Team
Dr George Beaton – Executive Chairman
George has guided beaton’s clients through a wide variety of strategic decisions in his 30+ years as an adviser and researcher.
His background in business school teaching combined with his work in professional services firms, public and private companies, universities and governments gives him deep insights into the challenges and opportunities that leaders and their organisations face.
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George’s management experience includes founder and executive director roles in consulting, communications and marketing research firms, and professorships in leading universities in Australia and South Africa.
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He holds MBBCh, MBA and PhD degrees. George was a senior fellow in the University of Melbourne business and law schools for 30 years and now chairs the College of Law program board for the Master of Legal Business innovative suite of qualifications.
George has authored two books on the legal services industry:
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NewLaw New Rules – A Conversation About the Future of the Legal Services Industry in 2013, and
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Remaking Law Firms: Why & How with Dr Imme Kaschner in 2016.
Libby Maynard – Partner
Libby works with beaton’s clients to help them win, retain and grow business and deliver value to their clients in sustainably profitable ways. She creates order out of chaos, works at both strategic and operational levels, combines creativity with strong analytical skills and big picture thinking, sets clear priorities and readily engages stakeholders at all levels.
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Libby has been instrumental in designing and executing major marketing, pricing and client service programs and winning significant competitive bids to corporates and governments. In addition, she has trained and coached in legal, consulting engineering, patent attorney, accounting and consulting, and financial services firms. Her approach is based on sound research, evidence and analysis and grounded in practicality.
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Libby has held senior leadership roles in marketing and business development, pricing and legal project management. She commenced her career as a lawyer and worked as a management consultant with an international firm and her own consultancy.
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Libby has an LLB from Monash University, an MBA from the Melbourne and London Business Schools, is a Fulbright Scholar, and a graduate of the AICD.
Kim Wiegand – Partner
Kim supports the growing number of firms that are seeking to improve the sophistication of their approach to client and market engagement.
Kim works with firms’ leadership and marketing and business development teams to implement purposeful projects improving client experience, growing revenue streams, developing networks, and having quality client conversations. She coaches partners and senior leaders on individual practice and skill development, leading to practice growth.
She has 10+ years in senior marketing and business development leadership roles, managing teams and stakeholders across Australia and the United Kingdom. Kim leans on her broad background to advise on the full mix of strategic marketing and business development.
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Kim facilitates the Marketing and Client Experience module of the Queensland Law Society Practice Management Course and regularly presents through industry associations. She holds a Bachelor of Business from Queensland University of Technology.
Paul Bonomy – Partner
Paul is focused on helping beaton’s clients outperform in their served markets.
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He assists firms’ leadership in the development and execution of strategy to deliver profitable growth. Specifically, he provides advice on client programs, pricing approaches, negotiation techniques and developing high value interactions with clients. He works with executive leadership groups and in a personal coaching capacity with partners.
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Paul’s background includes accounting, sales and negotiation. He has consulted to large accounting and law firms. For over a decade he led Freehills business development and then, with the merger, was Herbert Smith Freehills CMO heading the global business development team.
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Paul has a BCom from Wollongong University.
Jon Huxley – Partner
Jon’s passion is in helping beaton’s clients deliver profitable growth for their businesses.
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He is a recognised client-facing specialist and business development adviser for professional services and corporations. Jon’s experience covers strategy and planning, client engagement, process improvement, leading and delivering training and development programmes, coaching of client-facing teams as well as establishing and leading key client programmes. Jon is passionate about helping business leaders identify and improve the critical issues and opportunities in their business to achieve profitable growth.
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He has 10+ years in senior business development leadership roles with Beca and PwC, New Zealand’s two largest professional services firms. While General Manager of Business Development at Beca, Jon was proud to be associated with the firm’s serial success in the Client Choice Awards. His experience prior to that with ANZ Bank gives him a unique level of business insight and a strong understanding of how businesses operate.
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Jon holds an Honours Degree in Business from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK.
Paul Hugh-Jones – Partner
Paul consults with beaton’s clients to help them develop superior growth strategies and programs, using beaton’s suite of market, client and competitor information products and research insights.
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He helps firms build executional capability and performance, set KPIs, track performance, highlight opportunities and issues, and refine their programs.
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Paul has led successful change programs using this approach, both as a CMO within professional services firms and as a consultant to firms.
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Prior to consulting Paul spent 20 years in international sales and marketing director roles in both B2B and B2C, including Ashurst, Mallesons, Mars, British Airways and Bacardi.
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Paul has a BSc (Hons) from Reading University, UK and an executive MBA from Darden business school, West Virginia.
David Goener – Partner
David advises beaton’s clients on the application of strategic insights that professional services firms derive from our suite of information and research products. Having been a former client of beaton, he is well placed to assist clients identify where evidence can inform and enhance strategic decisions.
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Drawing on extensive senior leadership experience in Queensland’s largest professional services firms, BDO and McCullough Robertson, David also advises clients on business strategy, partner performance management, pricing and regularly facilitates strategic planning conferences.
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A Fellow of the Financial Services Institute of Australasia and Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, David holds a BCom from Griffith University and a Certificate in Financial Markets from FINSIA.
Ewa Foroncewicz – Administration and Brand Co-ordination Lead
Ewa joined beaton in 2017 on the day of our gala dinner to celebrate the annual Client Choice Awards. That night she was thrown into deep water, but with events and networking having always been her cup of tea, it quickly felt like a natural swim for her.
beaton’s celebration of professional services excellence and thought leadership through the Client Choice Awards and Client Choice Festival are a big part of Ewa’s job and critical to the production of our unique information product, the beatonbenchmarks.
