From the beginning of my tenure at Venus, the main purpose of my role was to build and develop the Bec Brideson brand as well as the Gender Intelligence consultancy from the ground up. Back in 2015, an enlightenment was happening around the female consumer and we were lucky to be right in the midst of it – catching onto the wildfire that was brands jumping on the gender bandwagon.
In those four years, I learned at the “coal face” not only how to build a consultancy out of an already existing business but the day-to-day operations, management and supervision of a boutique, full-service comms agency. These learnings were invaluable and unique to my position. I also became a close and trusted advisor and confidante within the senior leadership circle and especially with agency head Bec Brideson. The entire experience was indispensable, and something I would hope to naturally seek out in my next role – something that is challenging, varied and that I will learn a great deal from.
AWARDS
Building Bec’s brand with the right authority to the right audiences was key. Putting Bec up for awards and for opportunities to judge was a key stratagem in curating Bec’s credibility within the space. For example, Bec was first off the rank to judge The Gerety Awards and was honoured in 2017 with a global juror position for the Glass Lion at the Cannes Lions. In addition, during my tenure Bec won a considerable amount of awards such as winning two awards on the one night at the B&T Media Awards and her win at the Women’s Agenda awards in 2018.
OPERATIONS & ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT
The daily running of the business, plus all operations and logistics of Bec’s scheduling and execution of campaigns, speakerships, consulting and pro-bono work was organised by and run successfully through me. For all clients, I was first port of call in terms of ensuring that Bec was meeting deadlines and milestones.
At times, I was also representative of the Bec Brideson brand to clients for business development purposes and in order to meet Bec’s hectic consulting and speakership schedule. Bec entrusted me to speak, negotiate and manage the client for her.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
To build a consultancy, I had a good idea how to market it but not how to build a sales pipeline of happy, retained clients. This was certainly a steep learning curve. Within three months however, I had managed to create solid pipelines – with the majority of them coming from word-of-mouth recommendations.
By my fourth year, I was pulling opportunities from numerous places, and connecting our pro-bono work with paid clients as well as being able to place meetings from even my personal social networking. This is one of my strongest suits and one of the few I have been most proud of developing due to the fact that prior to this role, it was not a strong skill of mine.
Clients include:
COMMS AND COLLATERAL
From media bios, client booking templates, event registrations, scheduling, web copy, recruitment, audience research, contracts, checklists, keynotes, client qualifiers, speakership evaluations and social media – an enormous part of my job was ensuring that all copy and written communications were executed promptly and effectively.
THE BOOK
In 2017, Bec Brideson published her first book ‘Blind Spots’. The book was carefully formatted and typeset by our studio due to its special visual style and published through Wiley. I worked closely alongside the Wiley editing team and the Venus studio to bring this book to fruition which included over 23 full-edits over a period of 6 months.
Not only was Blind Spots a best seller – both Wesfarmers, Woolworths and other corporates jumped on it and bought numerous copies for their employees.
PR & CONTENT
Another major part of my role was to produce strategic content and PR opportunities for Bec to build her thought leadership on. This meant not only was I to find opportunities for Bec to market her brand, and our services but also to solidify Bec as the go-to expert in the area of gender and communications.
During my time, Bec became a commentator for Smart Company and was inducted into their Top Thinkers list. We also wrote frequently for Marketing Magazine, CEO mag, Mumbrella, B&T, Ad News, Salesforce, Entrepreneur and Women’s Agenda.
Bec has been featured in The Age, Herald Sun, Bank of Melbourne’s Business State mag, ABC Radio, Inside Retail, Daily Mail, news.com.au, Business Chicks, Women in Focus, Branding Insider and numerous podcasts.
MARKET AND AUDIENCE RESEARCH
Understanding potential, current and former client CX and their pain points was an important feature of my role. Constantly iterating and improving how we got clients, how we retained them and how exactly we could serve them was essential to ensuring that the consultancy continued to grow and evolve with the market place and its needs.
I studied how other consultancies were built, read extensively on the subject and reached out to other consultants in the arena or adjacent arenas on how they were able to build their client base and books. I also reached out to different levels of clients through my personal and professional networks and did in-depth interviews with them to understand how and why the change needed to embed gender intelligence in a business worked or didn’t work.
In terms of Bec’s speakership, I reached out to clients before Bec spoke and was able to connect with past and potential attendees in order to deep dive into what they wanted to hear, what they were looking to learn and what hadn’t worked out in the past. This extra step assured and impressed the client we were taking extra steps especially around such a seemingly controversial topic in the mainstream, while also ensuring that we got the results we needed out of Bec’s speakership.
EVENTS
In 2015, Bec spoke at the Cannes Lions and was exhilarated by the experience. She was eager to do more especially as she was about to embark upon building her first consultancy after the success of her comms agency.
One of my first tasks was to build an events lists, and to get her onto those events. Given the scope of gender intelligence, and its ability to work outside of normal comms campaigns, the audience would be very different from before although marketers were a huge target.
Over the next four years, I was able to get Bec at more than 70 events spanning practical skill workshops, intimate fireside conversations, big keynotes to one-on-one speed mentoring. Although most were based in either Melbourne or Sydney, Bec has also spoken at many other national and international locations for clients and events including being an honoured keynote guest at the Indie Summit in London. In 2018, Bec brought over the 3% Conference from New York City to Australia - working closely with the team at B&T to ensure female creativity and female creatives feel empowered and valued in the work that they do. For most of these events, I have been Bec’s assist - organising logistics and dealing with the client, qualifying needs both of the client and audience including intended event objectives and accompanying Bec to the event so she can purely focus on her keynote and its delivery while I handle operations. It was also on me to ‘market’ Bec’s speakership - encouraging her clientele, audience and community to attend the event, and raise Bec’s profile, before, during and after her speakership.
Our stratagem worked - Bec has become a renowned speaker on the subject of gender, gender intelligence, and female empowerment. For our clients, it has helped them establish Bec’s authority and credibility, and therefore ability to work with them successfully on their gender intelligence issues. In the last month (September 2019), Bec has now been asked to speak in India and Europe on the subject of gender intelligence with her international recognition and potential clients growing.
PRODUCTION
In mid-2018, I opened my guerrilla production house with my business partner named Rattle The Cage. I have always been interested in production, and the combination of my business knack and marketing skills alongside my business partner’s extensive production passion and history seemed a smart move.
Given the fast and agile nature of client’s demands today, a production firm of this kind was exactly what our agency needed across certain clients. We were able to respond to briefs fast and cleverly and work outside of agency hours in order to get the creative executed in time.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Being in charge of Bec Brideson and Venus social media, and being her “voice” was an incredibly hard challenge to begin with especially when handling all social media accounts across Bec Brideson, Venus Education, GMW and Venus Comms. Within a few weeks, I had to set up a morning process that allowed me to curate content for each platform, write captions and hashtags, and schedule it in at the appropriate times for distribution.
Over time however, I was able to grow her followers by 45% and engagement on a monthly average at about 26%. Utilising Google Analytics plus the analytics across each platform, we were able to gauge what times, and pieces of content were working and driving potential clients to our website and contact form pages.