Meet the Team

Alan founded the Resource Development Centre in 1987 and began training, developing and consulting in sales related subjects: Relationship Selling; Negotiating; Target Account Management; and Sales Team Direction.

For the past 15 years Alan has focused on training, developing and coaching experienced sales teams and their executives. He has conducted over 530 assignments in 30 countries plus 20 of the American states.

Alan has a refreshingly realistic style of delivery and his wide range of training material is firmly based on experience to encourage the development of pragmatic skills. His unique style and experiences in competitive selling strategies for high value sales propositions has resulted in his clients winning hundreds of millions of dollars of business, in highly competitive arenas.

Alan excels in his chosen profession and continues to deliver successful programmes to a wide variety of clients including Microsoft, Oracle, BT and Siemens plus a large number of smaller companies in a variety of industries. A few clients have used our techniques outside the business environment altogether – in such areas as international diplomatic services.

Alongside many other projects, Alan has recently achieved the following:

•Created and delivered a programme of Value Added Selling to 150 Key Account Managers to deliver global sales of $500 million+

•Worked as a strategist with a global sales team to over-achieve their annual sales target by 20%

•Coached a CEO and his Sales Director to over-deliver profits 15% higher than forecasted in a difficult and changing automotive market

•Assisted a CEO and Sales Director to realise the sales potential from newly emerging opportunities in Eastern Europe

•Provided negotiation techniques and skills to sales teams to deliver higher profit deals in spite of their difficult prevailing circumstances.

Richard retired from the Metropolitan Police after completing 30 years service, following both military service and experience in the private sector. His police experience has included a wide variety of operational roles and specialist detective duties.

His last five years were spent as part of the elite Hostage and Crisis negotiation unit dealing with Hostage situations both Nationally and Internationally and he served in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

During the last 10 years Richard has focussed on developing his training skills and has been selected to train law enforcement agencies and other government agencies within the UK and across the world. As lead trainer in hostage negotiation Richard researched and developed the communication skills taught to all hostage negotiators and since leaving the police, Richard has continued to develop these skills and now teaches them to all areas of industry.

Richard’s clients include Oracle, SAS, TGI Fridays, Shell Women’s group, United Nations, CIMA, Cambridge University Graduate Development programme, Norton Rose and many other blue chip companies.

Thomas set up the Virtual Coach Academy with Alan McCarthy in 2012 after spending 10 years in sales and management. Thomas has run several successful small companies and has sold products and services to some of the worlds largest companies.

Thomas has worked with BAE, Jaguar Land Rover, Aston Martin, PAM St Gobain, Lafarge Cement, UK Mail, Centrica to facilitate the delivery of required services.

Having recently moved to Virtual Coach Academy Thomas is now enjoying coaching others into the sales profession.

Chris retired from the police in 2013 having begun his policing career by serving five years in the Military Police. On leaving the Army he joined the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard serving 38 years as a career detective. After working on various major incident teams he was head hunted and became a member of the newly formed City of London and Metropolitan Police Fraud Squad dealing with organised and international crime syndicates.

Seconded to the Hostage and Crisis Negotiation Unit, during the last eighteen years of his service, he is the United Kingdoms most experienced Hostage Negotiator. Chris has not only been instrumental in successfully gaining the safe release of over two hundred hostages subject of kidnap, but has also negotiated and led teams responsible for the safe conclusion of many siege and suicide intervention situations.

Since 1995 Chris formed part of the UK Government international response to the kidnapping of British Subjects abroad. He has operated in over forty countries negotiating in some of the most inhospitable and dangerous areas of the world.

Whilst serving as a member of the Hostage and Crisis Negotiation Unit Chris became a member of their training team and w as responsible for training police and military officers from all over the world. He is currently part of the team delivering negotiation training to the Field Security Officers of the United Nations. He is regularly called upon to give talks and workshops on kidnap related issues and now trains private security officers in the skills of hostage negotiation.

Steve Hay has been an associate of RDC since Alan McCarthy founded the company in 1987. He is a commercially oriented Accountant with a proven record of success in risk management and across a variety of projects and roles in banking; governance; audit; and supply chain management.

Steve has been successful in both the private and public sectors. His consultancy work in the UK and overseas has benefitted from his track record of driving value creation through continuous improvement and change management – dealing with negotiation, outsourcing, cultural leadership, development and motivation of teams, and helping many senior managers to build successful careers.

Our joint projects have mainly been in the following areas:
•Negotiation Techniques
•Finance for Sales Managers
•Proposal Writing
•Sales Management Audits

These projects included negotiation workshops for sellers – and for buyers of specialised services such as Information Technology.

We have provided training and development for Sales Managers; improving their skills and self-confidence in Finance and increasing their success in selling to people from a financial background.

We have also provided specialist advice and development for Sales Managers in proposal writing; resulting in increased sales by building and communicating compelling business cases and presenting their real benefits to clients.

Our consultancy projects included overall reviews of Sales Organisations; using the RDC Sales Audit Blueprint to verify and provide reassurance of best practice – and to highlight areas for improvement, helping to deliver change that assures success in meeting sales targets.

John has been an Associate in RDC since taking up a Project Management role in 2011. He holds a Marketing Management MSc from Manchester Metropolitan University, specialising in Integrated Marketing Communications strategy.

Prior to his appointment at RDC, John was directing youth unemployment strategy programmes for the Department for Work and Pensions and Marketing Project Management for Esource, among other roles.

With a professional background in Marketing management, John is responsible for Communications and Target Assurance Planning within RDC and our partner organisations, successfully growing RDC Publishing, Camila Prada Tableware and Halcyon Magazine among others.

