My story

The career choices for girls at my convent school were limited to secretary, nurse, teacher, wife or nun. Boring. I wanted to be a jet fighter pilot or a racehorse vet.

By the time I left university, I was going to be a foreign correspondent. When my careers advisor suggested that it might be prudent to have a Plan B, I mentioned advertising. He said ‘it’s horribly competitive and full of rather unsavoury people’.

After graduation, I moved to London and temped. I worked at a small ad agency, and after we won three pitches in six weeks, my boss took me out for a swanky lunch and offered me a permanent job. It felt like a fun way to pass time until the inevitable call came from the BBC or The Guardian.

Much of what I know about strategy, I learned from Dave Trott. I worked at Gold Greenlees Trott in the mid 80s when Trottie and his team of working class renegades were shaking up London’s ad industry.

GGT was sink or swim. They used to say that you wouldn’t get stabbed in the back at GGT, you’d get stabbed right between the eyes. I loved it.

Every brief had to be signed off by Dave. He’d read your work in silence. If he picked up his pencil, you knew you were in trouble. He’d circle the problem area and quietly ask one or two pointed questions. If no good answer eventuated, as was normally the case, you’d be sent away to have another go next week.

On the mornings I had to take a brief in to Dave, I often felt physically ill. But through dozens of excruciating interrogations I learned how to crystallise a problem in a way that creates fertile ground for an answer.

As I learned several times through my career, nothing good lasts. Dave was ousted by his partners at GGT and a new creative director, Tim Mellors, was brought in. I still feel proud of being the first person Mellors got rid of once he’d ‘cleansed’ the creative department of all the Trottie loyalists.

I was also struggling emotionally. My mother had died from a brain tumour a couple of years earlier and while I was at GGT, my father died and shortly afterwards, my little brother died in an accident on New Year’s Eve. I’d thrown myself into working hard and partying harder, but I was storing up problems. I worked at other agencies, worked with Dave again, became a Planning Director. From the outside things looked good, but I was developing a serious drinking problem and sinking into depression.

I decided I could reinvent my life with a move to the US, and interviewed with Adam Morgan for the Planning Director role at Chiat Day in LA. At that time it was one of the most prestigious planning jobs in the world, working with clients like Apple, amazing creative people like Lee Clow and earning stupid amounts of money. So when I told Adam that I was going to take a job at Saatchi & Saatchi in New Zealand instead, he was gobsmacked. He said ‘people go to New Zealand to retire, you’re at the peak of your career.’

On paper, it looked like a crazy move. In reality, it probably saved my life.

In the late 90s and early 2000s Saatchi Wellington was an ideas powerhouse, recognised as one of the most creative agencies in the world. For 10 years I worked with and learned from some of the best creative and business minds in New Zealand, people like Kim Thorp, James Hall, Howard Grieve, Peter Cullinane.

Kim Thorp of Saatchi and Saatchi with some of the agency’s awards – Photograph taken by Phil Reid ca 21 August 1993

We worked with many of NZ’s biggest and most successful businesses and we were true business partners. As the only strategist in the agency, my responsibility was to develop strategies that created value for our clients. I got to see and work with a huge range of business challenges and opportunities and learn firsthand about what it took to make progress.

From a professional perspective, these were great times. The agency was flying high, I was a part of the core team, flying around the world business class as part of Saatchi’s Worldwide Planning Group and fielding calls from headhunters. I had a designer wardrobe, a lovely house, a life that looked successful and glamorous. But behind the glossy façade I was falling apart.

My addictions to work and alcohol were coiling ever more tightly around me. Although I was ‘high functioning’, I lived in fear of falling off the ever-narrowing tightrope I was walking, and losing everything.

In the early 2000s the Saatchi team began to break up. I was angry, afraid and very very lost. My new boss took me out for dinner and asked me ‘what can we do to make you happy?’. The next morning, in the grip of yet another crushing hangover, I knew that the answer was ‘nothing’.

It was time to leave Adland.

I knew that I couldn’t stay in advertising. But I had only the dimmest idea about how I was going to earn a living. I’d only ever worked in agencies, and in teams and I had no idea what value I could offer clients as a solo pro.

So I asked Kim Thorp, one of the wisest people I know. He told me my skill was in making complex problems simple, structuring thinking, bringing people together to agree how to move forward and stimulating creative thinking.

Honing and applying these skills has been the bedrock of my business.

My consulting career is now longer than my entire advertising career. I’ve worked on hundreds of projects with clients of all types, sizes, industries and markets – from Unilever in India to the Life Matters Trust in Dunedin.

As well as building my business, in the last two decades I’ve climbed mountains all over the world from Antarctica to Alaska, the Andes and the Himalaya. I’ve survived cancer, I’ve got married. But these achievements pale into insignificance against finally freeing myself from addiction.

In the process I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to get unstuck, both personally and professionally.

Developing strategy that works isn’t just about strategic horsepower. The human side matters at least as much, almost certainly more – listening, building empathy, earning trust and understanding what progress really looks like for the people concerned and what it will take to achieve it.

After 30+ years, I’m as much of a strategy enthusiast as ever. I’ve seen a lot of bad strategy, learned the power of good strategy and the differences between the two. And I’m still learning.