
College/Education: I trained as an Electrical Engineer with Otis Elevators and studied at Liverpool Polytechnic to gain HNC Electrical & Electronic Engineering. I also studied at the Open University gaining a BSc (Hons) Computing & Systems Thinking.
Favorite Activities Outside Work: I’m a keen golfer having played since I was a boy. I’ll play most weekends in a club tournament of some kind. I also really enjoy road cycling to try to keep fit and make room for a few beers. It’s a great sport to clear the mind but I do hate hills as I’m not built for climbing. Nadine and I very much enjoy travel, live music gigs and hiking when we can.
Background in Emergency Management: My background is enterprise software sales and building high performing sales teams, so I’m pretty new to Emergency Management, but learning a lot and enjoying the experience.
What Do You Love Most About Your Job?: Working with people of all backgrounds and cultures as teammates and customers. I also enjoy the learning and continuous development needed when you enter a new sector.
Why Juvare? I was very interested in combining my sales experience of developing new markets with a technology sector that was new and interesting to me. I’m enjoying the challenge of being part of the team taking the leading Juvare solution to new geos and vertical markets.
Most Important Quality You’ve Observed in Successful Emergency/Incident Management Professionals:
Of course this is a new sector for me but I’m not surprised to meet people who are extremely skilled with a common trait to use their wealth of experience to assist people in difficult times. A huge amount of training goes into developing EMS professionals but you can’t teach compassion, selflessness and commitment which are obvious qualities in many of the professionals I meet in this space.
What is the Future of Emergency/Critical Incident Management?
Emergency Management has traditionally been the realm of the emergency services and local authorities and as a discipline I would say this is less mature in Europe compared to North America. Despite initial work by the EU and ISO organisations, ‘European’ emergency management standards are still evolving but I expect European authorities to embrace and adopt critical incident management with more professional rigor encompassing not only public but private enterprise stakeholders.
I also believe business enterprises are starting to understand the need to be prepared for major crisis incidents whatever form they may take. Business Continuity Management to some extent does address major incidents but is chiefly related to IT outages and less focused on customers, employees’ well-being, property and brand reputation. Increasingly enterprises will need to have the capacity to prepare for crises, practice responses to not just recover but minimize impact and importantly connect a variety of stakeholders.
Favorite Vacation Destinations: South Africa’s West Cape is a wonderful winter destination. Fantastic climate, scenery, food and wine and the golf is extremely good. I also very much like Italy. Just returned from a family holiday to Sardinia in July and really enjoyed the beaches, history and food.
Favorite Sport/Sports Team: My favourite sport is Football and the English Premier League and I’m a huge fan of Liverpool F.C – YNWA.
What Music Do You Listen to?: I have a very eclectic taste in music from punk to classic and everything in between. Recently been revisiting Portishead, The Stone Roses, Future Islands, David Bowie and Pink Floyd. Quite a mix!
What Are You Reading?: Currently reading a thriller, The Passengers by John Harris. It’s a very up-to-date plot about a hacker targeting driverless cars, putting them on a collision course and asking the public to decide who should survive via social media!
Favorite Quote: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill
