After studying Music Industry Management & Marketing in the late 90s (Gen X rules!), I moved into a succession of high-reponsibility, high-pressure jobs, including working for the Ministry Of Defence in a key civilian role, the 999 service and for the Scottish Police records office.

After learning how to keep cool in a crisis, communicate with a huge variety of difference characters and how to stay awake on night shift without coffee, I then moved into what would become my specialist field - helping companies get organised for growth, stability, to attract investment and to be effective and efficient.

Beginning with a long tenure at iomart, a then-IT start-up, I helped build the company from the ground up, taking charge of admin, complaints, support and facilities teams, as well as indulging my creative writing side by providing copy for their website, newsletters and marketing materials. After a stint working in the Bangkok office (sawadee ka!), I returned to Scotland to take up a post with Red Bee Media, a post production and creative agency, providing subtitles for television channels in the UK, Europe and beyond.

Taking on the role of Operations Manager, I was responsible for the day to day running of the subtitling operation, supervising, allocating and troubleshooting for up to 200 people on any given day working on live and pre-recorded broadcasts. During this time, I really honed my decision-making and critical thinking skills, as well as developing a knack for strategic planning and budgeting.

After a redundancy, I honed in even further on my drive to work with creative businesses, firstly as Website Manager for Penny Black, where I helped move this chain of indie retail businesses over to Shopify and build up their hugely successful ecommerce offering. From purchasing and visual merchandising to newsletter and social posts, I worked with the management team to level up the online presence of the business.

From there, I moved agency-side to Cut Media, a sports content agency specialising in brand activation, athlete sponsorship and promotional content, joining to head up the operations and people function. Sadly, due to stormy market forces in the sports marketing field, Cut Media is no more, but it left me not only with great experience and skills from being part of the senior leadership team, but an extra string to my bow in the Production area, as I acted as Production Coordinator and Assistant Producer on several productions, including a memorable stint organising travel and accommodation for crew for the Paris Olympics with a week’s notice!

Since then, I’ve helped various creative agencies with short and long-term planning, cashflow forecasting, budgeting, people planning, organisational development, strategic goal setting and coaching CEO and business owners. Businesses I’ve helped recently include an architectural design studio, an animation studio and a renewable energy start-up, as well as continuing to work with indie retailers to help move them forward with their plans and figure out what their goals are and how to achieve them. And all whilst running my own creative businesses on the side. I’ve vast experience on both sides of the coin - corporate and indie - and am uniquely positioned to apply learnings from both of these sides to each other, making for agile, adaptive and quirky businesses that go from strength to strength.