SPEAKER PROFILE

With 25 years’ experience in the hospitality sector, Mike Shipley has worked for some of the biggest names in the industry. He began his career with Whitbread, before moving to JD Wetherspoon (JDW) – one of the UK’s biggest pub operators with close to 1,000 venues – as an operations
manager. Following eight years in operations he turned to finance, and became a chartered accountant while working as a senior operational finance manager at JDW. Next, he joined pub and bar group Barracuda, where he worked to make businesses finances more commercially focused, by helping to turn hard data into information for operators, with full responsibility for commercial reporting, strategic financial analysis and IT.

Mike continued to work with strategic technological systems, with a move supplier-side to Torex (now part of Oracle), where he developed an existing
business intelligence application to create a specialist hospitality solution with unique functionality, while also forming valuable strategic partnerships with key external partners. Now in his third year with Fourth, Mike has worked to develop Fourth Analytics – a system that enables hospitality
businesses to cut through, analyse and act on the huge volumes of data available to them – leading to more productive, pro-active and profitable business performance.