I spent my whole career in advertising and design agencies. Big budgets. Big teams. TV campaigns where a single shoot cost more than some companies' entire annual marketing spend.
Then I walked into a WeWork in London, sat down with three people, and thought: oh. This is what business actually feels like.
There was the founder, Raoul. The CMO, Torie. And me. Somewhere across the country, seven holiday parks that needed people to care about them, with a fraction of the budget I used to spend on a single press ad.
No safety net. No long approval chains. Just: we need to sell holidays, or this doesn't work.
It recalibrated everything.
The business had two very different audiences, and both of them mattered enormously. A young family planning their highlight of the year. And someone in their sixties considering dropping £300,000 on a lodge. Completely different emotional decisions. Completely different creative problems. We did serious audience research and testing to understand both, and built creative that could speak to each without the brand falling apart in the middle.
I led a small internal team, a designer, a copywriter, a social strategist, and worked across a much wider ecosystem of third parties. PR agencies, SEO partners, media planning and buying, digital. Having spent years on the agency side, I knew exactly how much effort an external partner might or might not give a smaller brand. So I made it my business to get them invested. To make them care. Because the work only holds together if everyone pulling on it is pulling in the same direction.
What made everything work was Raoul. He'd push back on ideas, sometimes hard, but he never shut them down. His default was: let the market decide. Let's try it and see. He had genuine taste, genuine appetite to win, and a real understanding that good creative was worth backing. That attitude was infectious.
When I joined, the brand had almost no visual identity worth speaking of. Stock photography. Inconsistent social. Nothing that felt intentional. We fixed that. We commissioned real photographers and filmmakers who understood the brand. We developed a proper tone of voice. We redesigned touchpoints across the parks, from signage to booking to digital, every detail with a purpose.
By the time I left, the brand had something it didn't have before. A point of view. The team had confidence. The business had momentum.
And I had a completely different understanding of what creative leadership is actually for. It's not about the quality of the idea in the room. It's about what the idea does when it meets the real world.
