About me
I've always been curious.
I was always a creative kid. I would take whatever old items were lying around the house and transform them into a story — usually one that involved me fighting alongside my favourite heroes, the Ninja Turtles.
Looking back, I think that says a lot about how my brain has always worked. I like taking something that already exists and asking, what else could this be? I like solving problems, creating things and figuring out how things work.
As a teenager, if someone put a problem in front of me, I'd persist until I found a solution. I could write, design and problem-solve. I had good people skills and was a confident communicator. I was fascinated by technology, maths and analytics, while also wanting to understand people and what made them tick.
I liked a bit of everything. And, as it turns out, that became one of my greatest strengths.
Finding marketing
When it came time to decide what I wanted to study at university, I had absolutely no idea. I initially wanted to pursue industrial design. Then psychology. Eventually, I settled on an Arts degree, studying Psychology and Media Communications, with a minor in Marketing.
In hindsight, it was probably inevitable that I'd end up in marketing. It was the perfect intersection of everything I was interested in — creativity, psychology, technology, communication, problem-solving and data. The lightbulb moment came during my second year when I took a subject called Brand Dynamics. The concept of guerrilla marketing completely blew me away.
The idea that you could understand how people think, find unconventional ways to capture their attention and influence their decision-making fascinated me. I became obsessed with understanding why people behave the way they do and how brands could use creativity to change that behaviour.
It sparked something in me that eventually pushed me to continue my studies with a Master's degree in Marketing.
I had found my thing.
Learning by doing
My first real taste of marketing came while working part-time at UNO Australia, a multi-disciplinary creative design agency. UNO gave me a blank canvas, a set of paintbrushes and all the paint in the world. The beauty — and the challenge — was that they had never really had a dedicated marketing person before. Marketing had generally been something a designer would try to squeeze in when they had the time.
There was an old website, no real social media presence, no client database, no email marketing and very little content. So I started building. I rebuilt the website from scratch with a budget of just $1,500. To this day, it remains one of my proudest achievements. I established the social media channels, introduced MailChimp and built our email templates and database.
I started producing regular articles and revitalised Channel UNO, the agency's quarterly whitepaper. But perhaps more importantly, I started teaching myself. I wanted to understand how websites were actually built, how they worked behind the scenes and how I could make them better.
That curiosity eventually led me into website consulting, helping clients who were looking to build new websites or improve the ones they already had. Then there was design. Working alongside talented designers from all different backgrounds gave me an accelerated education in design and the Adobe suite. They showed me shortcuts, techniques and ways of thinking that I simply couldn't have learned from a textbook.
UNO taught me to be resourceful. It taught me what hard work looked like, how to work within strict budgets and deadlines, how to deal with clients and, perhaps most importantly, how much you can learn when you're surrounded by people who are better than you at something.
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Getting technical
After four amazing years at UNO, I felt it was time for the next challenge. I'd learned an enormous amount, but I wanted something I couldn't get there: a mentor who could teach me the finer details of marketing, while also giving me the opportunity to expand my knowledge of website project management, development and SEO. SEO in particular had started to capture my attention. That led me to SMSGlobal.
On paper, SMSGlobal was very different from UNO. It was a fast-moving SaaS and telecommunications business, selling SMS services through its own technology platform. From day one, I was thrown into the deep end. I was responsible for developing the content strategy to increase organic traffic, while also managing a much larger and more complex website, multiple social channels, an email database of thousands, copywriting, technical content, SEO audits, analytics — and, somehow, I was still the in-house designer. It was challenging. It was also exactly what I needed.
My time at SMSGlobal fundamentally shaped the marketer I would become. I learned the web from the people who actually built it. Two front-end developers and six back-end developers were generous enough to answer my endless questions and work through problems with me. I started to understand not just how to manage a website, but how websites were constructed from the other side of the build. I learned SEO and paid search from people who were genuinely great at both. And I learned the power of content.
By the time I left, our blog was responsible for around 15% of website traffic through organic search. It had taken a lot of work, but we'd achieved what we'd set out to do. Design continued to evolve too.
The foundation I'd developed at UNO gave me the confidence to take on almost any design challenge that came my way. I was starting to realise that my ability to move between disciplines was becoming a strength. I didn't need to be the best designer, developer, SEO specialist or analyst in the room.
