Bios

Darren McLennan has more than 17 years experience in consulting including 8 years consulting to small and mid-size organizations across all business functions in services, technology, manufacturing, distribution, and retail. More recently, he worked with Deloitte Consulting, where he focused on customer strategy and customer service in public sector businesses and technology-media-telecom. He is currently focused on engagements in customer strategy, strategic planning, and the startup/tech innovation ecosystem.

In his spare time Darren reads voraciously and practices Muay Thai kickboxing and Brazilian jiu jitsu. But he does a bit less of both since his awesome son was born in the summer of 2016.

Email: darren@secondorder.ca

John Hall is an expert advisor and transformation leader in the areas of Strategy, Customer Experience Transformation, Service Operations, and Business Process Outsourcing. He is a former partner at McKinsey & Company and Accenture and was recently SVP Customer Experience at Rogers Communications.

During his 10 years at McKinsey he had extensive experience serving telecom, financial services and utilities clients, co-led the Canadian financial services practices and was a founding leader of the North American Customer Experience and Service Operations practice. As an independent advisor, he has counselled telcos in Canada and the UK on customer experience strategy and transformation.

At Vertex Business Services, headquartered in the UK, John was focused on operating and growing its private sector and utilities business in customer service and IT outsourcing for clients which included utilities, telecom operators, banks, and retailers in the Canada, the US, and UK. He also oversaw offshore operations in India.

At Rogers he led the transformation efforts which improved Net Promoter Score performance significantly, and more than doubled digital adoption.

In his spare time, he enjoys hosting friends at the cottage, listening to jazz music, skiing, and travel. He also has a keen interest in history and international relations.

Email: johnhall@bellnet.ca

Richard Lee retired as a Partner in Deloitte’s Consulting practice in Canada in 2014 after a career of 29 years.

While at Deloitte, Richard worked with his clients’ senior leadership teams to facilitate the development of their business, customer and product strategies and to plan the implementation transformational change.

After leaving Deloitte, Richard worked for Aequitas Innovations for two years on an online platform to facilitate the capital formation process for private companies. He is currently an Executive in Residence at the Ted Rogers School of Management where he coaches MBA students and an Advisor at the DMZ at Ryerson (a tech business incubator). In his spare time, Richard enjoys travel and he is an avid student of British history.

Email: richard@secondorder.ca

Debra MacLaughlan is the founder and managing partner at Strategic Inc. where she oversees a team of consultants providing consumer and market insights to a wide range of clients. These insights are used to develop business plans, create strategies to advance business and complete economic impacts analysis.

Debra shifted her attention to creating strategies for developing and maintaining customers- working first with Nordicity, then Coopers Lybrand, PwC and finally opening her own company.

Debra has been contracted by York Region, the Federal Government, the Ontario Government, Bell Media, Rogers Media, Evanov Radio Group, AMC, Fox Network and Goldman Sachs among others to consult on policy development, brand valuation and program assessment.

Email: DebMcLaughlin@mail.com

Stewart Hayes has spent over 15 years working with teams in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia to design, develop and implement strategic changes, leveraging organizational and operational change best-practices to do so. Since 2007, he has focused upon the the customer experience space, working with charitable, public sector and corporate clients, across industries including the financial services, telecommunications, retail & automotive sectors.

Stewart brings a rare combination of expertises in strategy design & development, project design, planning & management, operational efficiency & optimization and business modelling & process re- engineering. All of this work has been focused on how to design, activate and track great customer experiences that generate loyalty, advocacy and a return-on-investment. Stewart has consulted with companies across the globe, taking both direct leadership positions and facilitation roles in customer experience transformation.

Past clients of Stewart include HSBC, BMO, TD, Scotiabank, Magna International, Bank of England, RBC and CIBC.

When not helping to design exceptional experiences, Stewart enjoys skiing with his daughter, volunteering with his therapy dog Peploe, guitar, squash, meditation, and reading with his baby boy born in November 2017.

Stewart lives by a mantra that “fear is a clear indication you are doing something right.”

Email: stewart.hayes@authenegade.com