Mentors & Judges

Justin Jones

Justin is an experienced Chartered Accountant. He spent 18 years working in London before becoming CFO at Sanctuary Personnel in 2018, a Health and Social Care Recruiter and Managed Service provider based in Ipswich.

Justin qualified as a Chartered Accountant at KPMG through the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland. He spent 10 years at KPMG working in the Financial Services industry in London, within the Transaction Services team, primarily focused on delivering due diligence, refinancing and capital markets projects related to large insurance and asset management businesses. His clients included both corporate and private equity. During this time, he also completed an MBA at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees (in combination with The University of Edinburgh), and was an active coach, mentor, and trainer for the wider transaction services community.

Justin joined Aviva in 2010, where he oversaw the Transaction Support team in the Group Head Office, with a broad remit to assess the impact of large-scale transactions on the breadth of Group finance and regulatory capitals metrics. Key projects during this time included the disposal of the RAC, the sale of the Group's US business, and the capital markets transaction related to the sell-down of Delta Lloyd B.V. (a separately listed Netherlands based subsidiary).

Justin has also held senior finance and transaction roles at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Old Mutual (now known as Quilters), Access (the software development Group), and New Anglia Capital (a local business related to angel investment). At RBS Justin worked on projects related to the EU state-aid bailout of the bank, principally supporting a new Executive Management team to set up, establish and spin-out a fresh competitor bank within the UK market, a condition of the state aid bailout.

Justin joined Sanctuary Personnel in 2018 as CFO, where the management team delivered 3x growth in EBITDA within 3 years, before being sold to Private Equity at the start of 2022.

Justin is currently a Board Member at the University of Suffolk and supports start ups and early stage businesses through ad hoc mentoring.

Justin has lived in Suffolk with his wife and three children since 2013. His wider interests include running, rugby and cricket; he is also a coach at his local rugby club, helping to inspire and develop the next generation of players.

Mentors

Paul Graham

Paul has 28 years of experience in Telecommunications, having been part of the start-up eServGlobal. He was in the OCS division when it was acquired by Oracle in 2010, leading to the development of the Oracle NCC product. He is currently a Technical Consulting Manager for Oracle Communications.

Recently, Paul has served as the Director of UK Engineering for Matrixx Software. He played a key role in Matrixx's transition to adopting Cloud Native technologies and managed a group that has been at the forefront of the adoption, successfully conducting several 5G trials and implementations.

Additionally, Paul occasionally serves as a visiting lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Suffolk and Digitech, based at Adastral Park, in collaboration with BT/EE. He is very passionate about developing closer links between Industry and Academia.

He is also a chartered engineer and a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (FIET).

Hermione Way

Hermione Way has over 20-years experience in marketing and communications for the tech industry.