Craig’s long and winding road to the presidency

Craig Dean

Profile of Craig Dean — the globetrotter who has found home at last
THE man who would be president has taken a long and winding road to his adopted home town of Oldham.

As a travelogue, Mumps via Kings College Cambridge, Earby in the Yorkshire Dales, Uganda, 48 of the 52 American states, Singapore, Rwanda and Spain is pretty impressive.

Oh, and there was a most important stop in Accrington along the way...

For all his globetrotting, Craig Dean, still only 35, has found fulfilment at the Windsor Works in Gravel Walks just off the new-look Mumps roundabout and finally, perhaps, has put down permanent roots.

He is about the take on the presidency of the Oldham Council of the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce for a three-year stint, succeeding Paul Roberts in April, and this restless, ambitious Red Bull-fuelled enigma is certain to ruffle a few feathers.

“I know from personal experience that this country does not cater for or listen to those who most need help. People with a genuine need have the least access to assistance — the state simply makes it so hard,” he told me in the glass-walled boardroom at Web Applications Ltd where he has been chief executive for the past three years.

When he joined the IT business, which specialises in solutions for the travel and leisure sectors, at Hollinwood Business Centre in 2005 he was the seventh person on the payroll.

With his background in IT communications, a Masters in natural science with computer sciences, he was asked to become a consultant at the five-year-old business founded by Gordon Pearce and Lee Tudor.

He discovered brilliant software developers and outstanding products which today produce a £2 million-plus turnover business with nearly 60 staff in a renovated mill that, in itself, is a testament to the regeneration of this fine old mill town.

And Craig, who hails from Littleborough but now lives in Chadderton, is aiming to play his part as Oldham looks to the next stage of its reinvention as a destination for the digital age.

Already integrated into the business fabric of the borough, he is leading an expansion at Web Applications by taking ground-floor space in the Windsor Works the business now owns and has led the purchase of the former Christmas tree factory next door to create a third-sector business which will support IT training in Oldham for years to come.

His devotion to IT can be traced to his student days in Cambridge and the early years of his professional life. On leaving university he joined Cambridge Consultants Ltd and was soon working for Alcatel, the world-leading French telecoms conglomerate, helping pioneer Wireless Applications Protocols and he was also part of the team which wrote the software for the first Blue Tooth stack.

He was asked to become part of Cambridge Silicon Radio but didn’t fancy it and became a self-employed consultant, working for Welcome Holiday in Yorkshire which, to complete a circle, is now a major client of Web Applications.

His wanderlust kicked in when the Labour Government introduced a double whammy for single-person consultancies, requiring people like Craig to pay NIC contributions as an employee and employer so he joined what he called a “massive brain drain”.

He took a job as an unpaid chaperone of the African Children’s Choir, doubling as a sound and lighting engineer as the 18-strong children’s group toured America raising funds to support projects back home in Uganda. “The choir would sing in front 20 or 30 people one night and thousand the next — it was an exciting time touring the United States,” he recalled. Comprising mostly orphans, the choir was also accompanied by teachers. On one occasion they sang before an audience of 60,000 in Singapore.

In 2002 he returned with the choir to Uganda where he stayed for two years, working on charity building projects and eking a living through sponsorship and grant aid and also helped build an orphanage in Rwanda for genocide victims.

In 2004 he was taken seriously ill, a condition from which he suffers to this day, and was forced to return home, spending time in Chicago with his twin brother’s family and also with Godparents in Spain before finding a medical regimen that helped his manage the abdominal pain which forced his retreat from Africa.

It was his experience of seeking medical treatment in the UK that shaped his views on the society that rules this country and forged the grim determination to succeed in business and pass on his experiences as president of the Chamber movement.

“There is a lot going on in Oldham and small business needs a voice — the digital economy demands that small businesses like ourselves be heard and I believe the Chamber can be the voice of the people,” he told me.

And Accrington? Ah, that’s where he met his wife Vivienne, one more compelling reason why Africa’s loss is Oldham’s gain.