New Office

Fifteen years I’ve been taking pictures for money – might be a touch more than that, might even be 16 years. I can remember the time I got my first camera. There’s an easy one to write around that, because it was a trip around Europe in 2007 when I got my first house, when Matt Scott got us over the line with a house while we were in Europe for two of the five weeks he took to get the house done, which was an amazing turnaround. So I still remember when I got my first camera when I went around Europe. But the start to make money from it was a little bit more woolly than that. 

It certainly wasn’t much after that, maybe six months is about right, thinking about kit and that sort of stuff. Joshua Blavin’s got the blame for starting me on that one by giving me money when I was working for 4Rs and therefore BUPA and the Great Run series. Which has been great to work again for Great Run after a lot of years in a different capacity. 

But the other one in between that is that some of you will know, Nicola more than most because it was her bloody office, that the picture pops up on my phone every year of me having a key in my hand. And that was when I took a tiny corner of the office when Nicola had her office down on Amethyst Road down in Scotswood on the riverside. And that was quite a seminal moment for me because I was actually only there one day a week with daycare and various other things. And even then that felt like a big step to have an office and a place to call my own. And I think it was probably less than a year, Nicola will tell me more. But it wasn’t a great deal of time because it wasn’t the right time and dynamic and the business wasn’t making enough money to justify space. Or my headspace wasn’t in the right place to make a space work in the way that it needed to. 

Roll forward and I’m not saying it’s taken me another eight years or more than that to realize that I need an office. It’s just actually, there’s a lot gone on and functionality with the business and everybody knows that I’m very cautious when it comes to business decisions, aAnd they have to be right and they have to be justifiable and I think that’s what the success I’ve had recently kind of shows that it does work, that cautious approach. It doesn’t need to be completely gung ho and you owe everybody money – and I’m good with that! So yeah, since Karl started in January, it’s been clear that I needed to have us both in the same room a number of times a week. Both of us working from home, we’ve kind of done that for four years. Because I’m sure you know that Karl started with me before COVID or near enough, that’s when we first met anyway. He’s been doing stuff with me for a significant amount of time and then roll forward to now and now that dynamic needed an office. So I’m not giving too much away on the office itself yet because it needs a bit of work to be ours. I mean, yes, we’ve got desk and yes, we’ve got storage and yes, we’ve got computers, thanks for building those Karl. 

But before I’ve got lots of people around, it needs to have a bit more decoration. But to physically have keys and to have a space that we see each other a lot easier face to face, it’s been fantastic. It’s already changed the dynamic of how I work and how we work as a team. Because that’s the key, it’s team and I think that’s something super important that I’ll come to on some future posts. The team approach has certainly changed the dynamic from where it was all that time ago. 

There’s an argument when I had my keys previously that there was a team around me with Nic and the various support around what Nic had on offer in that building. But it’s not the same as it is now and without that team we wouldn’t have got to where we are now. It just fascinates me where it’s going to go in the next 12, 18, 24 – however many months going forward. How this seminal moment of having some keys in my hand could change all of that.