Digital Horizons

Marketing Grad to Agency Owner: How to Guide

• James Walker & Brian Hastings

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Ever wondered how a humble university student job at a restaurant could shape a path to becoming a managing director at a top digital marketing agency? Discover Brian's journey from his formative years at Queensland University of Technology to navigating the complexities of the digital marketing world. You'll gain insights into his early experiences in advertising sales at News Corp's Courier Mail and how these roles, often overlooked, equipped him with the foundational skills for a thriving career. Brian shares his wisdom on the critical importance of leveraging every opportunity, even those that seem mundane, to build a successful career in business and marketing.

Explore the transition from traditional marketing to the digital arena as Brian recounts his move from managing website projects to crafting digital strategies and leading significant accounts at Latitude Digital Marketing in London. From battling imposter syndrome to embracing leadership and strategic thinking, Brian provides an authentic look at the evolution from a digital director to a managing director. He emphasizes the art of trusting your team and relinquishing control to focus on broader business goals. If you’re looking to uncover the leadership insights that foster not just business success but personal growth, Brian’s story promises to inspire and guide you on your professional journey.

The Digital Horizons Podcast is hosted by:

James Walker - Managing Director WHD
Brian Hastings - Managing Director Nous

Speaker 1:

From university through to managing director of an eight-figure digital marketing agency. Today, we're going to be talking to Brian about how his journey has gone from finishing uni and then his first job in a digital marketing role, going right through to being the managing director of one of the top branding agencies here in Brisbane, australia. Brian, welcome to the show, as always.

Speaker 2:

Co-host but today you're in the interview seat. Yeah, I know I've got to actually think about what I'm going to say a bit more than I usually do. Not that we don't think about what we say.

Speaker 1:

No, I mean, this should be an easy one, because you're just talking about yourself right, you don't even have to really think about it.

Speaker 1:

It's my favorite topic. It's just recalling all 10 years. So we're talking about from, yeah, when you finish uni, and that's where Brian and I met each other when we're sitting in a marketing degree, marketing class at university here in Queensland, and then you've gone into different marketing roles. So how about we I guess this is where we're going to structure. This is going over, I guess, the different roles you've had along the career, any challenges and lessons learned from each of the different roles, and what you think that maybe you've done that's potentially differently to other people, or any advice you give people to allow people to ideally progress faster than what they would if they didn't have this information.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely Happy to share, and I think there's some value in each role that I extracted and that I wouldn't change. That I'll try to share with you guys today. Going back to the job I had during uni and to what I got out of the uni degree itself, so during uni I did a Bachelor of Business with a major of Advertising and Marketing at Queensland University of Technology. But my key takeaway was the job that I had during uni, which was after KFC, that is, working in a restaurant. One of the things you mentioned is you know what did you take out of it? What I thought I would get is a bit of an easier job than KSC.

Speaker 2:

What I really got from that role was the ability to communicate with people of all ages and backgrounds, to be able to juggle priorities I know it's just a restaurant, but the problems don't feel all that different as you get older. They're still big in the moment when you're solving them but also resolve problems with people of all different backgrounds, ages, seniority levels as patrons of the restaurant. The other thing I learned in that role was how to engage with and communicate and find common ground with people from all different backgrounds and ages and genders and wealth levels, find something to talk about and find some way to add value to their night or their evening. So that was a huge leap in my confidence at a young age of being able to talk to people from all over.

Speaker 1:

So I guess from this you're sort of saying not to discount the value of roles that you're doing within university because they are going to provide you. I mean, I'm sure plenty of people do internships and different things. But if you're not even able to land one of those types of roles, think about the role that you're currently in and learn about and think about well, how can this actually impact your future career in terms of gaining skills, if it is just talking to people, Absolutely yeah.

Speaker 2:

If you're going to, if your intent is to end up in a career where you are talking to people maybe even managing people running a business in the future Don't just do a job where you don't talk to anybody. Try to be always building those skills.

Speaker 1:

Yep, okay, so let's get into your first marketing role.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, just before then I guess there was uni. There was one thing I learned from uni I think it was my love of business in general. It just makes sense. Some of the other subjects, some of the other courses I did in the lead up to that I started in civil engineering. But business is so cut and dry and clear If you create something of value and you effectively communicate that value, you will get paid for it. A lot of ups and downs and ins and outs around that, but that was really compelling to me and the exams were easy. The assignments made sense because it just makes sense. So that's something I took from business and that the thing that communicates the value is brand. So that was one of my key takeaways.

