A network for life - Emma Marlow

00:00

I was lucky enough to have a good enough reputation in the industry that I was working in to never have had to go out and look for work. Work has always come to me. It enabled me to define the hours that I wanted to work, the roles that I wanted to take on, particularly on the type of people that you work with, because that's incredibly important in delivering best work and how that's delivered. I've had wonderful clients, I've had challenging clients. I've had clients that make you want to get out of bed in the morning, and I've had clients that don't.

00:29

At what point did you decide that you wanted to pursue your best work in the way that we all do, but that you didn't want to be defined by it?

00:37

That's a really good question, and it comes back to the starting point of having a family. I was brought up in an environment where I was encouraged, pushed a little, but encouraged to better myself to achieve more than previous generations had, to secure a white collar, if you like, working position, doing something that I enjoyed on a daily basis. That almost gave me a very early approach that I am, was, defined by my work, that work was a hugely significant part of the value that I was giving back to society, but also a hugely significant part of who I am.

01:24

Over the past decade and a half, I would say, I've probably realized that delivering my best work means being happy with the level of work that I'm able to deliver in a normal working day. That changes, that has changed significantly. Having worked in global advertising groups for 20 years, you work hard, you play hard, and work certainly does define who you are. Again, I think it's worth referring to the different generational stages that we all go through. Certainly when you're in your twenties and you are working in a role, or a number of roles now, because portfolio careers are becoming more common, that are giving you a high amount of satisfaction, you often don't look beyond them.

02:10

As your life starts to change, as you mature, as you have other demands on your time outside of work and outside of the social world that often comes with work, you start to reevaluate that position. Certainly, I started to understand that it didn't matter how hard I worked and it didn't matter how good the work I delivered was and it didn't matter how much enjoyment I derived from that. There is a significant amount of enjoyment to be derived outside of work. Certainly, as you move on, you find a partner, potentially have a family, those demands on your time become greater, but they're positive demands on your time.

02:49

At what point did you become a mother?

02:51

I had a successful career at the time with Dentsu Aegis, which is one of the big global advertising groups. I got to fly all over the world, working with clients such as Disney, Nokia, Microsoft, Proctor and Gamble. I started delivering some high-value consultancy work, both to Dentsu and some other advertising groups. The point at which I started a family was the point at which those two things became very incongruent with one another. I think I really realized when I was already servicing a client in Los Angeles and was sent out to work with that client very closely for a six-week period, while at the same time also having client responsibilities over in Asia, how far my working day was stretching.

03:43

Now, that's really possible to do when you don't have other demands on your time, but I wasn't prepared to put a hundred percent into that area of my life because the other area of my life, being starting a family, was really suffering as a result and the two weren't working together at all. That's when I realized I was beginning not to deliver my best work in that environment and I decided to move from a full-time role into much more contracting, consulting, so picking and choosing when I worked.

04:21

That enabled me to have much more agency over what I was doing, much more control, the ability to be able to pick and choose work, which has been a huge contributing factor to my work satisfaction, to being able to do the best job I possibly can.

04:38

You said that it was at that point that you knew that you weren't doing your best work, and it sounds like you'd got a lot further than a lot of people because you knew what your best work was. What was your working definition of your best work at that point?

04:56

To answer the point that you made about I knew what my best work was, yes, I believe I did. I started off working in the music industry, moved to looking after digital environments for the first time within music and also then within film, and very quickly became aware of how much of an impact digital, as it was then, was going to have on the world of entertainment, and from that point started looking for opportunities to develop that further, because music's always been my first love and entertainment certainly is what I know when it comes to advertising and marketing.

05:37

If you couple those with digital, there were huge opportunities at that point in time to become really involved in shaping the product and the communication for global organisations like Disney, like Fox, like Universal Music, and to really become quite instrumental in seeing how their digital proposition played out with audiences across the globe. From that point of view, I was always very secure about the work that I enjoyed doing the most and the work that I loved doing. For me, the inspiration that I receive from those sectors has really gone a long way to help me sustain that best work mentality.

