Personal

Is there a blog post that’s more difficult to write than ‘about me’/ ‘why the hell am I doing this’?

If there is, I haven’t found it.

Once upon a time there was a woman called Annabel who worked at a big software company beginning with ‘Sales’ and ending with ‘Force’.

That’s not good is it.

Got a bit of a shock

Ok. Let’s get a bit vulnerable, shall we?

My husband was diagnosed with a heart condition when I was 30 years old.

It turns out he’s fine and will hopefully be around annoying me for a long, long time.

However, sitting in a cardiologist’s office was a bit…surreal.

Then I went on a walk

Not long after that, we went to Japan. In Kyoto, there’s a place called ‘The Path of Philosophy’.

I’m a HUGE sceptic, and British. You can imagine the eye rolls.

The idea is that you walk along this path and talk about life.

So my husband and I (his name is Graham, by the way), got a little snack (Japanese snacks are next level) and started walking.

The conversation got around to this work I’d been doing at Salesforce with the psychologist Daniel Goleman. He wrote Emotional Intelligence, it’s great.

In this Salesforce x Daniel Goleman course/corporate therapy there were a series of prompts, including ‘What would you want people to say about you at your funeral?’.

Bit dark.

We also talked about people whose lives we admired, and why we admired them. My Aunt and Uncle are LIFE GOALS and they came up. We also talked about our values. Either the Path of Philosophy was working or the snacks were.

It worked

By the end of the path I’d realised that I wanted to work for myself, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

I’d been increasingly interested in the messages companies were putting out through their activations, and the fact I’ve always been a writer was getting harder to ignore.

3 years, one pandemic and some of the biggest names in tech later, and it turns out I’m good at this words thing. It turns out I’m a pure marketing writer, I LOVE writing for a purpose and seeing the data results. Don’t think I’m ever going to write a novel.

As you’ll see around this website, I offer copywriting services, but I also offer value proposition and messaging workshops for folks who aren’t sure how it fits together yet, and campaign consulting to create great customer journeys.

A few facts

Here’s a few facts about my writing and my business:

1. The shortest assignment I’ve ever had was 4 words. It took much longer than you’d think.
2. The longest assignment I’ve ever had was 37,500 words. The entire Salesforce EMEA blog for 2020.
3. The most high-profile assignment I’ve ever had was a speech for COP26, delivered to Prince Charles. Shortly followed by Adobe x David Bowie.
4. The most under-the-radar assignment I’ve ever had was a ghostwriting job for a 40 under 40 submission. She won 🙂
5. The most fun assignment was a toss-up between writing about pet photography, or when I was given the marketing function for a $500M turnover business for 6 months.
6. The best perk I’ve ever had is a custom bag painted by an artist, inspired by the London Underground network.
7. The worst is when a prospect told me ‘money just follows me, I own 3 Rolexes’, and then asked for a 70% discount.
8. The best pitch of my life was when a prospect gave me more money than I asked for while walking their dog.
9. The worst was when I had COVID and the screen froze mid coughing fit.
10. I frown the most when businesses tell me what they use to inform their messaging. ‘We’ve never spoken to our customers but here is a 12-page document of what our founder thinks it should be’.

In the name of being vulnerable, courageous or downright stupid, I document my business growth over on Linkedin. Follow along to see me messily building in public.