Speaker 2:

But then I moved into my first role. Back then it would have been 2006, 2007. Still used the newspaper to find jobs and I looked in the career one section of the Courier Mail, which is our local newspaper, and found a job for advertising sales at the career one section at the Courier Mail, our news limited newspaper. I thought, wow, I've just finished an advertising degree, I know advertising, I'll get an advertising job. Little did I know it was selling the little squares of job ads to companies in the career one job listing section. But it was my first in. It was my first professional job, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And this is a pretty large corporation, right, this is News Corp, that's right. So I think any role within that is only going to be kind of a small role in a very big business, big engine. But at least, as you said, foot in the door, do the work that you need to get done to sort of work out what you like and then move into the next one.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's right. So you know, I think if I knew what I knew now, I probably would have avoided a sales role. I didn't realize I was going into, you know, a sales target role. You've got to sell this much by this date at the end of the month. Actually, the first job was a sales support. I was literally entering the job ad bookings in a DOS-based program so that they would appear in the right spot in the newspaper their size, the name, their code, and how much Sounds terrible. It was all day, every day, just typing in a DOS-based program.

Speaker 1:

It was all day, every day, just typing in in a DOS-based program.

Speaker 2:

So I got from that accuracy, but also how a professional business works. Big corporate.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, how to operate and carry yourself. You've got to come with an iron shirt. We had to wear ties if we were leaving the building. Yeah, but I never did so.

Speaker 2:

I moved up from that role of sales support into an account manager role, which is actually the person who goes and speaks to the clients. I had a list of clients. My clients were the education industry universities to private educators. My role was to ensure that they kept buying job listing ads in the paper and then we had the career one online section by then. So it was my first taste of online advertising.

Speaker 2:

What I got out of that was structured sales training and process that I could do the sales training and the next day implement that sales process. So everything from disk profiles and understanding what sort of person you're communicating with, even down to little things like when you're about to start a meeting what mood do they feel they seem like they're in? Are they ready to hear you? Is it worth even starting the selling process through to objection handling processes for listening at a deeper level, so you're really hearing what the problem is and you're overcoming the right objections through to closing. How do you actually get confirmation on a pack or a deal? It was very structured. It was very sales orientated, but it's a beast of a business and they've got this process down really well. So that gave me a lot of confidence in the selling space. But what we had to offer was what they needed. So it was, I'm not going to say, easy, but it made sense. We had something that the client wanted and I was just making this easy as possible for them to get it.

Speaker 1:

Yep, all right. So then what's the next role you go in there from the news corp.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So from news sales I was recruited or poached across to 97.3 FM, which is part of the Australian Radio Network. It's changing names now but it's a radio station. I got a job in direct sales. Direct sales means selling radio straight to businesses, not through an advertising agency. I didn't quite know what I was in for. I thought it would be very similar to my time at News Limited in the Courier Mail. I had a client list at the Courier Mail. I didn't have a client list to work with here. So it's effectively 15 to 30 cold calls a morning to set 10 to 15 meetings a week for the next week to go and talk to business owners about radio which everyone knows about.

Speaker 2:

So, it was one of the biggest challenges. I'll admit I was let go from that business. But what I learned and my key takeaway from that is you've got to believe in what you do. I couldn't go into any meeting with a small business where this is their last $5,000 to $10,000 for a campaign and confidently tell them that this is the best place they could spend their money. It just didn't feel right.

Speaker 2:

