Founder and Managing Director
Independent senior judgement for B2B leaders navigating growth, change, delivery and customer reality.
Mark Conway founded Oak Consult to help leaders make better decisions when strategy, delivery, customers and commercial priorities are no longer joining up as clearly as they should.
With more than 30 years of experience across telecommunications, technology, software, healthcare and complex B2B services, Mark has led product launches, business transformation, customer experience improvement, digital delivery, go-to-market activity and the recovery of difficult projects.
His work is particularly valuable when an organisation is busy but not progressing, a major initiative is losing direction, internal confidence is no longer matched by customer reality, or a leadership team needs an experienced independent perspective without immediately making another permanent senior appointment.
Mark combines board-level judgement with practical follow-through. He does not arrive with a pre-packaged answer, create complexity to justify an engagement or leave the difficult work behind for somebody else to resolve. His role is to help leaders understand what is really happening, make clearer choices and turn those choices into progress.
Where Mark adds value
Mark typically supports founder-led, owner-managed and leadership-led B2B organisations in four connected areas:
- Product and transformation leadership;
- Digital project rescue and recovery;
- Customer and market alignment;
- Go-to-market strategy and execution.
He also provides retained senior support through Oak CORE, bringing together Clarity, Oversight, Reality and Execution for organisations that need ongoing independent judgement and practical momentum.
Experience grounded in delivery
During his career, Mark has held senior roles with O2 and KCOM and worked alongside major professional services and technology organisations including Deloitte, KPMG, Accenture and IBM.
His experience includes:
- Developing and launching products and services;
- Leading digital, CRM and organisational transformation;
- Improving customer and commercial alignment;
- Shaping propositions and routes to market;
- Strengthening governance and delivery accountability;
- Recovering initiatives that have drifted away from their intended outcomes;
- Connecting leadership ambition with operational reality.
Mark is also trained across quality management, business continuity and information security management systems, which brings additional rigour to his approach to governance, resilience and execution.
How Mark works
Mark is known for being straightforward, commercially grounded and prepared to ask the questions that organisations sometimes avoid. His work is based on a simple principle:
We only trust what the customer would recognise.
That thinking sits behind Oak Consult’s Customer Spectacles work and its wider focus on identifying the gap between internal reporting, leadership confidence and the reality experienced by customers, employees and delivery teams.
Clients should expect honesty, constructive challenge and practical support. Mark’s aim is not to make an organisation dependent on consultancy. It is to help its leaders see more clearly, decide more confidently and build the capability to move forward.
Beyond client work
Mark writes regularly about B2B customer reality, digital transformation, project recovery, artificial intelligence, leadership, go-to-market strategy and organisational trust. His Think Oak articles and whitepapers translate complex business issues into practical questions that leadership teams can use in real decisions—not simply theory, trends or management theatre.
Mark lives in North Lincolnshire. Away from work, he enjoys walking, photography, wildlife and exploring the UK with his family.
Speak to Mark
When something does not feel right in your strategy, customer relationships, transformation activity or commercial execution, it is often worth getting an experienced outside view before the problem becomes more expensive.
Contact Mark directly:
mark.conway@oakconsult.co.uk