James Mason

James Mason originally qualified as a Textile and Clothing Technologist and worked in these industries for over 30 years. During this time, he worked as Managing Director of various subsidiaries of Coats Viyella and William Baird, having full profit responsibility for a variety of subsidiaries involved in weaving, dyeing, printing and clothing manufacture both in the UK and overseas.

For the last 15 years James has worked as a Strategic Management Consultant in Scotland, running projects in companies operating at diverse stages from start ups and turnarounds to spinouts from Universities. This strategic work has further led to James operating as a Non Executive Director for clothing, construction and software companies.

He has also had a portfolio of roles based around Strategic Management Consultancy. Scottish Enterprise formed a team of Director level consultants called Company Growth, in which James was a Director, and his team was used to assist high growth companies.

James has a particular interest in Benchmarking in Scotland and was awarded the Licence to market the Benchmark Index in Scotland and Northern Ireland. He has carried out benchmarks for many companies in various sectors and has trained many benchmark practitioners. James Mason and Gavin Jones formed Upper Quartile in 2007; initially the objective was to promote performance measurement tools such as the Benchmark Index, Improve, the Adaptability Index and Wave. More recently James has been instrumental in guiding the growth in Upper Quartile as Senior Partner as the consultancy continued its expansion in International Consultancy.

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