06:26

Really the background to that, I was very happy doing what I was doing. I'd very happily still be working in that sector, but at that point in time, it really, really wasn't sustainable to be able to do that while having any kind of focus outside of work. The idea of a work-life balance wasn't something that was being talked about. If you were lucky enough and you were skilled and talented enough to be able to hold a relatively senior role advising these kind of organisations, you didn't expect anything more than that. That was your purpose. I think over the past decade and a half, that's really changed and it's been really, really encouraging to see that there is a much greater understanding that people deliver their best work when they're motivated in all areas of their life.

07:18

You said work-life balance there. It struck me that phrase is often used in a way that's meant to imply that you want to work really hard in one area at work and then you have an easier time of it and you enjoy your life. Actually, that's really not the case when you are having children. It's like a work-work balance, you've got to enable both. You said earlier that your definition of best work, you felt like you weren't doing your best work in that moment, when you weren't able to balance the two. It almost sounds like in order for you to truly do your best work, you had to be working in both contexts in some ways, otherwise you wouldn't be fulfilled.

08:00

I'll be clear with you. Working is much easier than having a family. Let's be really clear about that. If you go through a career path, and this is something that I hear from lots of other people as well, there's almost the escaping back to work. It's what we know, it's what we're familiar with. If you have a career path and you follow a career path for whatever reason that you want to follow, then you are in a place you want to be and you have the knowledge and experience to be able to bring that to bear, to deliver great work.

08:32

When you have a family, and this is true of everybody on the planet, you have no idea what you are doing when you have a child. For me, it was a much more natural environment to be at work than it was to be at home raising children. From that point of view, it is harder work, raising a family, than it is sitting at a desk.

08:52

We're all very lucky people. We're here, we're chatting, this is work. When we finish our conversation, I've got an interview to do. I'm going to be doing some client coms, I'm going to be having a meeting with my CEO, but I'll be doing that sat here, in front of a laptop, in a relatively cozy environment. Having a family is not like that. All of a sudden you are completely at sea, there's no manual for it. No one's telling you you're doing a good job, and really importantly, that's an important point, there's no validation. You're are certainly not going to get a toddler turn around and say, "Hey, great job you did there, Mummy. That was fantastic." There is no one to see you succeed and you have no idea if you are succeeding. For me, work was much easier, a much easier challenge.

09:42

Having said that, the reward from the family side of things is much greater. At the end of the day, that validation from your boss or from your coworkers or from a happy client or with an award only goes so far, it's not going to come and hug you at the end of the day and give you a kiss. That's something that's really, really important. Do I view family life as a job? Yes, there are aspects to it which are hugely demanding on my time from an administration point of view, from a learning point of view, from a teaching point of view. All of those things make it quite complex.

10:23

Certainly, among the professional women, because let's face it for, for the most part it is women that make that change in the middle period of their career and stop for a while to have children or however they work it, but having spoken with a lot of my professional friends who are also mothers, every single one of us says it's easier to do a full-time job. It's more immediately rewarding to do a full-time job.

10:51

It's also harder to juggle more plates. It doesn't matter whether that's two jobs or one job plus a family. The more plates you are juggling, the more demanding that is from a mental load point of view. Neither of those are negatives. We're in a very positive place, and I think becoming much more positive with the more flexible work opportunities, but for me, delivering best work was never going to be working full time and then trying to spend time with my children on the weekend. For me, delivering best work always has to be around recognizing that an individual enriches themselves and fulfils themselves from outside of the workplace as well as from within it.

11:39

How did becoming a mother impact the professional decisions that you made next and the places that you decided to work?

11:51

Hugely. I think it really came home to me that I couldn't continue the way I was, working a full-time job plus having my children without some kind of significant childcare. At that point, I took a step back and thought, do I really want a nanny, do I want that kind of environment for my children? I took the decision that I didn't. I was very lucky to be able to have that decision to make, rather than having to go one way or the other.

12:25

It was really brought home to me one Christmas, when I was spending Christmas with my family and taking a really well deserved break. I had a call on Boxing Day from a New York legal office, which was working because it was boxing day. That, I think, encapsulates why I was no longer able to do my best work, because I wasn't prepared to take that call and spend the time on that day when I'd carved out time for my family to then flip back into a work mode. Because again, as a parent, your brain has to be in two very different places. When you are working, it's in one place, particularly because of the roles that I take, I'm an operations lead. It's all about strategic thinking, it's about organisation, it's about understanding the needs of those within and outside your organisation, and it's about deployment ultimately. Those kind of roles require quite a lot of project management, quite a lot of detail orientation.

