CATALYST WORKS - Key Persons
A southerner living in the North West, Claire's still trying hard to hang onto her accent. She's worked as an analyst for HMRC and British Airways before switching to database marketing. After a spell as a busy freelance analyst, she became Head of Analysis at Catalyst in 2012. Claire's big passion is netball and any free time is spent coaching, running events for England Netball and playing in a Cheshire team as the world's shortest Goal Shooter.
Before joining Catalyst, Damion worked for the National Trust, WaterAid, Marie Curie Cancer Care, Medair and British Heart Foundation. He took a breather from the stress and strains of modern life by living and working in Portugal for years; ‘less Piccadilly Circus more Piri-Piri chicken'. His two biggest loves are running and biscuits, and he's currently averaging two correct answers per episode of University Challenge.
Georgie was a producer of corporate live events BC (before children). She then retrained and worked in repro for print firm AC (after children) before joining Catalyst.
Founder of the Catalyst stairs challenge, Heather has a fierce passion for health. (Just don't get her started on back-care.) With a background in health journalism, Heather's written for The Times, The Telegraph, The Mirror and Red magazine and was editor of Healthy, a national glossy magazine. Ten years ago, she joined the charity sector and now channels her energies into making sure charities get serious amounts of heart-felt support.
More recently, Katie Simpson has taken a more sociable approach to the challenge, joining me for a chat as we scale the tower together. But with talk of a new fitness regime involving 500 stomach crunches a day, I predict she will soon ditch the chat and fling herself into the competition with a vengeance.
With a background in graphic design, Katie followed her passion for obsessive organisation and moved into managing internal development and print schedules. This soon took her into print side before she happily embraced account management in the charity sector. Her passion is her family, organisation and decorating cakes, in that order. She says seeing the looks on people's faces when given the cake makes it all worth doing - we're still waiting.
Before founding Catalyst, Marc held several key roles included Head of Marketing Planning at Oxfam, Head of Individual Giving at Help the Aged, Head of Fundraising at British Red Cross and Marketing Director at Amnesty International. Now he heads up the Catalyst family, with all its quirks and wonders. Outside of work, he is an international man of mystery.
Next Stan Laidler joined in. At first, he chose a more dignified ascent aimed at improving his fitness, rather than injuring himself in childish workplace challenges. But the next week, he threw caution to the wind and attacked the stairs two at a time, nailing an impressive 3.22. Rattled by Stan's lightning performance, Rachel secured a breathtaking 3.
An expert in military aircraft and all things print, Stan has worked in print and direct mail production for 27 years. He started out on newspaper presses, and then moved to heat set offset web presses and sales before joining Catalyst. If Stan could be anywhere, he'd be swimming, skiing or doing just about anything Spanish. A keen Spanish speaker, Stan says his fluency improves in direct correlation with consumption of tapas and sangria.