John has recently successfully delivered:

•CV building, job search and interview techniques to groups of school leavers and graduates in the UK, helping them secure further education and employment opportunities

•Assurance plans for partner organisations and clients that have delivered sustained growth in both start-up and established companies

•Cross-service communication plans that have generated effective leads for sales activity and created brand and product awareness among existing and potential clients

Wanda is a highly experienced negotiator of software contracts and since 2009 has been training and mentoring IT sales professionals.

After gaining a degree in Applied Psychology, Wanda started her career at Mobil Oil – where she learned the best practices in Procurement. She was part of a large international team of buyers, concentrating of Marketing buying as well as Chemicals and IT.

She left Mobil to join Dale Carnegie Training where she spent four years training people on overcoming fear of public speaking and how to communicate and influence people.

After starting her family, Wanda joined Telewest (now Virgin Media) to set up their IT Procurement Department and a few years after that joined Merrill Lynch Investment Bank (now Bank of America) to run their EMEA IT Procurement Team.

After Merrill Lynch, Wanda moved to Barclays Capital to run their Global Software Procurement Team. The annual spend was around £400M and the team grew to 20 people worldwide.

Wanda founded Amycus in 2009. The company took its name from the Greek God and Trojan Fighter. The logo is the letter psi – highlighting Wanda’s expertise in the psychology of influence.

The Amycus workshop entitled “How to Influence Corporate Procurement” has been instrumental in unveiling the world of corporate procurement to clients like Oracle, Symantec and Trustmarque Solutions.

With the RDC constantly expanding we wanted to build a small strong team and so

Chris Fuller was recruited from a lifetime of sales experience to support both the sales and delivery of training for VCA.

Chris started his sales career back in 1998 and has sold everything from conservatories to high end cars, security services to finance.

He has held various management, recruitment and sales roles and recently awarded Fellow status with the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management so is a strong asset to the team.

Having worked for some of the top brands in the United Kingdom, Chris has a wealth of knowledge in both the B2C and B2B sales arena and enjoys sharing that with others.

Keke Patissier has over 20 years’ experience in the sales arena following the successful sale of her communications business to the WPP group. She has been an associate of RDC since 2002. She is a straight talking consultant with a track record of successful sales programmes both in the UK and Internationally.

Keke has led a wide variety of projects from sales strategy through to implementation working with large corporate or SMEs with tight success criteria in the IT, Automotive, Retail, Property, Travel Industries.
•Instigated new sales planning process across 12 subsidiaries in major IT corporation
•Developed strategies resulting in business growth from $7m to $90m in 4 years across 10 countries in CE
•Restructured and retrained sales force in line with corporate strategy
•Introduced sales planning methodology to ‘non sales’ personnel resulting in 20% growth overall

Sales strategy:
•Go to market model – Value proposition
•Customer segmentation

Sales teams development:
•Sales planning and monitoring Qualification
•Account management
•Negotiation
•Coaching

Michelle keeps everyone on track managing our finances.

She has worked with the RDC for over 10 years and does a great job of keeping everyone focussed.

Mark is an experienced and successful senior leader who has enjoyed a successful and varied career to date. He has worked internationally covering the US, the Middle East and Europe in leadership roles encompassing Sales, Operations (Service delivery and customer services), and marketing.

In his roles at Oracle and Microsoft he managed multi country organisations as well as working with Corporate HQ functions in the US, whilst with COLT and Reed Elsevier, enjoyed full end to end autonomy of UK functions with P&L responsibility.

He has worked across most sectors of business covering Banking and Finance, Public Sector, Telco, Legal and Retail, selling and delivering products and services for the majority of his career.

He has successfully delivered worldwide programs covering sales methodologies and change programs and now runs his own company, leveraging his experience to help companies improve their performance and operational rigour.

Mark has an MBA from Strathclyde Business School

Kevin has over 27 years experience in a wide variety of policing disciplines, his experience includes both overt and covert policing roles from walking the beat as a uniformed officer to Chief Inspector operations on a large division of Greater Manchester, and as head of Greater Manchester Police Hostage Negotiation Unit.

As a Hostage Negotiator he has years of experience of communicating in the most extreme and challenging situations, and has used this experience to develop others.

Kevin has also worked as Intelligence manager where he was responsible for collation and dissemination of intelligence for the City Centre division of Manchester and within the Specialist Operation branch as a Public Order Commander.

As head of the Hostage Unit Kevin was responsible for running a team of Police Negotiators and delivering training at a national and international level in relation to kidnap negotiation, and foundation level negotiation for new negotiators. Kevin has trained UK Police officers, UK Special Forces, United Nations, and a number of international police forces. He has himself successfully graduated from the FBI’s Hostage Negotiators training program in Quantico Virginia, something very Negotiators outside if the FBI have achieved.

Through his role as a Hostage Negotiator and a police leader Kevin has become an expert in the skills of listening, influencing, and leadership.

Alan is a specialist in the Education sector having worked in, and consulted to, universities and colleges, e-learning providers, vocational training companies, business colleges and international schools in an international career that spans over 20 years.

He also has experience of working within the logistics, banking and finance, manufacturing and leisure and tourism sectors where he has held senior marketing and sales positions.

This combination of experience in education as well as industry and commerce has proved valuable in implementing culturally appropriate and commercially astute programs that achieve targets and objectives.

His areas of expertise include income generation, student recruitment and marketing and internationalisation and he is currently engaged on projects with modern and Russell Group universities in this country and with major overseas institutions.

Alan has Masters degrees from Cranfield University and the University of New South Wales, and is a graduate of Aston University. He is fluent in 3 languages and is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.