In January 2014, I joined HCRG Care Group — under its previous owner at the time — as a Digital Communications Executive.
Even writing that sentence feels slightly odd. Not because I don’t remember it (I do), but because it suggests a neat, stable story. One job. One company. A steady climb.
That isn’t what happened.
Because the truth is: I didn’t really spend 12 years in the same place. Not in the way people mean it. Over those 12 years, the organisation changed shape repeatedly. The work changed. The expectations changed. I changed. At times it felt like I’d had multiple careers, just without ever needing to learn a new email signature from scratch.
And if I’m honest, even “Digital Communications Executive” doesn’t feel all that accurate now I know what I was doing.
A journalist, not a marketeer
I finished university in 2012, stuck around in Brighton for a while (living with one of my former uni housemates who still had another year to go), and then moved into a role at a market research and marketing company in London.
It was a brilliant environment — methodical, logical, community-minded — and I ended up working on projects I still remember fondly: membership satisfaction for the RSC, and a long-running programme for the student research world. Work that actually mattered. Work that taught you a lot about people and behaviour.
But marketing? Not really.
If anything, I was closer to being a journalist. And when I joined HCRG, the role was pitched more like that too — communications, reputation, content, PR. The organisation had grown quickly and was still growing, and they were building new capacity.
In that sense, it’s surprisingly similar to now. Different decade. Similar feeling.
We don’t win by being silent
One of the first real challenges I remember wasn’t a campaign or a creative idea. It was Twitter.
Private companies working in the NHS have never been universally popular, and back then there were groups on Twitter who were highly energised about it. There’s always a temptation (in lots of organisations) to retreat: go quiet, stay out of it, don’t poke the bear. That was even more true at the time: long before TikTok and the current social media landscape.
But my instinct was the opposite. I’ve never seen an argument that was reliably won by remaining silent, and this didn’t seem that different.
The way I saw it the job wasn’t to convince those who were dead set against the concept (quite aside from the execution) but to provide both sides of the argument so that the neutral on-looker could form a balanced view. Those who didn’t know the arguments (nor particularly care about them) are surprisingly numerous.
So we got consistent. We told stories. We found our voice and used it — not aggressively, not defensively, but properly. Because the great thing about a healthcare organisation is that you’re never short of human stories; with a bit of legwork you can make them great ones. And in those early days, I had the freedom to do that.
We also did something so simple it almost sounds too obvious: we used our waiting rooms as a channel. We promoted our social accounts in spaces where people actually were. Back then waiting rooms were busier — pre-Covid, fewer virtual appointments, less precise booking. If you want to build visibility, you start where the people are.
That early mix of reputation work and human storytelling shaped almost everything that came after.
12 years, and about seven careers
There are a couple of ways to tell this story.
One is job titles. I started in digital communications, became a Communications Manager, then Senior Communications Manager, then a sort of “Head of Comms elect” (a strange time, but it resolved itself eventually), before leading comms and then taking on marketing and internal comms as well.
By 2022, I was Director of Communications, Brand and Experience — including the customer services team, and some bits which counted as “experience” but which the leadership team at the time felt were a good fit for me, and my style of calm, ordered leadership.
Not long after that, I was asked to work across another portfolio company about one day a week: rebrand, new team, new approach. It eventually evolved into a Group Marketing Director role, running multiple teams, and then supporting the communications workstream through an acquisition.
That’s the “career CV” version.
But the more honest version is chapters — because these were eras, not roles:
- Growth: new contracts, mobilisations, learning what it means to “go live”
- Consolidation: uncertainty, troubles, and the work of holding steady
- Covid: I was asked to be a Silver Commander, which is all I dare remember now
- New investor: helping find them, then transferring the business — including a full rebrand in three months
- Embedding: Taking on customer services, experience etc, and settling in
- Broadening: working across multiple companies, building capability, supporting acquisition work and broadening my skillset
- Consolidating again: the last year especially — new contracts, integration, and making things repeatable and consistent. After all, what legacy do you have if it depends on you? And if you don’t know how you did it last time, how can you do it better?
The safe option?
At points, staying put might have looked like the safe option.
But it didn’t feel safe. It felt like constant reinvention — sometimes exciting, sometimes exhausting, often both.
