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.

Kate Fuller:

I met Will in 1983, two days after Christmas, on a hot summer’s evening in Kadina, country-South Australia. I was just a few hours old, and he was besotted. Or so I tell myself.

We grew up in the Barossa, where our folks established Peter Fuller and Associates (now Fuller) back in 1994, as a predominately ag and viticulture communications company. One of their first projects was building “brand Barossa” with some of the Valley’s most legendary winemakers. This gave both Will and I a pretty solid early understanding of the highs, lows and ultimate responsibility of running an independent agency.

Will left home at 18 to go to Adelaide Uni – where his hair grew longer, and his mates got hotter. I joined him a few years later but eventually moved to California to write for magazines and study jazz, while Will returned to the family business after building a career in wine marketing in London.

After years apart — Will building the Fuller brand in Adelaide, and me writing about research for Oxford University while doing one-woman cabaret shows in Edinburgh — I returned home and audaciously asked him for a job.

Fuller had grown from a rural PR firm into a full-service brand and creative agency, with over 30 employees and a national client list — and I not only wanted a piece of the pie, I could see a huge opportunity in bringing my creative and longform writing experience to the table.

And so Will and I started working together. It must have been our genetic ability to tell a good story, to find each other endlessly funny in creative workshops, or our joint love of a well-crafted jingle, but somehow we made a great team. Will focusing on strategy, and me crafting the story.

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