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I felt sick.  I was giving my first presentation and they were all people I knew - the very worst situation.  I had acquired a slim self-help volume from a bookshop in town which told me to use index cards with my main points on them.  It was good advice - I could shuffle and re-shuffle the order without having to re-write any text.  The room was stuffy, the audience expectant.  My hand shook and probably my voice too.  Within minutes though I was in flow - explaining how the market worked, what people wanted from it.  That was the day I realised how good I am at dissecting a market, a product, a service to get to the heart of how it works and reassembling it to make it easy for others to understand. 

Understanding is something I had to do fast some 10 years later when we were acquired by a new company that knew everything worth knowing about brands.  They had helped Ronald Reagan get elected and - despite not being a huge fan of the man’s politics - I really wanted to know how they did that.  I listened to the ideas and asked questions until I had really assimilated them into my way of thinking … and then won a big contract to deliver a branding and communications study for one of the UK’s best known overseas charities.  When the Marketing Director praised the outstandingly useful results, which would form the basis of a strategic repositioning, I knew it had worked.

The girl had always been good at working.  She was young to have a kid, alone, and many thought she would go nowhere in the fast-moving world of marketing, with its long and irregular hours and - let’s face it - macho business culture.  But she was focused and she learned fast.  As her manager all I had to do was to ask for results not hours at the desk and to be flexible about medical and nursery appointments; to work with her not against her, to believe in her.  It was an investment in business coaching before I knew what the term meant.  The payback on this investment was enormous.

Investment and how to measure it can be quite nebulous but just because you can’t put a number against something doesn’t mean it is unimportant.  I bristled the first time I heard someone quote the mantra (actually a misquotation from Einstein) “all that matters can be measured”.  The phrase seemed particularly ironic because it followed a presentation about art, poetry and literature and the insight they give into emerging culture.  How do you measure art or poetry or literature?   So impact assessment was always going to be an interesting challenge for me.  But by working with other passionate people, consulting multiple audiences, using a mixture of data collection methods combined with techniques learned in the fields of branding and communications I have been able to reach a point where I feel there are ways to do it which give a true and fair picture.

And true and fair picture could be the mantra for Public Aspect - bringing together research, business consulting, executive coaching and public affairs skills to help people understand the difference they are making/might make in terms of social impact and how to communicate and improve on this.  Do we make a difference and if so how much and how?  How will this new understanding alter strategy, relationships, the organisation’s mission and values, how people allocate their time?   You need support to help you gain insight into your achievements and how you work and how others work, ultimately in becoming more authentic, happier, more successful.

I hope you enjoy Public Aspect as much as I do.