13:27

That's all very well and that's great, and I love being able to get into the nitty gritty and the nuts and bolts of all of those things and that's where I feel my value delivery is the greatest, but it's very difficult to flip from a client call at 4:00 that ends at 5:00, talking about exactly that, deployment of teams across global markets, how that's going to work, looking at service design, et cetera, et cetera, back to, "Okay, I'm just going to come and cook your tea now. What do you mean you don't want to eat the supper that I've cooked for you?" It's very, very difficult not to bring a work attitude to a family environment in cases like that. That's really where my best work stopped being delivered, I believe, at that point, and I've had to find a new normal.

14:19

So what did you do?

14:19

I decided to do the work that I was doing previously, but do it from a consulting point of view, a contracting point of view, so that I had more agency and I was able to say no. The word no is really important. I think it's really important in terms of defining your best work, because if you say yes to everything, you can't possibly be doing your best work all the time because you are just going through the motions. The idea of saying no and saying, "Well, actually I think you would be better off doing this," or, "No, that's not something that I can look after, but this person or this way of doing it should meet your needs," is something that I think I believe you learn with experience. You learn with having gone through that a number of times and having managed other people to go through it. It gives you the confidence to be able to deliver better.

15:08

I was lucky enough to have a good enough reputation in the industry that I was working in to never have had to go out and look for work. Work has always come to me. It enabled me to define the hours that I wanted to work, the roles that I wanted to take on, and particularly, and this is a point that I wanted to make sure I landed and I'm really pleased we got here, particularly on the type of people that you work with, because that's incredibly important in delivering best work and how that's delivered.

15:47

Having worked on the agency side for over two decades, I've had wonderful clients, I've had challenging clients. I've had clients that make you want to get out of bed in the morning and I've had clients that don't. By giving myself the agency to pick and choose what I did, I have chosen to work with clients and partners that do make me want to get out of bed in the mornings.

16:08

That's how MeasureMatch, who I'm currently working as COO for, and I got together in the first place. I did some consulting for them, we worked very well together. Quite often, in that phase, when I was really looking at consulting work, I would suggest a test project to a client. We would have a test project and based on a number of things, we would reengage or not reengage. For me, those things really were about the value of the work that I delivered, they were about the environment that I was working in and the stakeholders that I was working with, and the ability of the clients that I was working with to stick to the rules of engagement.

16:53

What is it about the personal relationships that matters most to you? Which ones pull you in now, and has that differed from the beginning of your career?

17:08

I believe it evolves. I wouldn't necessarily be able to pinpoint a specific difference for me. I love working with people who inspire me. I love working with people who have a vision and helping them to execute that vision. It's not always the easiest people to work with or the people that are always responsive or the people that are immediately, on the surface of things, the most amenable. It's about working with people who can recognise the value that I deliver, because validation is something that's really important to me. It's about working with people who constantly challenge and inspire me, and it's about working with people who recognise that there is life outside work. It's pretty easy to determine those qualities of someone within a few meetings, just by the way that they engage you, the way that they act, the way that they respond when you deliver, and ultimately how the projects that you work on play out.

18:18

It doesn't sound like there's been a particular moment where you've actively gone out and searched for work, but more that it's almost naturally appeared through the work that you've done. Would you mind going into more detail there? How has it appeared and have you had to proactively do anything in order to encourage those conversations?

18:39

It's always good to ensure that people are aware that you are out there. I think awareness is really, really important. The obvious networking of LinkedIn is pretty baseline, it's pretty fundamental, and making sure that you have good connections, making sure that you are active and making sure that every so often you are creating content.

19:08

Having said that I'm not prolific when it comes to creating content or disseminating content. I'm aware of people out there who are far more active in that area than I am, primarily because I'm mostly getting on with work. The days are short often, marketing myself is not my priority because I have been lucky enough, or fortunate enough, not to have to go out and seek work.