Ewa is passionate about connection and relationships and thrives on successfully providing support to her work colleagues and beaton’s clients. Community building in the spirit of ‘together we can do more and better’ is what energises her at work every day.
Ewa graduated from the Warsaw School of Economics with a Masters in Marketing and Management.
Shanan Kan – Operations Lead
Shanan works with beaton’s clients and translates the experiences of their clients into actionable insights. He acts as the interface between client data and professional services firms’ strategic objectives.
He is the lead author of the beatoncompass client research reports, works intimately with our consulting team to deliver on our bespoke research services and drives beaton’s thought leadership program including the 3in30 webinar series and the Client Choice Festival.
Shanan’s research toolkit includes quantitative methods, such as survey design and statistical analysis, and qualitative techniques, such as journey mapping and storytelling. Shanan’s specialties include statistics, ethnography, participatory design, gamification, data visualisation, stakeholder communication, client advocacy and product and project management.
His research expertise is built on his educational foundation of a Bachelor of Psychology with first class honours from the Australian National University and a Graduate Diploma in Design Anthropology from Swinburne University of Technology, where he was the top graduate.
Marc Ewen – Associate
Since joining beaton in 2010, Marc has worked across various parts of our business including our M&A and strategy consulting practice beatoncapital, our events arm beatonlive and our professional services focused incubator beatonventures.
Today his role in the beaton research team sees him manage our transactional feedback platform, beatondebrief, as well as coordinating the expansion of the Client Choice Awards to enable small-to-medium professional services organisations to enjoy all of the benefits that taking part brings.
These responsibilities see him working with clients of all sizes across all stages of their client feedback journey. Marc takes great satisfaction in helping guide and support our clients through this process, whether with a firm starting out from scratch or one looking to supplement or improve upon an existing framework.
Marc is also CFO at beaton’s sister company, FirmChecker, a ratings and review platform for accountants, bookkeepers, conveyancers and lawyers.
He graduated from the University of Strathclyde with a BA (Hons) in Finance and the University of New South Wales with a Masters in Financial Analysis.
Grant Hollings – Research Lead
After working as a survey statistician in Southeast Asia for ten years, Grant joined beaton in 2015 as research manager.
At beaton Grant is responsible for managing the production of beaton's multi-faceted large tracking project. Each year this tracking project asks thousands of c-suite and in-house professionals, senior and line managers about their experience and perceptions of professional services firms in law, built & natural environment consulting, management consulting, accounting and IP.
Grant provides advice on survey design, weighting, fieldwork management and statistical analysis. Being an expert in SPSS, Python and R, he helps the team draw conclusions from complex quantitative data and making the findings accessible to our clients’ c-suite leaders.
He graduated from Victoria University of Wellington with a BCA (Hons) in Economics and Massey University with a Masters in Science (Statistics).
John Lipscomb – Senior Researcher
Beginning his career in research in 1999, John has worked across a wide range of industries. His research has driven positive outcomes for major corporations and not-for-profit organisations and in policy development and public health. John has extensive experience in B2B research, having managed large scale research programs from both the inside and as a consultant to some of Australia’s largest businesses.
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At beaton John works closely with our partners to understand clients’ core research needs and translate them into research projects to inform their decision-making. As part of our research team, John is involved in research design, project management, data analysis, reporting and innovation.
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John’s passion is using the craft of research to build actionable insights that drive meaningful change. He brings a pragmatic approach, balancing the real-world challenges of research with rigorous scientific method to achieve optimal results for clients. He draws on a wide range of technical quantitative research skills to discover, build and communicate a coherent narrative for clients; he is skilled at finding the story in the data and bringing this story to life.
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John holds a BCom with first degree honours and a PhD from Deakin University in Victoria.
Kate Allman – Content and Communications Lead
Kate is an award-winning journalist and the wordsmith behind all kinds of beaton content including blogs, emails, newsletters, and marketing material. Her unique skills were developed during years of working with some of the most notoriously difficult interview subjects: lawyers.
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Kate graduated from UNSW with bachelor degrees in both media (majoring in journalism) and law (second-class honours), and she previously worked at the NSW Law Society’s membership trade publication LSJ. There, she was Associate Editor and journalist for six years. Her work earned recognition by media industry awards including the Mumbrella Publish Awards and the NSW Council for Civil Liberties. While at LSJ, she interviewed George Beaton on several occasions and joined beaton after developing a relationship with the team on previous freelance writing projects.
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Kate’s communication skills span multiple platforms, from hosting in-person events and presenting to camera, to writing news and longform feature articles, to writing media releases and conducting public relations. She has earned certificates in radio and TV presenting at the Australian Film Television and Radio School and has published bylines in national newspapers including The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian. She is a regular host at high-profile business conferences and in 2019 presented a panel alongside former Prime Minister Julia Gillard at the International Bar Association Conference in Seoul, South Korea.
Kate is a board director at the Kennedy Foundation for Journalism, and a co-founder of the Equal Pay for Equal Play campaign that one day hopes to see equal prize money for women in government-funded sport
Dina Dacut – Virtual Assistant
Dina joined beaton in 2018. She is passionately meticulous about customer service and client satisfaction. Based on her philosophy that high quality information is power, Dina empowers beaton.
As a virtual assistant, she supports everyone in the beaton team by keeping our ever-growing systems and information databases up-to-date and easy to use. And she plays a crucial role in supporting respondents in beaton’s surveys conducted all year round. She is also our go-to person for many of our back-office needs.
Dina holds a BSc with a major in management (Notre Dame University) and a BS in Nursing (Philippine Women’s University).