Claudia Brennan
Age: 29
Position: Director of business development, Exclusive Hotels, Bagshot, Surrey
Career to date...
Having grown a successful mobile event catering business out of a university project with a group of fellow students, Brennan spent two years as a recruitment consultant before arriving at Exclusive Hotels in 2002. In her five years at Exclusive, Brennan has risen from one of three business development managers to director of business development for the group in June 2005. She now heads up a hand-picked team of five business development managers.
Why is she a winner?
Having cut her teeth on her mobile event catering business, Brennan arrived at Exclusive Hotels brimming with experience and entrepreneurial spirit and she wasn't slow to show her potential, achieving sales results across the group's four hotels of £300,000 in the first six months. Since then she has consistently surpassed expectations and targets, gaining £2.5m of new business through cold-calling in just three years and more recently achieving year-on-year revenue growth of 37% through business development.
Brennan has also proved adept at devising and implementing successful marketing campaigns, driving revenue growth and growing deposited business while improving customer loyalty and raising the group's profile. Her efforts in this area were recognised last year when she was the recipient of the Best Group Marketing Campaign Catey. She is also actively involved in the overall development of the group, sitting on the strategic review board.
Brennan's passion also extends to training and mentoring. In addition to running internal training and development programmes, as an alumnus of the hotel and catering management course at the University of Surrey, Brennan is regularly asked to give lectures to the students.