I could see that they needed a website or they needed to get their. You know, sometimes they didn't have anyone answering the phone. So if there was radio ads and someone called, no one was going to answer that call. There were so many problems I could quickly see that they should spend money on first to resolve before they did this thing and I couldn't close. I just couldn't do it because it wasn't the right thing to do at that level. Obviously larger brands who have those sorts of things sorted. I just couldn't do it because it wasn't the right thing to do at that level. Obviously larger brands who have those sorts of things sorted. They weren't the clients I was chasing and it just taught me it's okay to fail in certain areas. It just felt like a massive loser that I couldn't do this, but looking back now, it was because I didn't have faith in what I was selling. It's because I didn't believe in it and I didn't want to be responsible for taking their money on something that I didn't truly believe was going to change their business.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and again, I mean something like that is something that I guess gets instilled into you, I mean from running a digital agency. I'm sure that that's probably contributed a lot to the performance and how now this goes, because there are a lot of agencies out there in our space that will take people's money very easily, spend it on with no results. So I feel like that's something that would carry through.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely, and it's also taught me the type of career I wanted. I didn't want to be, you know, 15, 20 cold calls before 10am every day. I didn't want to be dropping in and, being the meeting that the person I was meeting with didn't see value in me being there. I was a time waster. It taught me to get over myself and just don't put the phone down and keep going. But it also gave me an insight into I want to be someone that's adding value. I want to be a career that I've got something worth providing or worth doing. So from there I moved into my first digital agency. So, while news and career one there was selling online advertising, this was my first digital agency and its primary product was websites, websites, design, design, development, some email marketing, and I introduced social advertising and organic social content to that agency.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and so within that, so this would be a pretty new space at the time. So imagine that there's probably, I guess, there'd be a lot to learn, because it would be a completely different role, and then also this whole industry is sort of just starting to really pick up at this time, right. So this would be what year are we talking here? This?

Speaker 2:

would have been 2010,. 2011 maybe, yeah, so this is sort of pre-Facebook ads really taken off.

Speaker 1:

This is sort of a time when you put a website up. It's then really reliant on SEO and other tactics to drive traffic to the site, social media, was not really taken that seriously by businesses at the time, so I guess it would have been quite a challenging and steep learning curve in terms of how to make these kind of things work for businesses that are going to give them a profitable result.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I completely agree. Even the owners, the founders of the business, weren't from a design or digital agency background. They run a phone call center business before that, but saw potential and opportunity here. So the team that they hired the designers, the developers and the account managers or the project managers that was my role. I was a website project manager, and as a part of running the projects, I would go out with an account director and we would win new business, and then I would run the site builds from the design process. I would do the wireframes with a designer. That designer would then apply the brand to the designs and then I would brief the developers on what we wanted it to do, but there wasn't anyone I could turn to.

Speaker 2:

Any sort of people in the business had been through many site projects before there was another project manager, so you're kind of figuring things out for yourself. What it did teach me, though, is how to quickly learn the ins and outs of a new business and industry. In the first discovery meeting, we would meet businesses from you know confectionery shops with you know bricks and mortar shops that wanted an online store to a tire shop, to business, to business services, to large scale retail brands. It was the first time where I was selling previously. This time I had to discover and properly understand what it is, their business does and what the challenge is and then craft the best solution or website to support that. And I really enjoyed that moment where you're going from one industry and one client challenge to another and juggling those variances or those differences, because in that job where I introduced search engine optimization, I introduced search engine optimization. At that time it was attempts to speed up the page as much as you could, but offshore link building, link building however you could get it.

Speaker 1:

I loved SEO at that time. It was so easy. It was like work out what the latest hack is and you'd rank number one and you'd do it. Yeah, it was a good time to be in SEO Craft a copy with the keywords that you wanted Spinning articles.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the longer the better. Getting articles written offshore and loading the website up with those articles Absolute garbage content.

Speaker 1:

The internet was flooded with rubbish but websites were ranking and it was a good time to be able to go get found online very easily.

Speaker 2:

Yeah that's right. And I think what I really enjoyed was because we're discovering these things on multiple sites and finding what works. We start to learn things like you know, the equity that's passed up the structure of the website. If it's a subsidiary page, that's passing that link equity further up the site. Those sorts of ins and outs of how you do it brought me a lot of value, not only in front of clients, but the perceived value of my input within the agency grew. Yes, I could craft the structure of a website and what a client needed, but the other things like the organic social, the SEO, and understanding how to communicate SEO and report on SEO, but then explaining why the client is paying what they're paying and our strategy and what we're going to do. It came out of me researching it and developing that process for this agency, which then led me to my shift overseas. So move to London, that's right, as most Australians in their early 20s tend to do.

Speaker 2:

I actually moved to London with you.

Speaker 1:

Yes, not like as a couple. We moved with your girlfriend at the time. Now wife and I moved with my girlfriend and wife girlfriend at the time. That was a fun period. It was awesome.

Speaker 2:

And you were doing the entrepreneurial thing at the time and I was following the sort of career path through the agency approach.

