Steve Darnell

After serving as an officer in the Royal Navy, Steve joined the world of business as a Commissioning Engineer, moving into sales before becoming Managing Director of a manufacturing business supplying major retailers across Europe from its UK head office, with subsidiaries in France, Germany and distributors worldwide.

This company was successfully sold for several million to a global multi-national. Here Steve picked up valuable experience as General Manager of one of the group factories, and Global Product Manager responsible for all Electronic Controls and for project managing a global strategy review for the food retail sector.

Fed up with living out of a suitcase and corporate politics, Steve moved into consultancy helping the owner-managers of SME's with business growth.  This led to the establishment of IRUN, an Internet Marketing Services company, initially supplying technology to web developers, before moving into franchising to help consultants, coaches and agencies deliver effective Internet Marketing solutions for their clients.

Having supplied hundreds of clients, both SME's and corporates, with fully content managed websites, email marketing tools and CRM systems, one thing stood out:  98% of businesses do not use the marketing tools they pay for each month, they don't add meaningful content to their websites or social media, send no communications to clients or prospects = no marketing...

Problem - Solution:  Business Owners need to create content, they need to 'tell their story' i.e. how they help clients.  This led to the creation of Enquir3, Client Engagement specialists. Enquir3 have conducted thousands of client satisfaction interviews to identify happy, (and unhappy), clients, to create 'Success Stories' and deliver a suite of tools to automate the process of publishing 'meaningful content' for businesses.  

This seemingly simple service delivers some astoundingly valuable results: 

  • Improved client satisfaction leads to Improved Retention, and...
  • Satisfied clients buy more and more frequently Increasing Sales, and of course...
  • Happy clients provide More Referrals and remember the original issue...
  • Client Success Stories provide Content for communications, meaning more 'prospects' become clients and Conversion Improves, and...
  • Testimonials and Success Stories from happy clients help increase Lead Generation.  

All of which is great, for companies who want to improve all of their Key Business Drivers.  This, in turn, led to the development of the Virtual Finance Director which was designed from the outset as a tool to help accountants quickly and easily identify clients in need of help, track and report on the impact of the improvements over time.

Accountants have clients in need of help,  the Virtual Finance Director highlights issues, tracks, and reports on improvement.  This provides the platform for the delivery of a whole host of value add services accountants can introduce to help their clients grow.