Deloitte Private’s Motor Industry Services (MIS) division continues to expand its team with four new Directors – Chris Mandile, Ben Hershman, Ahmed Mahmoud, and Karen Spear. These senior appointments bring the collective automotive team to nearly 80 motor industry experts across Australia and New Zealand.
With more than 25 years’ corporate experience, Chris has worked extensively across the automotive landscape as a senior executive.
Since 2012, he was at the Nissan Motor Company where he held a number of executive roles. His most recent position was as Director of Sales and Marketing where he was responsible for sales, regional offices, fleet sales, marketing, product planning, supply chain and logistics.
Prior to Nissan, Chris spent 10 years at Honda and held a variety of roles including Senior Manager Sales. This position covered a wide spectrum of areas including sales, white label finance and insurance, Honda extended warranty, franchise development, product planning, training, and accessory development.
Ben is a senior automotive executive with over 23 years’ experience across a broad range of disciplines within the industry.
He commenced his career in the UK as an engineer with Ford Motor Group before joining Volkswagen Group Australia as an Area Manager and then as National Fleet and Government manager within the Commercial Vehicles team.
Ben then spent almost 10 years at Hyundai Motor Company Australia, initially as Product Planning Manager, before heading up public relations, sponsorship, events and corporate social responsibility. He subsequently transitioned into the eastern region (NSW/ACT) as Senior Regional Sales Manager.
In 2014, he returned to Volkswagen as Australia’s General Manager of Group Retail Development responsible for dealer development, Customer First strategy and non-technical training. Most recently Ben consulted to two of AHG’s Sydney Mazda dealerships.
With over 22 years’ experience in the motor industry, Ahmed has held various executive level roles in both national and state based operations.
Ahmed spent much of his career at Toyota Australia and has held various senior roles driving sales, strategy, marketing and change management. Most recently, Ahmed led the company-wide restructure of the Toyota franchise business model focused on network profit, customer satisfaction and retention.
Working with group leaders, dealer principals and department managers, Ahmed’s vast dealer experience has enabled the development and application of real solutions for many opportunities available in our industry today.
With 18 years’ experience in automotive, retail and consumer products consulting, Karen joins us from Deloitte Digital to lead our National Customer Experience Practice.
Karen has spent the last 10 years of her career focusing on customer behaviour and developing insight-driven strategies to improve customer experience and engagement. Prior to this she held general management roles, where she demonstrated her strategic and operational ability to successfully transform businesses.
Bringing her broad retail experience to the team, Karen is working with OEM’s and Dealers to develop customer insights, design new retail experiences and build customer-centric capability.
“Chris, Ben, Ahmed and Karen’s collective wealth of industry knowledge and experience clearly highlights the unparalleled breadth and depth of our expanding MIS team, and reinforces why we are leaders in this space,” said Grant Cameron, Lead Partner for Deloitte Motor Industry Services.
“We’re delighted to have them join as it allows us to continue providing our clients with exceptional service and to grow our offerings in the Australian marketplace. Importantly, it keeps building our reach to partner with and support our clients through this unprecedented period of change that the industry is experiencing.”