Baptisms of fire
In the earlier years, winning a new contract could mean a week or two of intense media attention. Not the “pleased to announce…” kind. The chaotic kind. Twelve to thirty media calls a day. National papers. Corrections. Updates not just to the comms team, but to the board.
I can still feel the fear of the first time I emailed “~Board” with an update.
That’s the part of these careers that doesn’t show up in LinkedIn job titles: not the responsibilities, but the pressure — and the speed at which you have to grow into it.
And the thing about those moments is: you’re never “ready” beforehand. You become ready by being in them.
The smallest mistake that taught me the biggest lesson
One of the moments I still think about wasn’t even a major crisis.
A journalist from The Independent approached us about a story. It felt small. Silly, even — the kind of niche thing you assume won’t travel far. I spoke to the Chief Executive and told him what I genuinely thought: that it wasn’t something to worry about.
The next day it was the front page.
It wasn’t that I’d lied. I hadn’t. I’d told the truth as I saw it. The problem was that I’d been logical when the story was emotional.
It didn’t matter that the topic was dry (it was, technically, about constitutional documents in NHS commissioning). The shape of the story wasn’t dry. The feeling wasn’t dry.
I’ve still got a copy of the paper.
Partly because it’s a reminder of how wrong you can be when you assume the world works logically. But mostly because it reminds me what leadership pressure actually feels like: the sick feeling of getting it wrong, and the heavier feeling of thinking you’ve let someone down.
What I learned about leadership (that wasn’t marketing)
If I had to sum up what I’ve learned across all those chapters, it would be this:
Decisions are the powerhouse of everything.
How you make them. When you make them. That you make them.
There are times for analysis and times for speed. Times to hold your nerve and times to test and iterate. Times not to decide at all, and times where any decision is better than drift — because it creates movement, learning, momentum.
The second thing is people.
Working with people is the whole thing — and it changes dramatically across industries, cultures, leadership styles, and moments of pressure. I find it fascinating. I love people. And I’ve learned that leadership, done well, is less about performing leadership and more about being a good work human.
Helping the team get done what needs doing. Dropping back and helping out. Being steady. Being clear.
But above all: the importance of having a vision.
A destination. A story about why it’s the right place to be. Something that makes the hard days make sense.
That’s the privilege of leadership, really. Not the title — the responsibility to make things feel navigable for other people, and create a common goal of a new, slightly improved, world.
Staying, without going stale
I’ve occasionally found myself in an informal “historian” role — bringing lessons from the archive into conversations at the leadership table. I’m not the longest serving at all, but I am unusually long-tenured: somewhere in the top 0.5% of colleagues for length of service now.
The risk of staying that long, of course, is staleness. Comfort. Same thinking. Shrinking horizons.
So I’ve tried to do the opposite: bring in new people, new energy, and keep dragging the outside world back in with me — coaching, mentoring, the MBA, public speaking training, networking, conferences, professional membership bodies. Anything that stops you becoming too internal in your thinking.
But it’s also true to say that I haven’t just stayed inside the same walls for over a decade.
I’ve had deliberate “jaunts” out — supporting rebrands, helping build marketing capability in a whole new company, and working on acquisition activity for our shareholder. It’s meant inducting myself into new teams and new businesses again and again (I reckon I’ve done it about eight times now). Different context, different culture, different expectations — and it has a way of forcing you to stay sharp, learn quickly, and remember that there’s always more than one way to do something well.
If you’re going to stay, you have to keep moving anyway — even if you move by widening, not leaving.
A quiet kind of anniversary
This anniversary has made me reflective. Not “twelve years, aren’t I loyal.” Not nostalgia. Not even pride, exactly. Just perspective. Looking back, I can see how many versions of the organisation I’ve known — and how many versions of me I’ve been inside it (and outside of it in the other companies, and in life). I can see the patterns: growth, pressure, reinvention, learning. I can see the moments where I did things for the right reasons, and the moments where I did things for FOMO, or to prove myself, or simply because momentum can sometimes feel safer than stillness.
The purpose of this reflection? To mark the passage of time, reflect honestly and consider what the past might give me for the future. Otherwise, just onwards.