19:35

At the time when I began working for agency groups back in 2005, it was a very, very small digital community. Funnily enough, I was speaking to a friend of mine who's just launched a new agency play, who I worked with 2006 to 2009, and he parroted this back at me and said, "All of the people that we worked with, they're all doing brilliantly well and they're all really willing to help, because I've spoken to so many of them over the past few days." The opportunity that we had at that point, and I'm sure that opportunity's there in other areas today, which are emerging, which are becoming commoditised, it is really that you make a network, a community of colleagues who stay with you. They do, and that's a wonderful thing to have colleagues who succeed and succeed very, very well and then think, "Oh, well, I've got this challenge and Emma would be great at that. Why don't I give her a call and see what's going on?"

20:38

From a consultant point of view, it really is about personal connections. LinkedIn can provide the bedrock, but the better personal connections that you can make in different roles, the better your reputation, if you navigate those roles successfully of course. Thankfully, I have always been able to trade on my reputation, which is a fortunate position to be in.

21:02

How did you meet James, and what happened there?

21:09

Thanks for bringing that in. James was one of those alumni, James and I worked together for Dentsu back in 2006, when I believe James was managing the Deutsche Bank account and several others and I was looking after Disney. We were the first digital agency sitting within a major media agency, which was pretty big news at the time. We spent most of our time trying to convince clients to spend on digital and take their money out of TV budgets, which if you think about it now is really quite an interesting place to be. We were digital evangelists.

21:50

James and I have all stayed in touch. He went on to work at Neo, for Ogilvy. I went on to work at Havas. James began MeasureMatch as a venture back in 2016 and I was one of the people that he got in touch with from an advisory point of view. I came on board to MeasureMatch as an advisor while I was doing my main job with other clients. Then, as I've said, back in 2018, James and I spoke about some consultancy, agreed that, and somehow the hidden journey, the point that you made right at the start of this, James and I have been working together ever since. I came on board as COO in 2020, I believe.

22:30

Other than having this network of people that you've worked with before, what do you think other people can do to make their journey that little bit less hidden?

22:42

Two things. First of all, make sure the bedrock is there, make sure LinkedIn is active, make sure you are a content creator through whatever channels that they are, create a point of difference around yourself to ensure that you are both visible and an obvious part of a potential employer's consideration set. The second thing is know what you want to do. That doesn't have to come right at the start of a career, but we do this for a long time. I mean, the pension age is going up and up and up. Certainly, by the time I get there, there probably won't be one. We're doing this for a third of our lives, day to day and for 40 years or however long it is. Make sure whatever it is you do it's enjoyable, it's something you want to spend your time doing, because ultimately that is how you are going to create your best work. That is how you'll be attractive to an employer. That is how you will create cut through for yourself.

23:45

In today's current market, hopefully that's a little easier to take on board than it would've been previously, where we were expected to progress through a very linear career path. If you are not enjoying doing something, the chances are right now you can probably jump sideways and choose to do something else relatively simply. You may need some training, you may need to self start when it comes to a bit of learning and development, but more and more employers are hiring based on attitude versus based on experience.

24:19

Culture, cultural fit, engagement and generally a willingness from employees is something that's incredibly important to an employer. Certainly, when I'm looking through CVS, and I've had a lot of hiring experience from big groups to startups, I'm not looking for exam results, I'm not looking for a very linear career path. What I'm looking for is someone who is clearly passionate about what they want to do and someone who has good stints for every role, from a time point of view, so a certain period of time in every role, they haven't jumped about too much.

25:03

Think about it very carefully and do think about mentoring. Do think about somebody that you admire, who is further up the career ladder than you are. They might be in your industry, they might be in a different industry, but they will almost certainly be able to give you some valuable experience on how to navigate your way to where you want to be efficiently and in a way that you will enjoy doing it. A mentor could even be someone that you don't know, there is no harm in reaching out to someone that you admire and saying, "Hey, I love what you do. I would love to grab half an hour of your time. Do you think it would be possible to ask you a few questions on this, because this is my goal and I think you could help me."

25:48

We're all quite vain at the end of the day. If somebody reaches out to us with an email like that, the chances are it'll get a response. If you don't try, you don't get. I think that's probably the ethos of where I started from and how I'm doing what I do now, is just go and ask.

26:05

If someone wants to reach out to you, Emma, what's the best way for them to do so?

26:09

Hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm Emma Marlow, COO of MeasureMatch, and I promise I will respond.

26:18

Thank you so much for sharing your story, Emma.