My story: who I am and how I got to here

The ‘real’ me

So, who am I? As a kid I was an explorer and a tree climber. I once made a skateboard out of a plank of wood and some old rollerskates and wasn’t nearly as scared as I should have been about attempting to ride it down a steep hill.

Musically, I’m an indie kid at heart with punk roots. The regular rotation on my Spotify account is bands like the Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins, The Strokes, Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, Cat Power. I also roll out a good dose of Nina Simone on the regular. Answers to the big questions: Stones and Blur.*

I tried really hard to learn to surf and snowboard in my 20s and skateboard in my 30s after some work colleagues gave me lessons with an NYC skater dude. I got a “you go, girl” from a playground mum, and feel chuffed for surviving a skate through the streets of the East Village without injury. A brief moment of glory amidst a great deal of falling on my arse.

These days I safely scooter around—not an electric one, the kind where I am the battery—and go on occasional kayaks on the beautiful Sydney Harbour. I’m also rediscovering my bike, an activity I hope to do more of.

I love planning and going on epic adventures with my kiddo. Road trips with retro motels, learning to play chess on 24h flights, sleeping on a train. I love my work, but I’m highly motivated by the next holiday in my sights! Next on the agenda — Japan!

*The biggest getting-to-know-you questions when I was coming up were 1. ‘Beatles or Stones?’ and 2. ‘Blur or Oasis?’.

Writer and editor

I always wanted to be a writer. I majored in writing as part of my mixed-media degree at university and some of my first jobs were copywriting and editorial roles. I learned the ropes of what made good content and how to pull a story together, a skill that has only become sharper over the years as I have honed it to create brand stories for my clients.

The art & production years

The geeky kind of art, never the cool kind…

My first foray into art, design and production was producing page layouts for science and medical magazines, culminating in an exciting and skill-building period at Nature Publishing Group in London (now Springer Nature). You mightn’t know you know it, but they’re the gang you hear about on the radio whenever there’s a new scientific or medical innovation — ‘published in Nature‘. The art I was drawing was mostly penises and biological diagrams. My team of art designers aced the local pub challenge of ‘first to draw an accurate diagram of the human body’. We did it in under a minute and even had a gall bladder. That’s right, sooo cool.

Workflow & operations wiz

I moved from art and production into special projects at Nature and landed the exciting task of moving our traditional print-first production workflow to a digital-first model. This was 2009/2010. I went full geek on processes and became completely obsessed with the wonders of workflows and all the things I could make happen now that this new era of automation was opening up. This was how I became known as a source of knowledge on workflow automation and started fielding calls from magazines across Europe and the US for advice on how they could set up their own digital-first systems.

Teacher

One of the great things about building stuff that is completely new is that you then get to teach people how to use it. I already knew I enjoyed teaching, as I’d done loads of sport coaching for kids as a teen and in my early twenties. Teaching adults in the workplace was a different skill, but one that I quickly found rewarding. I loved making the complex simple and sharing the joy of this (at the time) new technology.

When I moved back to Sydney I bolstered my teaching skills by gaining my Cert IV in Training and Assessment. This qualification has continued to be useful as I run workshops and training sessions for my clients. It’s also something I always come back to whenever I create new training materials for the Studio Clvr training library.

Coder, marketer, jack-of-all-trades

I often think of this period of my life as the ‘New York years’. I moved from London to New York on the tail of an amazing job opportunity that didn’t work out the way I’d planned. Sometimes things not working out is exactly what you need. I met some cool people. I got to play a Rolling Stone’s guitar. I taught myself code and off the back of my Nature days, made some awesome apps to detect heart disease and gastrointestinal issues. I designed packaging, I branded small businesses, I did marketing for this and I built websites for that. I did the digital nomad thing for a few years. Then I moved back to Sydney and Studio Clvr was born.

Discovering my ‘ikigai’

Ikigai is a Japanese philosophy, meaning “a reason for being”. Ikigai is the result of balancing work you love with work you are good at, work that is profitable and useful to the world. After years of trying to be the marketer for everyone, I made the call that all business leaders eventually come to. I took a long, hard look at what I enjoyed most, what I was good at, what was making money, and what my clients were getting the most impact from.

I niched down to target service-based professionals — people I can relate to in worlds I’m familiar with and comfortable in. And I ditched the random marketing bits and bobs, I abandoned product-based e-commerce businesses. I honed in hard on web design and growth marketing for service pros and digital strategy around processes and workflows — pulling together my skills from those Nature years with everything I’d learned working with small businesses and startups.

Read more about how I rebuilt my business for the better in Business re-invention: the nine steps I used to re-think everything.