Katie Evans

So my name is Katie Evans. I currently sit in London, although I get to travel the world. And my job is Chief Communications Officer.

So the main element of my role or the main objective of my role is to make sure that enough people have heard about the company or the product that I am representing or working for.

So what that means is there's a few different elements to it. First of all, there's marketing. So that's where you tell everyone directly what your product is, what problem you are solving, how you are solving it.

The next way of doing that is through PR, which stands for public relations. That means engaging with the press and encouraging them to talk about your product or your company or your solution in a positive way so that more people can read about it in publications and news outlets that I don't have access to, but they can control what they write. So it reaches a broader audience.

And then the third element is working with sales teams to actually go and talk directly with clients or targeted clients, prospective clients that we would like to come and use our platform, our product, our service and making sure that they are communicating effectively with those groups of people.

So a typical day for me is I start by reading the news. So understanding what is being said about the different topics or themes that my company are particularly interested in.

I have a lot of meetings in my day and those meetings are talking across people, sorry, talking with people from across the business. So communications is a really interesting function in a company because it's one of the few functions that actually targets or touches every part of the business and the reason it does that is because you have to have a full picture of the solution or the product that you are then communicating outwardly or externally to people and equally if you're talking to journalists and trying to encourage them because you cannot control what a journalist writes so you have to try and encourage them to write something.

You have to be prepared and armed with the knowledge to be able to answer absolutely any question they might have. That could be anything from the operations, the fees, the clients, regulation in some cases.

A lot of people I think look at stereotypes of what communications experts are from watching films, from watching TV series and thinking it's just long lunches with journalists or with clients but actually you have to be able to process a lot of complex information from across multiple areas of the business and then translate that into language that absolutely anyone can understand and that's quite a skill set in itself.

So I have marketing personnel who sit with me or report into me and they are responsible for not only how the brand looks and feels, so if you think of companies like Apple you know instinctively what their logo is so that would fall under branding so I work with our director of brand to make sure that we have a strong logo that we have consistent branding across all of our materials whether that's online or offline.

I then also have content specialists that I work with who help write content, create multimedia content and that type of content will be distributed across a variety of channels. So think social media like LinkedIn, Twitter or X I should call it now, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, as well as we have our own marketing channels in terms of like email database. So how do we directly communicate with clients? So that's what my content specialist is doing.

The best thing about my job is I actually am quite lucky in that because I have made a point of learning about the business, learning about the industry that we sit within, and that comes actually from my PR background because again you have to you have to be on guard to be able to answer any questions.

I've actually now managed to propel myself within the industry to then be able and go and speak at big conferences about these topics. Now traditionally you don't see comms people sitting on industry panels and by panels it's where you get you know four or five people together to talk about an industry topic.

That traditionally doesn't really happen with communications people but because I think communications of the future are going to be full of people who actually understand the subject matter extremely well and they're the ones that are responsible for delivering, creating and delivering that message externally, it makes total sense in my mind that we should be the people that go and sit on these on these industry panels as well.

So I love doing that. But I also love the idea that we're not just talking in a vacuum and we have to be aware of what other companies and people are saying and how does that make our message more or less effective. So being just more aware and alive to what is going on in the industry for me is one of the major perks of what I do.

The hardest part of my job is trying to ask the right questions in a bid to get the right information that you could from the company from that is often very technical.

There's often a lot of jargon. Jargon is basically, you know, complicated language when actually simple language could be used instead. How do I make sure I understand all of this complexity and turn that into simple language that everyone can understand?

And trying to extract that from people and really get to the the bottom of what they mean when they say things is probably the most difficult part of my job.

So my journey was quite mixed.

I did go to university and I did a history degree because one of the things you will need if you're considering a role in communications or marketing more widely and even business development is strong writing skills.

So doing a history degree or an arts degree at university really helped me prepare for that. It also instilled quite a lot of research skills as well which is another thing you'd need for this role.

So I did history at university for my undergraduate. I then decided to go to another university and do a master's degree in public relations.

And then my first job out of university was in the fashion industry so I did fashion PR. Now fashion PR looks quite different to financial services PR in some respects however you can translate the skills from one industry to another because essentially you're always looking for the problem and then how to communicate the solution and that can be translated across any industry.

I didn't know what I wanted to do when I left school. So I made sure that I did things at school that I enjoyed and it was choosing topics that I wanted to do rather than I felt like I had to do.

And so I did a whole array of different things from history to Spanish to performing arts to art to psychology and it was all stuff that I took an interest in because I felt that if I was interested in it I would work harder at it.

But the other thing that I was thankful for when I was at school was I also did a lot of activities outside of school, so I have a background as a ballet dancer and I felt that that actually instilled quite a lot of discipline for me because I had to get myself to lessons and it was only going to be me that failed if I didn't turn up to practice because it was only me taking the exams.

So I felt that the combination of doing what I enjoyed at school plus having that discipline and that creative outlet via ballet classes really set me up for now what I employ or the mantra I sort of have in my professional career which is to do things that you enjoy not things that you have to do.

A moment in my career I will never forget that's positive is I remember getting my first front page cover story of the Financial Times.

Now if you work in public relations which is where you're encouraging journalists to write about you, it's a very long process. You have to build a relationship with the journalists, you have to keep feeding them information, you have to keep answering their questions.

So to get any sort of mention in an article, particularly in a top tier financial publication like the FT, takes a long time to execute. You're talking months, right, rather than hours or days.

And I remember it very vividly. It was when I was working for the London Metal Exchange. So if you've heard of things like aluminium and copper and steel, all of those, the price of all of those metals are decided in London in this big trading ring where you have people shouting at each other face to face trading these metals, these base metals and we had just moved to a new office and we'd built an entire new trading ring and we brought all the photojournalists down to take snaps of it whilst these guys were trading and I say guys because sadly there weren't any women on the floor at that time and the front page of the FT reported on it as "Lord of the Ring".

And it was such a fantastic visual story and I had people sending it to me and even in The Guardian we had a double, you opened the double page, the middle page and it was an entire, like a Renaissance painting, like something you would see like from Leonardo da Vinci of these people, it was a close-up of them trading face to face and I still have the clippings today. So that was a pretty big moment for me in my career.

I don't want to come across as preachy because I think everyone has their own path to tread.

I was very grateful that my parents instilled in me that as long as you were doing your best, it was good enough. And I still stand by that mantra today, even though I'm probably one of the toughest people on myself.

But I think going back to what I was saying about schooling, as long as you're doing something you enjoy, then you will automatically do well at it because you'll be putting so much into it.

And I think we get a lot, a lot of people can, can get bogged down with comparing themselves to others and thinking I should be at this stage and I'm only at this stage.

Remove all of that. It's just noise. As long as you're doing something you enjoy and you're getting fulfillment out of it then keep on with it.