Richard Jones co-founded Ventura Team as a different kind of consultancy - employing only senior professionals (the average age is 45) with exceptional hands-on skills. Ventura was set up to advise operators, utilities and regulators across fixed and mobile (including network sharing) but has also created it's own startup operator in the ultra-competive Swedish market. This now has 80,000 customers (business and residential) with 100meg symmetric services and 750,000 homes passed. Richard's pragmatic approach to developing and then implementing strategies and operations with his colleagues has earned a strong reputation with operators facing tough challenges in the region and also with industry bodies such as the Fibre to the Home Council and GSM-A. Richard is currently working on his second IP based NGN rollout in the Gulf. He has previously been seconded in as Chief Commercial Officer from startup to the launch phases of a Gulf startup operator - covering all aspects of business and financial planning, commercial deployment and implementation. During this work he was closely involved in the evaluation process and eventual selection of the largest WiMAX deployment in EMEA. As a result of this experience Richard regularly speaks at conferences and holds workshops covering broadband strategy and business cases for fibre, DSL and WiMAX in Europe and GCC (e.g. for operators in countries such as Oman and Portugal, for the FTTH Council in Europe and the Middle East and at WiMAX MEGNA, FTTX MEGNA and the Broadband Congress). Highly entrepreneurial, Richard has led, founded and helped other businesses now on Nasdaq (post-acquisition) and with 75 times returns for shareholders. His work in turning around the toughest projects and programmes led to his writing Project Management Survival - published by Kogan Page in English and available in other languages including Chinese.Richard has a degree in Electronics (UK/France), a masters equivalent in engineering and an MBA with distinction.
