Senior Management

Caroline Knowles – head of sales and administration

After 15 years with major home shopping company Empire Stores, Caroline is the member of the Advanced team who knows exactly what it’s like to be on the other end of the phone when dealing with logistics and pre-retail services providers. Caroline was involved in many management disciplines at Empire and spent the last nine years as a Buying and Merchandising manager of the Ladies Fashions department.

Caroline joined Advanced in 1999 as administration manager to help cope with the demands of the company’s surge in growth. Her empathy with customers, however, was too great to ignore and Advanced felt the best use of her talents would be to combine a sales and administrative function. She has fulfilled this dual role since 2002 and her success is shown by the company’s continued rapid growth.

Caroline was appointed to her current role as head of administration in early 2008 - this role incorporates heading the sales function to ensure that our clients receive a seamless customer-focused service from Advanced.

Ben Balfour – head of operations

Advanced’s home-grown success story, Ben has risen to the top after joining the company on the shop floor as a 22-year-old. His ability and industry quickly marked him out as being of managerial calibre and he was appointed production manager within six months of entering the company.

He has had 14 years of hands-on experience since then managing all aspects of the business, covering production, warehousing, administration and transport. The nature of the business has changed greatly in that time, with the company evolving from a paper-based system when he began into an industry leader in IT - a transformation which Ben has been closely involved with.

The management challenges have also developed over time, with the workforce rising from 30 to 300-plus and changing its composition to the point where 14 languages are now spoken. Ben led from the front during Advanced’s drive for Investor in People status and has now had his managerial skills certified by gaining an NVQ level V in operations management.

Darren Outlaw – head of distribution

Darren has been involved in the transport and distribution industry for the past 20 years and has experience in pretty much every sector. He started out working in a small general haulage company and the early hands-on experience ensured he learnt every aspect of general haulage, from driving HGVs to running the company. Darren used this crucial learning curve as a platform for development within the much bigger companies he later worked for. It fostered in Darren an ethos of small company commitment and he applied this to service and customer focus in the environments of the larger multi-user companies. Progressing through several medium sized general haulage companies, Darren took a position with Rickaby & Lee, a specialist FMCG distribution provider, as Fleet Controller.

Promotions and Company takeovers saw Darren fill several roles such as General Hub Traffic Manager to on site Contact Manager and finally Contact Manager for the new company Hammond Logistics (now Bibby Distribution). This last position was located on the client’s site, St Ives Print, and involved operating a dedicated fleet of vehicles serving two further sites and five other companies within the group. It served as invaluable experience of being under constant customer scrutiny: “the captive audience”.