About Debbie Newman
Debbie has worked within a sales and marketing environment for the last 35 years.
She is a Companion of the Institute of Sales & Marketing Management
For twenty years she worked in areas as wide apart as education, to the very aggressive market of telephony solutions for businesses in and around the South West. Both of these roles combined sales and marketing functions and as such she has always strived to produce sensible, workable marketing solutions instead of theoretical nonsense!
- She established a successful south west sales office for an independent mobile phone provider when she won one of the company’s largest contracts with Viridor plc, based in Taunton. She also undertook the marketing for the whole company
- She proposed, developed and established the successful commercial arm of a boarding school;
- In the early 80s she pioneered Colombia as one of the new markets for the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) schools, with joint funding from the British Tourist Authority and working with the national carrier, Avianca. As the Faulkland crisis in ’82 had an immediate impact on travel from Argentina, Chile and Brazil to the UK for language studies, Colombia developed into a hugely important market, necessitating many trips there as well as throughout much of South America, half of Europe and the Near East – all before mobiles.
She is married with two daughters – one of whom is a staff nurse for the North Bristol Trust, and the younger is about to go to the Royal Academy of Music for post-graduate studies. Her husband, Bernard, recently retired from 38 years’ teaching and is now an international music examiner – so role reversal with the travel!
Debbie speaks good French, some German and Spanish and a little understanding of Italian.
She served as Patrons' Secretary of
West Wiltshire Young Musicians for nine years , in which
both of her children played throughout their school years and was Chair of the
Bath & Wiltshire Branch
of the Institute of Directors for three and a half years
from 2004 to 2007.
She readily admits she is a workaholic, but when not working loves to travel,
enjoys the arts, gardening and spending time with her family and friends.
