The world of reporting is fast-paced and intense – tell us how you caught the reporting bug.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a huge interest in business – in how businesses work, what makes them successful (or not, in some cases) and where market leaders pull ahead of the competition.
I started my career as a product manager at Reuters and was lucky to spend lots of time in the newsroom with the financial newswire journalists as they broke stories. They taught me to think about how and why company news can be market-moving. I was soon hooked, and that’s never left me.
Moving into investor relations, I loved hearing the executive team talking to investors about the company’s strategy and plans and helping to craft the investment case, but there are only so many ways to tell the same story! The great thing about working agency-side is the variety – you help lots of businesses to tell their stories and see how they evolve over time.
Working with a wide range of clients – whether it’s engineering and aerospace or finance or media – is endlessly stimulating. And while every sector has its distinctive characteristics, there can be a read-across from one to another that can give you a helpful perspective.
For example, pharma and mining companies produce very different products but both invest a lot of money in researching and developing assets over long periods of time before they can generate a return on them. There are similarities in their business models and their approaches to partnering with others to pool expertise and share risk.
What brought you to Conran in 2013?
My time at Reuters included stints in corporate strategy, employee comms and speechwriting for the CEO and COO, which in turn led me to the investor relations team and responsibility for the annual report. I learned about the intersection between narrative and numbers, and the need to be rigorous and to challenge. But I also saw how design and branding can be transformational in bringing a report to life and engaging readers in a way that 20,000 words of plain text just don’t do.
After Reuters, I worked at Ofcom, the telecoms and media regulator, communicating the finer points of economic regulatory decisions to analysts and journalists. But I missed the buzz of a faster-moving news cycle and the challenge of bringing together all the elements of the annual report into a polished whole. That being so, I moved to another reporting agency and then joined Conran in 2013 to head up the consulting and advisory arm for reporting and corporate comms.
I knew immediately that I wanted to work here when I walked through the gates of our old offices in Camden on a sunny day in May and met the team: smart, interesting people who obviously enjoyed working together.