Andy Openshaw

Quitting Reunert’s corporate environment led to unexpected offers and a chance to develop entrepreneurial skills

Andy Openshaw didn’t really have a plan in place when he resigned from tech group Reunert late last year.

He had joined the group back in 2011 when his employer, ECN Telecoms, was bought out by Reunert. Though Openshaw had started out as ECN’S sales director, he soon rose to become MD of Nashua ECN, the entity created from the merger of ECN and Reunert’s Nashua Mobile.

From there, he went on to run several of Reunert’s ICT operations, eventually becoming CEO of the group’s communications cluster in late 2017.

Openshaw says while he enjoyed being part of a large corporation, it didn’t really cater to his entrepreneurial instincts. He missed the feeling he had before joining Reunert, where he was a part of several smaller businesses that he had enjoyed building up. “We built ECN into a fantastic business,” he recalls.

By late last year, Openshaw had had enough of the corporate life. “I was scared of becoming part of the furniture,” he jokes.

He knew it was time to move on. “I resigned from Reunert without going into a new job. I just wanted to take a year off.”

But then something unexpected happened: word got out that he was leaving, and people started calling him to find out if he was interested in working for them. One of them was Huge Group CEO James Herbst. Openshaw agreed to take on the job of Huge Group COO, starting on March 1.

Huge Group is nowhere near as large as Reunert, and Openshaw