Meet Mark, our newly appointed Regional Director for North America.

Mark will be working with the Senior Leadership team to launch Facteon’s presence in North America, which will help drive the company’s strategic goals to gain new business and support our existing customers in the North American markets.

Mark, tell us a little bit about your career journey:

In 2006, my fascination with international business expansion led me on a journey to live and work in China, where I provided strategic consulting to global companies, helping them expand into international markets.  Whilst in China, I worked closely with New Zealand Trade & Enterprise on numerous consulting and market entry related projects, and it was during these engagements that I developed a passion for helping New Zealand companies succeed on the global stage.

I am extremely excited to be working at Facteon to showcase New Zealand know-how and technology, especially to companies located in the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

What do you enjoy most about your new role?

As Regional Director – North America, I am enjoying the challenges of expansion and building a reliable and capable team that can support Facteon’s strategic vision.  Furthermore, I’m an inquisitive individual who enjoys learning, and there are innumerable opportunities to learn and grow in this new role.

How does your consulting background impact or influence your role as Regional Director at Facteon?

As a consultant working in China, I assisted companies from all over the world in a variety of industries to quickly understand one of the most challenging global markets, and then helped them develop strategies necessary to succeed.  This has given me the experience and ability to quickly understand complicated industries and then identify the key strategic challenges, considerations, and pain points.  Furthermore, with more than 15 years of working in China, I can bridge many important business-related cultural gaps.

What challenges and changes have you observed within the industry recently and how do you respond to them?

A life-long student of international business, I have witnessed first-hand the meteoric rise of China’s industrial base and am now seeing the rapid trend of “re-shoring”.  Diversifying supply chains is a key strategic direction for most companies, which has been exacerbated by the challenges experienced by the Covid-19 Pandemic.  These supply chain diversification efforts create substantial opportunities for Facteon in the North American (and other global) markets.  Facteon’s key challenge in North America is building a strong team that gives our customers in North America the confidence and certainty in what has become uncertain times – a challenge I am confident will be overcome quickly.

What do you love most about Sales & Engineering?

When it comes to sales, I love helping people identify potential challenges and overcome them with solutions to help them get to where they want to be. Having a customer-centric approach creates trust and encourages them to invest in me and my team. 

Engineering is a great field and one that I am enjoying a lot – although I am not an engineer and still have much to learn.  Like my personal feeling of helping people achieve their goals, engineering, in so far as my understanding of how we apply it at Facteon, helps people identify areas of improvement and creates solutions to overcome problems and challenges that keep them from maximizing their operating efficiency.  

It is this process of identifying challenges and roadblocks, and then figuring out ways to overcome them that really drives me.

What excites you most about the future of sales in the smart manufacturing space?

I’m excited to introduce and showcase Facteon’s leading edge technologies in smart manufacturing to the North American market to help them in their AI journey. I feel that for too long manufacturing was being centralized, which is high risk, and so helping those companies mitigate the risk of their supply chains, really drives me to excel.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned in your Sales/Engineering career?... How did that experience transform you?

Throughout my career in sales and client engagement, I have learned that treating customers as partners is the best way to develop long lasting relationships.  Sometimes, this means finding solutions for them that are outside of my own scope of services offered.  However, by looking out for your customers’ and partners’ best interests, they will also look out for yours.  And if there is a chance that they don’t, they probably aren’t the types of people you want to be working with anyway.

What do you get up to when you’re not working at Facteon?

Work is my life…I’m just kidding. In all seriousness though, I love hiking and other outdoor sports, but my passion is scuba diving.  I am a PADI Dive Master and Tech Diver, and I love exploring the underwater world and sharing my love of the ocean with others.  I relate scuba diving to “poor man’s space travel”, as you literally see a whole new world and the creatures inhabiting it.