Newport Director awarded OBE for services to business
A director of Newport-headquartered Acorn Recruitment, has been named in the Queen’s birthday honours list.
Dan Langford, Group Marketing Director at Acorn for more than 15 years, has been awarded an OBE for services to business. Langford is recognised in South Wales business circles, and across Wales and London, not only for his work at Acorn, one of the UK’s leading recruitment companies, but also for the voluntary contribution he has made to support Welsh business and economic development.
Dan’s professional career started in the commercial and marketing department of UWIC (now Cardiff Metropolitan University). He was the university’s Director of Marketing before joining the board at Acorn in 2004.
Dan has supported and advised many organisations in his voluntary non-executive roles. He served as a board member on the strategy board that set up the Cardiff Capital Region – one of only six board members drawn from the private sector – for which he also chaired the marketing & branding committee.
He has also made contributions as a board member of the Welsh Government’s flagship business support service Business Wales, a member of the Board of Governors of the former Coleg Glan Hafren (now Cardiff & Vale College), a Director of London Welsh Rugby Football Club, Commercial Director for the Welsh Commonwealth Games Team and Director of the Wales in London Society.
Dan is one of the founding directors of FOR Cardiff, the Cardiff business Improvement district (BID), for which he is also Chair of the Marketing Committee.
Dan achieved his Chartered Institute of Marketing post-graduate diploma at the University of South Wales in Newport, he is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts.
He was honoured for ‘outstanding contribution’ by the Chartered Institute of Marketing in Wales in 2013, and was awarded the Director’s Director of the Year award from the Institute of Directors in Wales in 2018.
Dan has also contributed a great deal of time to support charitable causes in Wales, including being a board member of the NSPCC Full Stop Appeal in Wales. In 2014 he set up and chaired the first CEO Sleepout in Cardiff, which saw 85 senior business people sleep out overnight, raising £80,000 for charities working with people affected by homelessness.
In 2016, together with business partner Mike Jordan, Director of leading branding agency bluegg, Dan founded Wales Week in London, an annual initiative promoting events and profile-raising opportunities in London for Wales and Welsh organisations. Described as ‘where Wales meets London, when London celebrates Wales’, in 2019 WWIL held its third annual programme with some 107 events taking place across the city, attracting nearly 10,000 attendees over the two-week period.
2019 also witnessed the first Wales Week Worldwide, which included Wales Weeks taking place in New England, Essex, Melbourne, Paris, New York, Ohio, Newcastle, among other locations.
Dan and his Marketing team at Acorn are recognised throughout the recruitment industry as one of the leading marketing teams in the UK, and were awarded UK Marketing Team of the Year at the 2018 National Recruiter Awards. Acorn has been nationally recognised many times over the years as a leading, award-winning recruitment firm, including UK’s best recruiter on a number of occasions.
Dan Langford said;
“To be honest it hasn’t really sunk in – it is recognition for the wonderful contribution and support I have received from so many amazing people throughout my career.”
Founder and Managing Director of Acorn Recruitment, Matt Southall, said:
“We’re absolutely delighted for Dan – he’s been a central part of the growth of our business for so many years, bringing such great energy, expertise and commitment to all he has done here. We couldn’t be more pleased for him.”