Graduation – June 1994
Once upon a time a graduate in modern languages left Cambridge University, threw aside her Doc Martens and dungarees, bought a decent suit from M&S and embarked on a career in marketing. She didn’t have much idea about what that entailed, but she’d experienced something of a conversion during a post-school vacation job at IT giant IBM. Taking the job purely for the money and expecting to find the world of corporate business very dull, she’d in fact had a brilliant summer with a bunch of like-minded marketers and drinkers. This changed the course of her career.
Turning her back on previous plans to teach English (how could a teacher’s social life match up?!) the then school-leaver had reapplied for a languages degree and spent a gap year and three further university vacations working for IBM. It was almost certainly a lucky escape for a generation of schoolchildren. Emerging from her studies, she accepted a graduate job at IBM.
Nearly three years in marketing at IBM gave her a great grounding in the corporate world and a CIM qualification in marketing communications. Her interests took her towards the discipline of PR. After a spell in the Press Office, mentored by a fantastic colleague, she was offered a role in ASDA’s press office. Consumer PR held huge appeal, so she moved from London to Leeds to rediscover her Yorkshire roots.
Mementos of corporate life!
Working at ASDA was a rollercoaster ride. She met some incredibly inspiring people, some amazing friends, some of the best operators in retail and some of the most intimidating. She had some of the most exciting as well as some of the toughest experiences of her career. Moving into retail marketing, she spent nearly five years at ASDA, until the Walmart takeover motivated her to move on.
Next stop was Partners the Stationer, a brief and salutary experience as Business Development Manager in a small retailer that was swiftly dissolved and taken over, leaving her redundant. With bills to pay, she moved on to a contract role at a mobile phone service provider.
This proved a decisive move. Working in an aggressive, commercial culture where marketing was barely understood brought enormous challenges and pressures as well as high financial rewards. She learned, painfully, that money isn’t everything. In the end, turning 30 with a bonus in her pocket, she decided to take a career break and consider her next move.
Returning from a few months’ travels, she was revitalised and liberated. But what to do to earn a crust? The one thing she knew was that writing had always been her first love in marketing communications. Was there a way to make a living from this?
A job offer from a wine company as a permanent, full-time copywriter looked like a dream come true. The perfect subject matter, location and specialism! But was being tied to a corporate role again – however lovely the company – truly what she wanted? Happily, she was inspired and emboldened by an entrepreneurially minded partner. The idea of working freelance and running her own copywriting business was born.
She wrote a plan and resolved to try it for six months, to see if she could secure enough work to live off and whether writing was truly her full-time vocation.
Reader, she did, and it was!