Speaker 1:

We're talking about 2011 right now. Right yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I guess what I really enjoyed about having the backing of some digital marketing capability. So website project management, managing multiple clients, understanding Google analytics and SEO and organic social when I moved to London understanding Google Analytics and SEO and organic social. When I moved to London, I started looking for restaurant and hospitality jobs, but they were going to pay so poorly. At the same time, I thought, well, why can't I apply for a proper job? So when starting to see what those jobs were paying, I started going to recruiters and directly to agencies and actually landed a job at a large performance agency.

Speaker 2:

It was called Latitude Digital Marketing at the time. It's since been sold to one of the large groups. It had 80 or 90 people with a satellite office in London which I got a job in and its main production team. So all the paid search and programmatic, display and SEO teams were based in Warrington in the north of England. So this was my first foray into people doing it properly, like in London. Digital marketing was way more mature. There was no taking one chunk of budget and then taking whatever management fee you wanted out of it. Which agencies in Brisbane were doing at the time? This agency was doing it well, and spending millions of dollars a month on large gaming clients, windows and blinds manufacturer, which spent a half a million pounds a month in paid search alone. It was incredible money that I was witness to, so it was a great job to land.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and so I guess, from doing that, what do you think got you in the door there? Like, how did you land this job? Because it sounds like a pretty good job, especially for a lot of Australians that go to London, don't typically going to land the job that they want to be in. As I said, probably going to land something that's more, just take a job to do whatever you want. So what do you think was it that got you the job in that position there?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, look, it wasn't again a huge or a high authority position. I did get a job as an account manager. Now, an account manager means you have a group of clients that you are responsible for and you are the one point of contact between the client and the teams running their advertising in the agency. Why I think I stood out.

Speaker 2:

There is a perception in London that Australians are good communicators and work hard, so that was a positive. But also at this time, digital marketing skill sets were rare, so they were looking for a combination of people who are good communicators that were willing to take a salary that was probably lower than what you know what someone who's had a few years of experience in London would be looking for, but it was high for me because the pound was, you know, double the Australian dollar and it worked out well. But also I could demonstrate in a meeting with the CEO in my interview, enough of an understanding of search engine optimization and paid search that they would be comfortable putting me in front of their clients from day one. So the only thing I appeared to be missing was understanding their processes. They were comfortable that I knew Google Analytics inside and out. I could jump into campaigns and accounts and have a look whether the performance is good or bad. So, whether I could or not, that was just from the interview. I was managing nothing like these clients.

Speaker 1:

Good account managers are so hard to find. Even now, I struggle to find a very large or even a small pool of people with good experience, good people skills and able to do the job, so it's definitely a highly valuable skill. Anyone who's looking to get into digital marketing if you have good people skills, I highly recommend and enjoy talking to people. Do that, because it's something that is very valuable as well, because it's just such a limited shortage of people.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so with Latitude in London, what I took away from it was larger client management, handling of bigger budgets, but also the correct forecasting and application of how those budgets should be spent, considering there are many different channels they could be using.

Speaker 2:

That was really fun and exciting. How are we going to spend this couple of hundred thousand a month for the next six months to get the right combination of demand generation, brand activity in digital and performance? How to find that point of diminishing returns in paid search because these budgets were so high? There is a point where, if you keep spending, you're not going to get any more convergence at an appropriate level, and I really learned the value of good quality reporting with a great commentary, so that when you go to a meeting a monthly meeting or a weekly catch up you know the campaign inside and out, but you've got real insights, something they can take away from that meeting. So it was a really great experience for me. I got to work with clients in the Middle East, traveled to see them in Jordan, in Gibraltar, in Spain and all around the UK, so it was an awesome job. I moved from account manager up to account director in that time and then my two-year visa was up and they didn't sponsor you.

Speaker 1:

They offered.

Speaker 2:

They offered to look at the process. I think everyone says that. Yeah yeah, but they did say it to me. I chose not to stay. Life in London can feel quite temporary. You're partying a lot and you're burning the midnight oil. You're working hard, but you're spending all your money. It feels like real life.

Speaker 1:

Nothing's permanent, right? Yeah, nothing's permanent.

Speaker 2:

You can't buy a piece of furniture or look at a piece of property and I was there with my girlfriend so we weren't tied to other people. We didn't fall in love with someone who lived there, so we both knew home was back in Australia after that period.

Speaker 1:

Yep, so back to Australia and then into now.

