Leigh Armstrong is managing director at Brandon.
With a team of 30, the Altrincham-headquartered brand design consultancy is now in its 10th year and works with a range of clients including vegan food brand ‘Biff’.
Leigh has over 20 years of international brand management experience. In her career, Leigh has led multi-national clients across four of the large networks Omnicom (TBWA), WPP (JWT), Vivendi (Havas) and Publicis (Leo Burnett Canada and US) and has previously held the role of director for new business at Leo Burnett NA.
She shared how a recent week in her life went…
Monday
Monday always begins with a remote full agency team meeting where we walk through work that’s planned in across all disciplines that week. It’s normally also a chance to catch up on the fun stuff everyone has been doing over the weekend. I then normally have some larger project catch-ups with various teams across the business – to keep me up to date on our work and our clients.
Monday’s are also our regular HR meeting day in which I get together with our FD and HR Manager and we just talk about people. We’re currently looking to revamp our EVP and have some amazing ideas on the table! I also then attend a full Client Services team meeting to go through the active and planned projects and the finances and deliverables that sit behind them. Monday’s are normally full of regular cross discipline meetings and we’ve actively introduced a no external meeting policy on a Monday unless it’s specifically requested or needed. Everyone needs Monday to get back up to speed for the week ahead.
Tuesday
4am start today to get to Crewe station to hop on the train to London for a client meeting. I actually enjoy driving at that time as it’s so empty! Strong coffee and a chat on the train about the week ahead with Richard Taylor, founder of Brandon. Following the meeting, we de-camp to our regular workspace in London and we both dial into respective client calls.
Wednesday
Constantly checking emails and phones all day today as we’re expecting a large pitch result any day now. Time sure does go slow when you’re waiting on a pitch result. We could NOT have done any more on this pitch – so no matter the outcome, know that everyone at Brandon has done an amazing job and we should all feel incredibly proud.
Thursday
Fantastic news today. We found out that we won the pitch. This is a game-changing client win for Brandon on our road to global domination. Announcing the win to the team feels fantastic – it was an agency wide effort to deliver this work. Not just everyone who touched the pitch directly but everyone who leaned in, picked up people’s work to allow them to deliver the best they could. We should all be very proud of what we produced. I am for sure.
Friday
Double whammy exciting day today, as it’s the Brandon team party, and we also have a half day offsite (at amazing space Ducie Street Warehouse) for a company-wide workshop on our Brandon values.
The session goes brilliantly – the team are really engaged and some fantastic insights to fuel the direction of the business into 2023. And then – party time! A delicious meal at The Anthologist in Manchester followed by games, drinks and karaoke. No doubt my rendition of Islands in The Stream will go down in Brandon history.
