Meet the man behind the The Yorkshire Mafia LinkedIn group
Yorkshire Mafia founder Geoff Shepherd has big plans for his new venture, Silicon Yorkshire, photographed in Leeds for The Yorkshire Post by Tony Johnson.
The conferences, which had collective audiences of over 250,000 people and brought tens of millions of pounds into the Leeds economy, were an unanticipated side-effect of the Yorkshire Mafia LinkedIn group that Shepherd had set up in 2008 in the hope it would help drive some business towards the tech recruitment company he had established with his business partner, Satvinder Mann.
It did manage to achieve that aim – but the Yorkshire Mafia element snowballed to the point that by 2018, its annual Buy Yorkshire conference was being held at the First Direct Arena in Leeds to cope with demand and a speaker line-up including the CEO of British Airways. But without any fanfare or direct publicity, Shepherd decided the time was right to call a halt.
“I just thought ‘kill it’. It was instinct, I just thought where else will we go? We didn’t want to be repeating everything,” he says. “There’s other things I wanted to do in life. Planning for those events was ridiculous. Six months out, I would know everything down to the security arrangements and the walkie-talkie frequencies.”
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