Ready for a plot twist? 

The best stories have a plot twist but we certainly weren’t ready for ours.

If you've had a nosy on our about page you'll know that we were busy hustling along running our PR agency that we'd grown purely through word of mouth recommendations, while trying to keep on top of home life.   

Spoiler alert, the elusive ‘work life balance’ wasn’t exactly well thought out. Before we knew it, our books were full and we were BUSY (again). This time it was different. A long-term gig supporting the PR, marketing and partnership teams at Hull UK City of Culture 2017 and new client work coming in left, right and centre, our word of mouth reputation saw us managing huge client projects with our tiny team. It was working and we were all set to grow our team to help us scale. But what happened next, knocked us for six. 

The big C

We’ve always been pretty good at multitasking. Between us we’ve got two husbands (one each), four kids (two each), three dogs (Becca’s two retrievers and my spaniel), two side businesses (one each) and a travel website we created with a few other makers and creators where we live. Not to mention we love to travel and spend time with friends, so we’re used to juggling. But when my husband suddenly became critically ill and we had two festivals to launch, clients to serve, kids to care for and a VAT crisis we didn’t see coming, the juggle became very real. 

I won’t lie, it was tough. Months of long days with Becca leading the client-side while I ventured back and forth to the hospital saw us successfully launch the festivals and sort our taxes all while keeping our clients and kids happy. Jiggered? You bet. So as things started to get back to normal, we had to make a choice: grow our team so we could meet our demand or slow down and remember why we started this journey in the first place?

Facing cancer head on, makes you look at things in a new way.

Our AHA moment came when we identified a repeating pattern: clients came to use needing help on PR and copywriting but only had the budget for one-off or project-specific support, what they really needed was to align their copy with their values and get really clear on their stories. 

That prompted us to go back to what got us going in the first place, stories. Finding them, creating them, sharing them with the world and helping others do it too.

Laura x