Speaker 2:

That's right, yeah, so what year are we talking here? 2012. So 2011 and 12 were in the UK End of 2012, I think. Back to Australia, I did some traveling and when I was in Vietnam on a holiday, on the way back I put up a LinkedIn post saying I've got lots of digital marketing experience London digital marketing experience and I'd love to bring that to a business in Australia. I had people reach out to me from posting that and I had an interview with Nowse teed up before I arrived back in Australia. So Nowse is where I'm now. I'm the managing director and one of the owners of the business.

Speaker 2:

When I started, they were a branding agency that did a lot of design work, primarily design work and communications through print. They'd done some websites and had a developer internally and a lot of their revenue was coming from creative and design projects, creating brands. But they were using third parties to do SEO, paid search, paid social and any of their external advertising paid search, paid social and any of their external advertising. Their websites were okay, but they were looking for someone to meet the needs of their strategy. So my skillset developed overseas was perfect for what they were looking for. I had the right combination of returning home, so it wasn't a flight risk they could commit to me because I was not going to be going anywhere, because I've done my overseas travel the way. I got the job and I think what was really helpful for them to decide to go on this path with me as digital director. So I was building out the digital function of Nowse.

Speaker 2:

I was in the interview. I brought a business plan for what I'm going to do in month one, month three, month six and what 12 months would look like, down to the point of how I'm going to month three, month six and what 12 months would look like, down to the point of how I'm going to. You know every service I'm going to introduce paid search, advertising, campaign management, search engine optimization. I quoted out the different levels and what we would do for those levels, through to website design and development, how we would structure the quotes around that and created a segment of the business on paper and a plan to get there that they hadn't seen before.

Speaker 2:

This was quite easy for me because I knew the costs we were charging back in London and I just applied what I expected Australian rates to be. I could build out our sort of points of difference and the needs that we would have for every service. We couldn't start some of the services. I ran the campaigns myself. Then, as we progressed, I would use an external third-party provider for search engine optimization. I'm working with my old agency back in London, but then I got to the threshold where I could remove that need and we had the teams built in-house. So it was really awesome and a big leap for me going from a structured role of an account manager and account director into a role where I had to build this digital agency within a larger branding agency.

Speaker 1:

And so you put this whole plan in place. How did the execution of the plan and, I guess, the timelines and everything that you sort of mapped out in your initial interview did that get put into place and, if so, how was the results and where'd that land say over that first 12 months?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the plans got put in place. The pricing didn't really change much from what I'd forecast it should be our fee structures and everything. The forecast was hard and a bit hopeful, so we didn't land the first year or two targets, but the growth was really inspiring. It gave both the board at Nowse and myself a lot of excitement and reason to keep pushing because we didn't have to add costs in the business until I got to a certain threshold where I couldn't personally manage the campaigns anymore. So I had a bit of time. The beauty of it is the revenue came in quite quickly, which covered my role, so I was kind of paying for myself from an early point in time. We went from 5% of our revenue ending up on a screen whether that be ads or a website, to well over 50, 60, 70% of our revenue ending up in activities that are on screen.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, nice, and what period was this over that this grew and sort of, and then into your next role from there.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, sure. So the first role at Nowse digital director. That was my first six years at Nowse. After my first year and a half I was invited to join the business to become a director and an owner. I joined the board, that role. I took an understanding of building out client revenue so that it would actually deliver a profit, so a bit more of a business understanding rather than just the hands-on tactics of running the campaigns. Then I shifted from that role to the managing director role and the chair of the board when the managing director at the time, persephone Lobb, when she retired so Persephone retired over five years ago now and through the progress of the digital component of the business, the digital revenues, that's what kind of indicated to the rest of the business that I had what was needed to keep driving this business forward. So the growth started accelerating at a reasonable amount probably after the first year when I started at Nowse and then it started building upon itself and we saw it doubled itself year on year for the first five years.

Speaker 2:

So double digit 100% growth, triple digit growth for the first three to five years and then it did kind of get to a threshold of our size where we've taken a more conservative approach to growth. The more clients we bring on, the more risk there is of getting it wrong, not onboarding them correctly, scaling at a speed that we can't keep up with. But the growth has been continual in that department since.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and so biggest lesson learned going from into that role, what do you think has been some things that you learned Into the managing director role?

