Bob has built a reputation as a consultant and pioneer in marketing and organizational performance since founding The Gilford Group Limited in Toronto in 1985.    He helps major organizations put innovative strategies into practice. He specializes in service delivery, brand, and enterprise performance - understanding customers as individuals and performance implementation, business requirements, culture change, metrics, scorecards, process improvement, business intelligence, risk management, and business cases.

In the 1990's, Bob collaborated with early  customer strategy adopters. At Digital Equipment Corporation he was Marketing Manager, then leader of the Americas Financial Services consulting practice, helping to create rapid sales support and dashboard application development. He worked as a subject matter expert with NCR on call centers, and in its Teradata Division as a thought-leader in analytical CRM, optimized communication, and customer profitability measurement.

Previously, he was Chief Financial Officer of three international distribution and consumer services organizations.  Early in his career, he started one of the first Treasury Management consulting practices in Canada for a leading consulting firm, and was with a multinational packaged goods company in Montreal and Boston.

Bob believes strongly that customer strategies are all about the customer not the organization, and that organization and employee goals must be aligned through tangible actions to achieve this.  A shift is needed to an innovation culture, with customer and employee dialog, priorities and actions based on defined outcomes, and a knowledge and learning organization. A cornerstone of his approach is planning changes in small steps that are self-funding.

Bob is a speaker and writer on these topics. Recent publications include Ivey Business Journal, Canadian Banker, CA Magazine, Canadian Marketing, Canadian Underwriter, The Banker (UK), and Corporate Executive Board Council on Financial Competition.  He was the keynote speaker and chairman of the MarcusEvans Travel Industry Marketing Conferences in Amsterdam (2005), Barcelona (2006), and London (2006).

He teaches Strategic Market Planning in the Schulich School of Business MBA program. He is a member of the Canadian Association of Management Consultants, the Strategic Capability Network, and the Financial Executives Institute.  He is a past Board member of the Strategic Leadership Forum (The Toronto Society for Strategic Planning).

Bob holds an MBA degree from Suffolk University in Boston, Mass. and CA designations in both Canada (CA) and England (FCA).