Dan Robb, CMO of the world’s largest online rental service, Rentalcars.com, runs us through a week in his working life.
Monday
I live in London with my wife and two young twins. My wife is Marketing Director for Google UK and we’ve been based in London for a number of years. This means I have to get a very early train up to Manchester. My colleague Supriya Uchil who is our Chief Product Officer, got on the train at Wilmslow so it was good to have a catch up on what’s been happening in our worlds over the weekend. We’ve been attracting some key talent recently and Supriya relocated from Amazon in Seattle to join the team.
This week is our quarterly business meeting with the leadership team. First up, I dial in to the trading update – our weekend traffic is a good bellwether for the business..
We’ve got 12 new starters this week, and each member of the leadership team takes it turns to meet them as part of their induction. It’s really important to me to be part of this. Our values encourage our colleagues to seek ownership of their roles and the part they play in our growth, so I love being part of the team building exercise.
Next up is a quick update with my channel heads including SEO, PPC and PR. We’re focusing ourselves on being a consumer champion in an industry which hasn’t always been so. That means investments into our customer service and consumer engagement programmes.
I end the day with a late session on our company objectives and making sure they are shared across the business. We aim to make these as visible as possible so our teams are fully involved in the direction the business is heading.
Being Cyber Monday, I spend the evening searching for a present for my wife. I won’t share what I bought her in case she reads this, but it’s getting harder each year.
Tuesday
As part of our quarterly business review, the leadership team meets to look at how the year is progressing as well as looking ahead to next year. We split this over two days to ensure we’ve got clarity on objectives as well as developing our strategy for 2018.
The great part of these meetings is have dinner and plenty of fun together. There are dozens of great restaurants in Manchester and over the past 18 months, I’ve really enjoyed trying them out. It’s a good time to share our successes which we’ve had a few this year.
Wednesday
I’m back into the business review today and looking at our strategy going forwards. This is really exciting as we’re looking to develop the business considerably. We launched Rideways last year and the growth has been fantastic. We’re looking at how we can grow the ground transportation aspect of our business further too.
Ian Brown, our CEO, reaffirms our objectives and we discuss investment opportunities for the next year or two. What we have done so far is really reaping rewards for the business and our people.
We’ve hired over 700 people this year, mainly in Manchester. We opened a new customer service centre in Barcelona too. We are still looking at further recruitment in 2018, albeit at a slightly lower level.
Thursday
Looking at our employee base, it’s brilliant to see we now have over 70 nationalities here. I spend the morning discussing the diversity of our teams and observing what we can improve upon. This year was the first time we had full participation in Pride Manchester which was really good fun. The mix and diversity of our people really matters to me. There’s always learning from one another.
Like any marketer, I have a raft of vendor calls to respond to or take. I try to focus on those which could add value to our business. Wrapping up for the day will be our hiring review, each department is tasked with looking at their growth objectives for the next year and putting in recruitment plans. It’s exciting to see us grow and achieve great feedback from our employees.
I also chaired our Marketing Forum which allows a broader level of colleagues to input into how we can improve our work and processes.
I then head to the station to grab the train home and back to my family.
Friday
I spend this morning with Google. We’re probably one of Google’s biggest partners and we work very closely on both our product development and requirements. It allows us to feedback on products and platforms as well as share our forward plans.
I also catch up with Mindshare who are our global agency, wrapping up meetings a bit earlier, I’m able to see my children in a school play and enjoy a post-performance catch-up with them.
