What is your current job title and company?
Managing Director, Wave Healthcare Communications
What is the best part of your job, the bit you like the most?
We recently welcomed three new members of our board with a huge variety of experience in the MedComms industry. Running an agency we have built from scratch can be a somewhat insular experience and so the best part of my job now is working with our new leadership team with broader experience than my own to build a future for Wave in which our programme director and senior writers / editors play a much bigger role in operational leadership. We learnt through the lockdown months just how much people can achieve when they are truly given the responsibility and support to do so. Making Wave a company in which more of our team feels this freedom and responsibility, and has the support to realise it, is my main focus and key interest.
What is the one thing you wish you’d known when starting your MedComms career?
How hard it would be to recruit really good people. We have our strongest team ever now, but it took an enormous amount of time and effort to find them.
What’s the funniest or most interesting experience you have faced?
Oh golly, there are so many! Turning up in Moscow to facilitate an advisory board that had been meticulously planned in English to find the advisors only spoke Russian was ‘interesting’, but a late night and an interpreter meant we had one of the most successful in the series.
What’s the highlight of your career so far?
The early days are obviously exciting, and then landing our first big account about 2 years in, but I think 2020, for all its challenges, was a huge highlight as it forced us to adapt really quickly and to ask so much more of our programme directors in leading us out of the threat we faced in March. This they did brilliantly, and the success of 2020 has been the inspiration behind the 5-year growth plan that now spearheads all that we do. Growth in the commercial is important, of course, but perhaps the key focus for our growth is centred around the people and creating sufficient truly senior roles to drive our ambitions.
Thanks for your time, James.
To find out how Julia could help you progress your MedComms career or help your recruitment process, get in touch with her – [email protected].
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