In Dynamic Duos, Mumbrella each week asks two colleagues with a professional and personal affiliation to share with readers the importance of workplace relationships in an increasingly hybridised world of work.

Fran Chalmers:

We met in London, while I was working in broadcast PR and he was working at OFCOM, the British broadcasting regulator — I remember my old boss getting very twitchy about us spending time together.

George is a Kiwi and when we met, he was growing tired of the London rat race. Whereas I had not long moved back to the UK from Brisbane and was missing Australia terribly. We also both had a desire to work for ourselves and felt that our differing skills would be a great starting point to build a business together.

After just a few months of knowing each other, we started doing some research into broadcast PR in Australia and spotted an untapped niche in an industry that was largely saturated in London. We started concocting our business plan and set the wheels in motion to move to Australia — over a year later, we got visas approved and took the plunge.

It turns out we were right. George’s experience in large enterprises, tech and project management paired with mine in business development and working closely with clients on PR campaigns in a highly competitive media landscape in London set us up well for success. We have very separate and defined roles in the business, and this has helped us work harmoniously together for the last 10 years.

We had a steep learning curve when first setting up in Australia, having to get up to speed with a completely new media landscape and start from scratch building up a client base, but we are very proud of the organic growth we’ve achieved over the years. Evolving into a full-service PR agency and adapting our offering to where the market was at the time has allowed us to capture and develop three defined business streams which provide both business security and diversity to the agency’s offerings.

Our relationship is built implicitly on trust and respect, for each other’s strengths and roles within the business, allowing us to not double up on time spent and focus on our own areas of expertise. Having said that, we still run every big decision........

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