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Kim Owen
Senior Associate at Advisian - Commercial Manager - Contracts Manager
Professional Background
Kim Owen is a seasoned professional with extensive experience in the fields of Quantity Surveying and Commercial Management. Over the years, Kim has excelled in various pivotal roles, including Commercial Manager, Contracts Manager, Quantity Surveyor, and Consultant, representing clients, main contractors, and third parties. This broad array of experience has positioned Kim as a knowledgeable and reliable figure in the construction and consultancy sectors, bringing a wealth of insight to every project undertaken.
With a robust project experience portfolio that encompasses a diverse range of industries including Hospitals and Healthcare, Commercial projects, Mining and Resources, Airports, Power, Marine, Roads, Piping, and general infrastructure, Kim has demonstrated versatility and adaptability in her work. Each project has contributed to an ever-evolving skill set, allowing Kim to lead with excellence in commercial and financial management practices.
Kim's primary focus has been on developing and implementing best practice commercial strategies alongside leading transparent project controls and reporting mechanisms designed to mitigate risks and ensure project success. Her dedication to transparency in operations has earned her commendations from peers and clients alike, making her an assertive force in ensuring project objectives are met effectively.
As a subject matter expert, Kim provides invaluable contractual advice to project management teams. Her expertise spans numerous areas including estimation services, procurement guidance, claims preparation and defense, budget and cost control advice, evaluation of contract variations, and the implementation and management of commercial procedures. These capabilities not only streamline project processes but also contribute to the financial health and robustness of the projects she oversees.
Kim's transition into a consulting environment has been remarkably successful, where she has continued to provide commercial expertise, due diligence, and comprehensive analysis across various projects. Her commitment to excellence and continuous improvement reflects her passion for the industry and her clients’ success.
Education and Achievements
Kim's educational background has laid a solid foundation for her career in Quantity Surveying and Commercial Management. She studied at the Durban University of Technology, an institution known for its strong emphasis on practical skills and industry-relevant knowledge. Furthermore, she also pursued studies in Law, Construction at Robert Gordon University. This blend of technical and legal education enables Kim to approach her role with a comprehensive understanding of both the financial and regulatory complexities involved in construction and project management.
Notable Positions and Contributions
Throughout her career, Kim has held several key positions that have contributed not only to her growth as a professional but also to the success of the organizations she has been a part of. As a Senior Associate at Advisian, she leads initiatives that enhance corporate performance through strategic commercial advice and management. Her previous role as Commercial Manager at Bgc Contracting highlights her skills in handling complex contracts and overseeing their execution to ensure compliance and financial success.
Kim has also made her mark in significant positions with prominent companies including:
- Commercial Manager at Murray & Roberts Australia Pty Ltd: Here, she honed her capabilities in managing large-scale commercial projects.
- Senior Contracts Administrator at BHP Billiton Major Projects: Kim demonstrated her negotiation and contract management skills, facilitating some of the largest mining development projects in Australia.
- Senior Quantity Surveyor roles at reputed firms: Her early experience as a Senior Quantity Surveyor at firms including Gordon Verhoef & Krause and Marius Kemp and Associates enabled her to build an excellent groundwork in quantity surveying principles and practices.
Such experiences have established her as a leader in contractual negotiations, cost planning, and due diligence, qualities that resonate with her commitment to achieving project success.
Key Skills and Expertise
Kim Owen’s key skills are extensive and essential in her field. They include:
- Contracts Negotiation: Proficient in achieving favorable terms that drive project success.
- Contracts Management: Skilled in overseeing contractual obligations and ensuring compliance.
- Commercial Management: Focused on optimizing financial performance across projects.
- Cost Planning & Analysis: Adept at estimating project costs and ensuring budget adherence.
- Project Cost Control & Analysis: Implementing and monitoring financial controls to manage costs effectively.
- Commercial Due Diligence: Providing thorough analysis and scrutiny to ensure project viability.
- Mediation and Arbitration: Capable of resolving disputes amicably and efficiently.
- Quantity Surveying & Estimating: Strong background in calculating project materials and labor costs.
- Earned Value Management: Using performance measurement techniques to gauge project health.
- Forensic Delay Analysis: Expert at analyzing project delays to determine impact on timelines.
These skills not only underline her qualification in handling complex commercial projects but also showcase her dedication to implementing industry best practices and achieving client goals.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Kim Owen’s dynamic career is a reflection of her commitment to innovation, excellence, and transparency in project management and quantity surveying. With a solid educational background, significant industry experience, and a suite of valuable skills, Kim continues to change the landscape of the construction and consulting industries. As she progresses in her career, she remains focused on enhancing commercial operations and ensuring that her clients experience successful project outcomes.
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Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
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- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
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Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.