Celebrating seven years at Oracle, 20 years in the industry

What didn’t happen is possibly more appropriate. I was pleased to be voted onto the PRCA Council again, helping to raise awareness of industry standards. We launched our new digital services brochure, expanded into other industries, held a staff workshop to revise our values and launched our own Oracle music playlist. We won ‘most innovative marketing campaign’ award for the second year in a row, won Property Week’s ‘best places to work in property’ award and made the PR Week listings for ‘top 150 UK PR agencies’, ‘top 50 PR agencies outside London’ as well as ‘top 350 Global PR agencies’. I sat on the judging panels for the Negotiator Awards and the ARMA Awards, took part in a conference panel on cross platform marketing and supported the PRCA Apprenticeship scheme by taking on two new apprentices.

That aside, I’ll admit it was a challenging year for us in the sense of managing continued growth, staff and client expectations, but we did it! When you grow quickly, you enjoy it, you certainly don’t complain about it but what you don’t realise is, it comes with a whole new set of challenges you may have not met before….I’m a strong believer in ‘there’s always room for improvement’, and in our industry you simply can’t afford to sit back and continue to offer the same service, you have to keep one step ahead and provide new ideas.

In typical Oracle style, we met all challenges head on but at the same time took the time to reflect, refine ourselves and our strategy, we’ve continued to deliver for our clients but also up our game and enhance our service offering.

Just us… and our 20 years of experience to guide us, doing what we do best and working as a team…or even THE A team. As I keep telling the staff, each and every one of them brings something different to the table, something which complements this group of quite incredible individuals that I am so very proud of.

So what’s in store for our 8th year? Well, personally, I’m off to give birth to identical twin girls in 5 weeks’ time, so there will undoubtedly be a whole host of new challenges for me. For the Oracle team, I am excited by our pipeline of work, new ideas and the team’s passion for pursuing new avenues to continue our growth and development. And while I’m safe in the knowledge the company is in the excellent hands of a senior management team that has worked with me for many years, I expect I won’t be able to keep myself away for too long….as someone once told me, those who start a business, mean business.