Can you tell us a story about your time on the client side and, and how you moved into agency land?

I was, I was fortunate enough to start in the client side in the strategy department where all the plans came together, um, for BT in the headquarters.

So you could really see how the products and services people, the pricing through finance, um, channels through the sales, um, teams, and, um, communications through the customer communications unit all worked together in a planning and budget cycle to produce what became the strategy, and therefore the funding and the money that went out into the business in order to achieve the particular objectives for that year.

And I think that that was a great way of understanding the complexity of, of business and, and how... what happens within particular teams.

'Cause you talk about like a bottom-up and a top-down planning process, and there were both.

So there would be assumptions and, uh, suggestions for financing that would come top-down, but then there was also a requirement to build a bottom-up budget to say, "These are the things that we would need to do based on those assumptions to achieve the commercial objectives for the business in the next one to five years." Um, and so it was how that fitted together I think gave a really great understanding of the business as well as the marketing side of it because it, you know, marketing was all of those things, the products and services, the pricing, the channels, and the communications.

So how those all kind of fitted together at the top of the company was interesting, and such a great learning curve 'cause I got to work with some of the smartest people in London.

[laughs]