Trevor Mather

Trevor was head boy at Balshaw's Church of England High School (1982/83) and a proud member of Clayton House!

His brother, Steven and  sister-in-law Elaine also attended Balshaws.

Trevor is now the managing director of the now global Auto Trader, with an annual turnover of £281.6 million.  The Auto Trader site is so popular that it gets 96 advert views per second!  Perhaps it was the Balshaw’s motto ‘non sibi sed aliis’ which led him to make one of his biggest decisions of removing commission for its sales force to focus them on advice and expertise-sharing, thus removing the motivation for sales staff to be pushy in their approach to clients. 

Prior to his current role, Trevor was President and CEO of Thoughtworks, a global IT and software consultancy which he grew to have operations in 29 cities around the world. ThoughtWorks was founded by Roy Singham in a Chicago basement in 1993. Roy’s formula for success from the start was “Attitude, Aptitude, and Integrity” — he built ThoughtWorks upon the firm belief that communities of talented, driven, and principled people could move mountains. Put simply, ThoughtWorks creates and implements the most difficult IT systems in the world. He built up the UK office to 150 people then he was asked to build and look after India, then Australia, then China and then North America. They are now over 1100 people spread across the world and he was asked to become the CEO in late 2006.

Trevor left school and went to Runshaw College and then off to Southampton University to play rugby and get a Masters degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics.

He joined British Aerospace in Warton but then decided engineering was not for him. He was more into business and so was fortunate to be offered work with Accenture (especially after they gave him 12 months off so he could travel around the world) and moved to London.

During 10 years in Accenture Trevor specialised in providing the link between business people and IT, building some of the most complex IT solutions predominantly for Financial Services companies all over the world. He was lucky enough to travel to and live in Melbourne, Cape Town, Amsterdam, New York ….. and Swindon and Newcastle.

Left in the dotcom bubble around 1999 to become a venture capitalist, finding small companies, investing in them and then growing them and then in 2002 was asked to start up ThoughtWorks in the UK.It was a US business that wanted to expand into the UK and the rest of the world.

Trevor lives in Manchester and spends one week a month in the USA, one week in London, one week in India or China and 1 week a month somewhere else! He tends to spend time meeting customers, working on major sales, working with the executive team to plan and manage the business or recruiting the best talent he can find. No day is the same and it is difficult to manage his personal life but it’s great fun.

Despite the travel, he still manages to get home every weekend where he sees his wife, three children and 2 dogs! Trevor still loves rugby and all sports.

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