How did it feel to start again?
It’s an amazing gift – being given the second chance in the same business. We made so many mistakes the first time round – and to be able to start again and learn from that was great. It was the best thing that ever, ever happened. Now we’re back in scale-up mode.
Before I left, I had a big 360 review with my whole team and it was so good to take the learnings from our whole team – like, for example, I knew I had to bring in a COO. A lot of my team from Australia relocated to help us scale too.
How will making it easier to connect improve our creative industry’s output?
I got my initial job at the BRIT Awards through my dad – but I think that’s rubbish, because if I’d been born into a different background, I wouldn’t have got that initial break, and I wouldn’t be where I am now. It breaks my heart to think how much talent we’re squandering by not giving people a way in.
That, for me, is a bit of a travesty. There’s a super-bright bunch of creative people coming through. If they don’t know people in the creative industries, they don’t have a way in. So if we don’t give them that way in, the quality of our creative output is going to sink.
Diversity is very close to our hearts. Diversity is good for business – that’s proven now, so the problem now becomes how you connect with diverse talent. If you’re still going through the old-school way of using your existing network, that’s just going to perpetuate the problem.