Mel Ingalls

Has more than 25 years experience in business and IT, often blending the two to identify strategic opportunities for the use of technology. He is a business strategist, a marketing specialist, a business mentor, an entrepreneur, and an investor.

Has more than 25 years experience in business and IT, often blending the two to identify strategic opportunities for the use of technology. He is a business strategist, a marketing specialist, a business mentor, an entrepreneur, and an investor.

Mel Ingalls has more than 25 years experience in business and IT, often blending the two to identify strategic opportunities for the use of technology. He is a business strategist, a marketing specialist, a business mentor, an entrepreneur, and an investor.

Mel holds a bachelors degree from Harvard and an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, one of the top business schools in the US, in business strategy, marketing and finance. He has worked for some of the leading consulting firms in the world, including Booz
•Allen & Hamilton, Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), and a strategic arm of KPMG. He has built and run a software company, raising more than US$7 million in private and venture capital. He currently runs an independent business and IT consultancy, and he and his partner manage a successful residential real estate portfolio. Mel has enormous breadth of experience. He has worked in more than a dozen industries—including ICT, financial services, travel, consumer goods, retail—and in virtually every functional area. He has worked in very small companies, with fewer than five employees, and multi-billion-dollar multi-nationals with tens of thousands of employees. He also has significant depth in IT, with many years of experience in development, project management, IT strategy, Internet, and software company management. In the mid-1990s, he founded a software company—raising US$7.2 million in private and venture capital—and lived through all the trials, tribulations, anxieties, successes and excitement that such an endeavour entails. Since 2000, he has turned around a failing Internet Service Provider and successfully arranged a merger of equals, launched several Internet businesses, consulted to a wide variety of small businesses on a multitude of business topics and built a very profitable residential real estate portfolio. Mel is an avid skier, sailor, hiker, traveller, nature photographer and real estate investor. He has played 13 sports competitively, including 26 seasons of soccer. He is currently providing mentoring through the Nelson Tasman Business Trust to several businesses at the Top of the South.

Presentations:

Topics:
• Outside-the-square thinking: a greater role for government in NZ business?
• Increase turnover by understanding and influencing your customers’ buying behaviour
• Competitive assets: How to distinguish your business in meaningful ways
• How to make your business attractive to investors
• Marketing
• The strategic use of IT