Dee Blick, The Marketing Gym
I’m an award-winning Chartered Marketer running my own business, The Marketing Gym Ltd. Based in Horsham, I specialise in providing marketing solutions for small businesses within Sussex, and have built up a strong reputation for achieving excellent results from a small marketing budget.
After graduating from Sheffield University, I moved to Horsham in 1984 to take up a marketing role with a large Insurance Company. During the next twelve years, as my experience increased my responsibilities increased, culminating with me running £1m marketing campaigns and leading my own team.
After having a break to bring up my two children, I decided to branch out on my own, recognising that many of the skills and principles learned during my time in the corporate world were just as relevant to the small business community. With my children at school, becoming self-employed offered the flexibility of working to my own schedule. This enabled me to continue to be around for the children after school and during the holidays etc., but at the same time start to build my own marketing business.
Working with small businesses has always been my passion and I believe that my enthusiasm for marketing and my strong desire to achieve great results for my clients has helped me to build a strong reputation in my field. Building up a business on your own can be daunting, but if you are eager to succeed and love the work that you do, I believe that you are half way to achieving your goal.
My husband has now joined me in
the business, having taken a twelve-month sabbatical from his own job. Having
someone to share the ups and downs of the business has
given me a new lease of life. Suddenly I am the breadwinner in the
family which is a little bit daunting, but the positive effect has been
enormous, and I am proud to say that in January this year I wrote and had published
my first book, Powerful Marketing on a Shoestring Budget for Small Businesses.
I feel I can now look to the future with renewed enthusiasm. I am planning to develop one-day small business marketing boot camps, and my mind is continually active with new ideas of how to take my business forward. Having written the book, I know that anything is possible and suffering from RSI is an inconvenience rather than a barrier.
