Jo Scott is managing partner and co-owner at Manchester’s Truth Creative.
Founded in 2006, the creative agency works with a range of clients including University Academy 92 (UA92), North East tech group Cybit and Sinclair Pharma.
Jo oversees the management of the Truth group and its strategic offering to clients. She has previously held senior roles at McCann, Gyro International and Cicero across branding, marketing, advertising and business.
Here, she shared how a recent week in her life went…
Monday
I begin my week dropping our two boys – one at breakfast club, the other at his friend’s house so they can walk to school together. I then head into Manchester to our city centre office. We’ve been in the building since September 2020, after deciding to buy in June 2020. It’s probably one of the most counter-intuitive things I’ve ever done, but my business partner, husband and our creative director, Darren, convinced me we should plough forwards despite the national lockdowns and pandemic. I’m glad we did.
I love Truth Towers; it’s a crowing glory to the hard work and dedication we’ve had for the last 16 years. It’s a Grade II listed building with heaps of character and feels a bit NYC with exposed brick and industrial interior. We start our day as a team with a workload session – what’s coming up, what’s on the schedule for this week and any agency discussions. Whilst I manage the business, I’m very much involved in every client we work with and still do a fair amount of account handling.
Both myself and Darren have always wanted to keep doing what we love; not directing from behind an office wall – we like leading by example and being part of the team. Today is a pretty exciting day – we’ve got two new people in my team: an apprentice and also a senior account manager. Much of the day is myself and the rest of the team showing the ropes and settling them both in. I’m looking forward to the new dynamic and helping them grow as part of the Truth team.
This afternoon myself and Darren head over to a studio round the corner to record a podcast. It’s a new idea from Vikas and Rachael Shah about partnership in business, aptly named ‘Better in Tandem’. We’re the very first guests on the show and they ask us how we manage to work together as husband and wife, and how we’ve managed to be successful in both our business and personal lives. The episode is due to launch in March so I’m looking forward to hearing it back. After the recording we head home – the boys are football crazy and both play for Bramhall North; Monday night the eldest trains and Darren is the coach, so we usually have to dash home a bit earlier and catch up later on.
Tuesday
We’ve just finished rolling out this year’s campaign for our higher education (HE) client UA92 and Tuesday is a demo at the campus ready for the UCAS event schedule. Today, I also chat to another HE provider for a lecture they’d like me to do with their students.
It’s a great way to give something back and inspire the next. The remainder of my day is consolidating insight from one of our Brand Lab sessions we ran last week for our global client, Sinclair. We’ve been running our Labs since 2019 and they’re an efficient but super effective way to generate ideas quickly using design sprint methodology. We run the Labs for Sinclair virtually, but it’s a great way to engage teams who are literally across the globe.