Speaker 2:

I think for a lot of people who reach their ultimate career goal you know, for me it was run the business, be the managing director there can be a bittersweet feeling when you get it Like what do I do now? Like it's really nice having a guiding objective that you're doing everything in your power to get towards, and once you get there, it can be a little bit disheartening. You go okay, I'm there. I had a lot of imposter syndrome. How am I doing this? How am I running this business? How have I been left in charge of this business? So that's one thing to look out for as you go from the doing role, like the specialist to the manager of a team, to the managing director, that's something you're going to have to prepare yourself for to let go of the doing of the work and take out of the next role what you're supposed to be getting out of it, which is leadership and seeing people.

Speaker 2:

Yeah strategy, building that strategy and I think what I am now, five years into the managing director role. My focus is building a strategy by understanding what I want the business to look like in a really clear picture of what it should look like in three years or five years time. Being able to describe it to everyone in your management team really clearly and have everyone get on board with that and then define the steps taken within three years, one year, 90 days, one month to get to that point. Having the ability to really communicate where you want to take this business and bring people along for the ride. That's leadership rather than management, which is KPIs and targets and whatnot. That's all still really important, but it's shifting from being down in the weeds to trying to set a vision of what you want this business to be and have the right people on board or in the journey along for the ride with you.

Speaker 1:

I find that that's something, even in my role of that strategy side and that vision side and all these kinds of things.

Speaker 1:

No one's demanding it from you either, so you've got to actually sit down and push yourself, because there's no one. When you are in the, you know, doing the work and doing this stuff, there's always someone that needs it or something. So there's always timelines and stuff. But I find that to actually work out where your time is best spent to achieve whatever you need to achieve is quite challenging, because there's so many different things you can be spending time on and so trying to identify. All right, I know today or this week, this month, this quarter, I should be spending my time on this, and I think this is we've talked about the EOS and traction and stuff really gives a good guiding point and I think that's what we'll do. An episode on this, but I find that it's a massive shift, as you're saying, from going from in the job doing the work, client work especially. Then going out of that completely leaves a big hole in your week.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Over all so many years of doing client work, it changes so much in terms of where you're going to focus your time and energy.

Speaker 2:

And I think, if you pair that with a little bit of imposter syndrome, like, is my strategy even going to be good enough? What does a strategy even look like? What initiative should I be working on when you can see that you could be of help right now to clients or people doing the job you used to do, and you stop doing that thing that is uncomfortable or new and you go back to doing what you're comfortable doing? I found myself doing that a lot in the first year or two of the managing director role. I also thought it was my job to do everything. Present up to the board everything that I've been working on.

Speaker 2:

Everyone had their own jobs and the managing director their job is to do everything else and it just isn't the case.

Speaker 2:

You need to find ways of determining the right initiatives that you need to be working on and working with your team to get them done and relying on people to get them done.

Speaker 2:

But yeah, I think my biggest takeaway is letting go of what I found I drew a lot of value in, which is knowing a lot about digital marketing, conversing with clients and being seen of having a lot of value in those moments, and jumping headfirst into business management and the managing director role, and it wasn't headfirst, it was slowly, and I had to slowly give up the things that I saw as giving me a lot of value and find new reasons and new things to draw joy from out of my work, which is watching this great team and company reach its potential, watching people build up in their own roles and start kicking goals themselves, and being able to get in and find barriers that are stopping people from reaching their potential and change the business in ways that it betters the business, that it helps it get to where it needs to get to.

Speaker 2:

So being able to laser focus in on one team help remove barriers, make changes, improve things and then move out of that, move into a different area pretty quickly. So it's a new journey, it's a new job, but I still get a lot of client facing time, which is where I'm really valuable as well.

Speaker 1:

Well, I hope that anyone who's been listening to this and who currently is any, I guess any of these levels within their marketing career can take some of this information and advice and allow them to sort of help progress through their career a bit faster and hopefully even identify. Look, this is a progress, this is a route that you can go through. Becoming the managing director of an established and large branding or marketing agency is not out of reach. It is definitely possible.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. The one thing I would reiterate that I took away from all jobs was the ability to communicate and explain things clearly in a way that had people's trust and confidence in you from an early stage, from the restaurant job to the sales jobs, through to the digital marketing jobs. If you can learn to communicate your ideas and have people understand them really easily and quickly, then you're going to do well in whatever you're doing. So find roles that help you build that skill Perfect.

Speaker 1:

Cool, thank you. Thank you for listening today. We'll be back with another episode next week. Cheers.