I joined GM Business Growth Hub in September 2022 and became part of the communications team. I have learnt a lot in my time here, but first, my early career.
I graduated from the University of Sheffield and soon moved to Hong Kong, via a brief stay in Italy. This was via an EU sponsored course where I spent 9 months in Bournemouth learning marketing and Italian. This included one month working in a bookshop in the centre of Ferrara, a lovely city in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy.
Moving to Asia
After Italy I moved to Hong Kong, where at the time my father was living. My first ‘proper’ job was as a financial journalist at small magazine. It was at this job that I leant the journalist trade. It was not breaking news type of work, but rather interviewing CEOs, CFOs and CIOs and writing articles based on their views.
I stayed there for a few years then moved to work in a couple of roles, first with AXA Investment Management, writing fund reports. I attended the fund manager meetings every morning, so got a good insight to how investment decisions were made and how the industry worked. That didn’t last long, and I returned to journalism for just over a year, working at another magazine, this time covering alternative investments and the insurance sector.
These jobs gave me a broad education in the financial and investment world. This served me well when I joined Gavin Anderson, a global communications firm. One of my favourite times at the agency was not working with a financial firm but with a Japanese cosmetics company, Shu Uemera. Their factory was in the same region as the Fukushima nuclear plant. The plant was impacted by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The release of radioactive material did not directly affect the Shu Uemera factory, but it was a concern for investors and customers. That’s where we came in, recommended by their bankers. Crisis communications is always interesting, and we moved fast to make recommendations and to publicise them when they were implemented. This included radiation sensors where material entered the factory and where they left. We also recommend independent verification and arranged for two academics from Hong Kong University to visit the factory.
After five years there I moved in-house at AXA Investment Management as the Asia Pacific Regional Manager for marketing and communication. While there I launched the Hong Kong website and the regional intranet site. Early experience for my later work on the GM BGH site!
Back to the UK
After brief stints at another communications agency, Edelman, and at J.P. Morgan, I decided, in 2013, it was time to return to the UK, after 17 years in Hong Kong. I landed in London and soon started work at yet another communications firm, Peregrine Communications. It was then that my father became ill, and I moved to Liverpool to be near him. I started doing bits of freelance work which I got via people I knew in Hong Kong. I cared for my father until he passed away in 2019.
I decided to return to looking for full-time work and through our colleagues at Restart I landed a job cutting the corners off passports and processing both renewing and first applications for passports. While there I was still looking for something a bit more suited to my experience. Enter Growth Company and GM Business Growth Hub!
Great team!
In contrast to my job in London, all the colleagues at GC are great. The communications team works together well and always willing to help each other and always have time for a chat. They are all great people as are the marketing team that we work closely with. And partly due to colleagues and the guidance they have provided, I have learnt a lot since joining.
I started work in communications long before social media apps were a thing! I have however, learnt how to use social media in a business sense. I can now write posts, using digital tools such as Hootsuite to help me. I am now confident in this area. Our social media team has people of all ages, and we share our respective talents and experiences to get the best results for all our work.
I have also been introduced to Canva, another tool that was new to me. I have used the site’s own tutorials and tips from colleagues to manage to use it to a degree that I can now give guidance to team members on its use.
I can now do the client interviews, write the case studies, adjust any photos in Canva, post it on our website and then write and post to social media to promote the case study. I could do the first two before I came to Growth Company and only all of them after joining.
I still have more to learn both in social media and different ways to use it, and on Canva there is so much more to learn.
I enjoy working at GM BGH and looking forward to continuing to learn and working with all my colleagues.