Client Stories

Client Stories > Bonhill Group plc

Bonhill Group plc is a leading B2B media company providing Business Information, Live Events and Data & Insight propositions to the international Diversity, Financial Services and Technology industries. Bonhill is headquartered in London and with a growing presence overseas.

In 2018 Bonhill raised financing on London’s AIM market to acquire InvestmentNews, a US financial services media business located in New York. As Bonhill has grown rapidly, both organically and through acquisition, over the last year it has needed to establish a clear strategy for its systems, processes and organisation. James Robson, COO explained:

Like most media companies we are transitioning our business model into being data centric and information dependent which means that our technology systems are mission critical. The success of our business is dependent on three key technology initiatives. Firstly, we need to be operationally effective to deliver relevant and timely world class content, events and data products to our audiences and for the benefit of our clients. Secondly, we need to deliver efficiency and margin improvement which will be significantly enabled though the integration of our IT systems and subsequent streamlining of processes. Finally, we need to create a technology infrastructure that supports our growth ambitions in the UK, the USA and other overseas territories.

We needed best in class technology leadership and so we contacted Freeman Clarke.

Within days Freeman Clarke had reached into their London team and Darlene Schroeder joined us as our Chief Information Officer (CIO). Darlene immediately took ownership of our entire IT landscape, getting to grips with our processes and suppliers, taking charge of our major technology change project and steering our IT teams in the UK and USA forwards. We have been very impressed with the speed that Darlene picked up the nuisances of our industry, took charge of all our IT workstreams and brought her experience to our senior management team. She has a robust but realistic and commercial approach which is exactly what we need.

Bonhill now had a competent Freeman Clarke CIO in place to create and lead their technology strategy. However, in parallel to integrating the existing systems and processes between the UK and US operations, the company also needed to develop and implement an entirely new technology infrastructure to support its business ambitions. Underpinning the new IT infrastructure was a comprehensive redesign of Bonhill’s ad-tech and core data systems.

James commented further:

Once again we reached out to Freeman Clarke who quickly installed Joe Mernagh as our Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to work with Darlene. Joe was tasked with designing our new systems architecture. Again, we were impressed by the speed that Joe integrated into our team and understood the specifics of our technology challenges. We simply could not have made this progress without Freeman Clarke’s expert IT leadership.

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Freeman Clarke is the UK’s largest and most experienced team of part-time (we call it “fractional”) IT leaders. We work exclusively with ambitious organisations and we frequently help our clients use IT to beat their competition.