FROM his early dreams of becoming the Milk Tray Man to his current role as an internationally-acclaimed speaker, Geoff Ramm has always aimed high. Karen Dent meets the South Shields entrepreneur and discovers why keeping his eyes open at all times has made him what he is.

GEOFF Ramm says he’s always been a bit obsessed by marketing – even when he didn’t know what it was. At three, he was addicted to TV adverts and slogans and admits to an “embarrassing” penchant for collecting flyers.

He reels off advertising jingles from his childhood as he speaks and says the Smash robots are still his favourite advert of all time. But it was that mysterious man in the black polo neck who really sparked his imagination.

“From the age of six, the biggest ambition in my life was to become the next Milk Tray Man,” he says.

“That advert: the guy jumping out of the helicopter, the lady in the shower – there was always a lady in the shower – and he jumps on the balcony, the door is always slightly ajar ...

“She’s still in the shower and he just puts the chocolates by the side of the bed, puts the card on top – a bit of networking – and he leaves. That advert captivated me.”

It made such a lasting impression that he now uses it in his marketing talks – talks that have twice earned him international titles – but he says it splits the audience in two.

“That advert is 30 years old – I’m 36,” says Ramm. “It’s actually my main introduction in my talks: half the audience will burst out laughing, if they’re 36 or 36-plus. Half the audience haven’t got a clue because they’re younger than me. So I say you’ve got to go on YouTube.”

Born and bred in South Shields, Ramm now works globally, taking his “observational marketing” tips to audiences stretching from the North East to the Middle East.

His itinerary this year includes South Africa, the Netherlands and a third trip to Iran, where he has twice spoken, and been voted best speaker, at the World Advertising Forum in Tehran.

Initially, Ramm thought the phonecall from the event organisers was a practical joke set up by some of his mates. He picked up the call on a Friday afternoon and was asked what he was doing on four dates in November.

“I looked in my diary and said, ‘I’m speaking in London at the PSA (Professional Speakers’ Association) conference on that weekend’ and he said, ‘That’s fine, we’ll fly you off on Sunday night’.

“And I said, ‘To where?’ and he said, “Tehran’. And I said, ‘Tehran, Iran?’.

“Honest to God, I thought it was a wind-up. I thought one of my mates has phoned up a radio station and thought, ‘We’ll get Geoff’, because it’s Ramm, Tehran, Iran.

“‘And we’ll make up this bogus event and we’ll get him embarrassed on the radio’, and I thought, ‘Oh, I can’t let this happen’. So I said, ‘OK, that’s fine’.

“He said it was speaking to 2,000 businesses over two days. And I said, ‘Who else is speaking at the conference?’ He said Michael Jackson and I was like ‘Oh, come ON’. But it is worth mentioning that this is Michael Jackson, the South African motivational speaker, not the late Prince of Pop.

“I went on the website – it was true; and literally a few months later, I was flying out. I spoke at the World Advertising Forum in Tehran.

“That changed me; that changed me as a speaker, that changed everything.”

He was one of six speakers at the event and was initially concerned that his ideas and techniques would not translate well from English to the Persian language Farsi.

“They’ve all got their headsets on, it’s interpreted – you need an interpreter for me to get into English, never mind Geordie to English to Farsi. That was the big, biggest butterfly ever,” he said.

The audience voted by text on each speaker just after their speeches.

“I was panicking. I thought, I just want to fly back to Newcastle with a bit of pride intact. I thought, ‘Oh God, you don’t want to be the first out of the Big Brother House’. I don’t want to be last of six speakers, you just don’t.”

He was in second place after the first day, behind Michael Jackson – who he says is a phenomenal speaker – then was top of the pile on day two.

Ramm said: “I was, on aggregate, voted best speaker of the event and it was just phenomenal. It was just a real tipping point, turning point, call it what you will. It was a real shift in how I felt.

“I got a Persian rug as my gift for winning – a huge, beautiful Persian rug worth £4,000, incredible.”

Redundancy from his job in marketing at the Springfield Motor group kick-started Ramm’s venture into self-employment.

“It’s one of those things. If I hadn’t been made redundant, I wouldn’t have been here now,” he says. “I would hate this rollercoaster to stop.”

He now claims that nine years as his own boss has made him unemployable. It’s also not a route he would choose to go down again because he likes to be in control of his own ideas.

“It’s the whole Billy Connolly thing – you take this great idea, you take it to a council and it gets cut, bruised, chopped, and it comes out the other side a shadow of the original concept. I would find that hard to cope with.”