From inner-city Bristol to rural Cornwall, suburbs of Birmingham to BID developments as far apart as Hexham and Hastings, Matt has a wealth of experience in all aspects of place management.

Leaving a successful career in retail in 2004, Matt trained as a Business Advisor working with pre-start and existing businesses and brought this experience, along with many innovative project deliveries, a wealth of place-based knowledge and strategic-level BIDs involvement to Revive & Thrive when he helped Mark Barnes to start the company and later joined it himself.

Matt has subsequently worked on a range of projects in towns and cities around the country, developing, delivering and managing BIDs, supporting other town partnerships and working alongside Mark on establishing and growing Revive & Thrive.

Matt is a champion for town centres and the High Street and is committed to helping business groups, BIDs, local authorities and other interested parties

Mark’s vision for supporting places up and down the country began a decade ago when he left a career in Automotive Aftersales Management to work on place related projects and contracts

A three-year spell as a town centre manager gave him the understanding of the difficulties faced by place practitioners as he developed the concept for Revive & Thrive supporting and working with solutions providers and strengthening his extensive national network.

Since incorporating the company in 2013, he has grown Revive & Thrive into one of the pillars of the place-based support community and, with the recent addition of the non-executive board, advisory group, ambassadors, a growing team and the company’s corporate advocates, he continues to oversee the evolution of Revive & Thrive and the development of our industry.

Invaluable member of Revive & Thrive Team, Stephen is an experienced graphic and web designer with over ten years of freelance work under his belt. He has turned his hand to events in recent years delivering dozens of town and city events. He is passionate about all things design with experience in video editing and effects, web design, illustration, animated presentations, copywriting, typography and graphic design – he brings all of these qualities to deliver Place Magazine each month as well as taking care of all of our marketing materials and website design.

Having worked within the Place Management industry for most of his career he’s caught the passion for improving our communities that Revive and Thrive stands for.

Claire graduated as a teacher and spent the following twelve years in both Education and Youth Services within the local authority. She has always enjoyed encouraging people to engage in local issues and developing their future.
Claire’s drive to help people and communities lead to her becoming a Parliamentary Researcher and Senior Caseworker for a Member of Parliament. Within this role she helped many individuals and businesses deal with issues and problems affecting them at many levels. This gave Claire an in-depth knowledge of dealing with not only local and national Government but also large corporations. Claire is an enthusiastic and driven individual with exceptional communication skills.