I needed to understand enough about each discipline to connect them.
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Learning to think bigger
My next move took me from a company of around 50 people to Findex, one of Australia's largest financial and accounting firms, with thousands of employees and offices across Australia and New Zealand. It was a completely different world. Suit and tie. Large corporate environments. Multiple brands. Complex stakeholder groups. Senior executives. Tight processes.
It taught me something I hadn't really experienced before: People are often the hardest part of a project.
I started in communications, creating and managing monthly and quarterly newsletters, ghostwriting technical content for senior staff, editing articles, presentations and speeches, and learning how to communicate complex information clearly. After about a year, I moved into the marketing team and began focusing more heavily on digital projects. I worked across SEO audits for multiple websites, content strategies, digital assets, event landing pages and microsites.
Two projects particularly stand out.
The first was the Findex Community Fund, which I helped design from the ground up. I still remember drawing and redrawing curves by hand until they were exactly right. The second was a series of real-time website performance dashboards built using Google Data Studio. My manager challenged me to create something that would allow stakeholders to explore our website performance themselves rather than relying on static reports.
I took the challenge and built it. It was another important lesson: sometimes the best solution isn't simply doing the task better. It's finding a better way of doing the task altogether.
Bringing it all together
Then came Bennelong. An email about an opportunity arrived at exactly the right time. From the moment I walked into Bennelong House, I knew it felt different. Bennelong was operating in an industry I found genuinely interesting — funds management — but it was also small enough to be agile and entrepreneurial while being surrounded by people with deep expertise. The role was initially focused on digital growth and building out Bennelong's digital presence as the business expanded internationally.
That meant websites. Lots of websites. I worked across interconnected websites, databases, feeds, analytics and reporting, while also rebuilding the digital assets used across our marketing automation platform. But the role quickly became much broader. Website management led to UX. UX led to analytics. Analytics led to strategy. Strategy led to content.
Content led to SEO. SEO led to search and paid media. Marketing automation connected everything together. And suddenly I was back where I'd always been most comfortable: doing a bit of everything. Except now, I understood how all the pieces fitted together.
Connecting the dots
Having worked both agency and client-side, across creative, technology, SaaS, professional services and financial services, I've developed a deliberately broad skillset. I've never been particularly interested in being defined by one channel. I'm interested in how everything connects. I understand enough about design to work with designers. Enough about development to work with developers.
Enough about SEO and paid search to understand how people discover brands. Enough about analytics to understand what the numbers are telling us. Enough about content to know what makes a story worth telling. Enough about marketing automation to build journeys around the customer. And enough about strategy to understand why we're doing any of it in the first place.
That's where I believe my real value lies. Not in knowing every answer, but in knowing enough to ask the right questions, connect the right people and find the right solution.
And now, AI
The digital landscape is changing faster than it ever has. AI is transforming the way we search, create, analyse, automate and interact with brands. Some of the things that once took hours can now happen in minutes. For me, that's not something to resist. It's something to explore.
My curiosity has always been one of my greatest strengths, and AI has simply given me another enormous landscape to explore. I'm interested in how it can make marketers better — not just faster. How can it uncover insights we might otherwise miss? How can it improve a customer experience?
How can it remove repetitive work and give people more time to think? How can it help us test more ideas, learn faster and create things that weren't previously possible? I don't see AI as replacing the creative, strategic or human elements of marketing.
I see it as another tool in the box. And, perhaps fittingly, that's where I've always felt most comfortable — standing in front of a new tool, pulling it apart, figuring out how it works and wondering what I can build with it.
What's next?
I've spent my career building a broad set of skills rather than specialising in just one. I've been a designer, writer, strategist, website manager, SEO specialist, analyst, content creator, project manager and marketer.
I've worked in agencies and in-house. I've worked with small businesses and large organisations. I've worked alongside designers, developers, investment professionals, executives and everyone in between. And I've learned something from every one of them.
I'm proud of how far that curiosity has taken me. But I'm even more interested in where it can take me next. The technology will keep changing. The channels will keep changing. The way people discover and interact with brands will keep changing.
That's okay. I've always liked figuring out what's next.
