About Britefire

Britefire is a performance consulting and training company based in South Africa that helps businesses excel in e-business and e-marketing, web project management, and corporate learning. The company was founded by renowned e-marketing and e-learning pioneer Godfrey Parkin and global e-commerce guru Karen Parkin, who built their reputations in the USA and Europe. A contemporary 21st century company, Britefire understands and is at the forefront of evolving business trends. We aim to bring exciting new approaches in performance improvement to a new generation of business people.

The founders of Britefire have been e-business thought-leaders throughout the growth of the internet, e-marketing, and e-learning in Europe and the US, and understand clearly the potential impact on South African growth. We believe that the future economic prosperity of South Africa requires
  • massively increasing the affordability and availability of training and education
  • stimulating and facilitating small-medium business entrepreneurship and leadership
  • creatively and aggressively targeting global markets
We are convinced that the internet and other emerging technologies can contribute dramatically to the democratisation of knowledge, skills, and commercial opportunities and that more (a lot more) should be done to liberalise the infrastructures and encourage the pioneering of innovative approaches in these fields. We intend to champion these goals, while working toward providing some of the inputs and impetus required. We will continue to challenge creative minds to find more practical, accessible and effective applications of technology in the fields of e-learning and e-commerce.

As part of a program of making fundamental knowledge and skills available to small business people and individual entrepreneurs, Britefire will be providing low-cost seminars. We will also provide for deserving individuals a number of no-cost scholarship seats to most of our courses and seminars. Additionally, we will be running a number of free learning events in areas that most training organisations simply never visit.
 

The Principals

Godfrey Parkin - President and CEO

Godfrey Parkin is a consultant, trainer, entrepreneur, and strategist, with extensive international experience in marketing, applied internet technologies, and corporate training. In a career that spans twenty five years and three dozen countries, his innovative work in business performance improvement and technology-enhanced learning has earned him global recognition.

Godfrey has worked with companies like Unilever, Nomura Bank, American Airlines, General Motors, Gillette, Toyota, and DreamWorks. His diverse list of achievements include quadrupling the revenues of Credit Suisse’s securities sales teams worldwide; radically transforming the culture of A.C. Nielsen’s companies around the globe; helping a small company beat all the big Learning Management Systems vendors in their bid for Porsche’s global business; and transforming a failing US training operation into the world’s largest provider of e-learning courses in Project Management .

Godfrey is integrally involved in furthering the development of e-marketing and corporate learning, and is an active member of the small global community of thought leaders working on the practical exploitation of web 2.0. He is the moderator of the E-learning Discussion Group of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), and is a coordinator of “Trdev,” the internet's premier training and development community. He is also a regular member of the judging panel for Brandon Hall’s “Excellence in Learning Awards” and is a sought-after speaker at conferences worldwide.

He believes that consulting and training should focus on producing tangible, practical impacts on performance, and that, if the vision and strategy are clearly defined, achieving dramatic impacts need cost no more than the cost of achieving marginal improvements.

Godfrey writes a regular column (“Parkin Space”) for TrainingZONE, the UK's largest circulation online training journal, and is a member of the team behind the leading edge “Learning Circuits” blog. And for several years he has authored his own popular and authoritative marketing and performance improvement blog, “Parkin's Lot.”
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Karen Parkin — Vice President

Karen Parkin is an outstanding leader with an enviable depth of experience in Information Technology, advertising, new media, web development and e-commerce. Wherever she has worked, she has rapidly acquired a reputation for planning, execution, and delivery on complex high-pressure projects demanding sound business judgment, creative flair, and technical innovation.

Her career to date culminated in her leading projects that took Marriott Hotels International from having a US-only web site to its international presence in 20 countries in 9 languages. Marriott’s US and international web sites now take over $10 million a day in online hotel reservations, for all of its 2,800 hotels around the world.

Karen is passionate about everything she does and inspires people around her through striving uncompromisingly for the best. She believes strongly in the importance of Project Management and communications as fundamental building blocks for getting things done professionally. She has developed great understanding of multicultural work environments and international markets and is a recognized guru in internationalisation and localisation. She moves with ease from large corporate structures to small entrepreneurial companies. Her mastery of state-of-the-art management processes and technology has been gained by “walking the walk” in major projects and in real-world business experiences.

Her bio includes working for or with major companies like IBM, Dow Chemical Europe, the BBC, EURO RSCG (a subsidiary of Havas International), Lockheed Martin, Intel, and Marriott International.
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