Ed Hatton launched The Marketing Director in 1990 to provide advice and guidance to small / medium businesses in the fields of strategy, marketing and sales and general business consulting. Initially it focussed on technology companies and then expanded to mentoring organisations from many sectors including services, manufacturing, retail, professions and non-profit.

This service was set up to fill a need for knowledgeable and experienced assistance in strategy marketing and sales in entrepreneurial organisations where the entrepreneur often has little experience of developing and implementing winning strategies and effective marketing with limited budgets. That need remains to this day. Consulting assignments have been mainly in South Africa but have also been undertaken in Australia, the Middle East and elsewhere in Africa.

The business has developed an increasing number of services for start-up and early stage entrepreneurial businesses. Ed is vitally interested and deeply passionate about the need for more successful entrepreneurial businesses as the key to economic growth in South Africa.

Ed has devoted the last 25 years to developing and training entrepreneurs and is a passionate believer that economic and employment issues can best be address by many successful entrepreneurial businesses of all sizes. He is a columnist and writer having co-authored a textbook on entrepreneurship, writing a regular column for Entrepreneur magazine for the last five years and being a frequent contributor to a range of media from Strategic Marketing to New Age, from Kaya FM to Talk Radio 702 and many others. Ed is a senior Business partners mentor.

He is a sought after public and corporate speaker addressing marketing, entrepreneurship, pricing, the cost of quality, intellectual property issues among others.

Ed and his wife Lal recently celebrated their 40th anniversary, Ed is a LifeLine counsellor, enjoys classic car rallying and photography and loves breaks in game reserves or the mountains.