Resolution.

With a love for literature, a passion for copywriting and a respect for the power of marketing, Sharon Starkey set up Resolution, a strategic communications agency, with a desire to offer bespoke marketing solutions.

Describing themselves as the voice of their clients’ brand, the agency uses a strategic approach including digital solutions to help organisations deliver a clear and consistent marketing message.

With no initial plans for growth, when the opportunity to join the DigitalCity SCALE programme arose, Sharon was initially sceptical. She shares “I hadn’t really thought about scaling the business, we were completing tasks for clients and working on their growth plans without even considering our own.”

However, following the workshops, Sharon adopted a completely different mind-set. “Attending SCALE gave me the time to focus on the business and has had a direct impact on our growth. I honestly believe that there is not a book or course out there that could have taught me what I learnt on SCALE.”

The exercise allowed the business to review organisational and client task against skill set and a decision was made to bring graphic design in-house and out-source administrative tasks; improving productivity and freeing up the core team for client work. Sharon says “As a team, we’ve really worked out what we are, we know who our target market is and where our skills lie so we can best offer support to our clients – all of this is a direct result of the programme.”

Along with more confidence, self-value and the courage to take more risks, Sharon has taken away nuggets of knowledge and advice from the mentors that she admittedly still applies to her thought process today. But, it wasn’t just the mentoring that had an effect, having the opportunity to speak to people in the same industry was another core benefit.

She explains: “The unique structure of the course, which included representatives from organisations of various sizes in various industries, provided us with access to people who had similar challenges via different experiences. The learnings I took from not just the speakers but also the attendees has been so valuable to us.”

David Dixon, of DigitalCity, added “The concept of SCALE is not about pigeon holing a certain type of business – it’s about mixing totally different organisations together. We like to build up that bond between all of those involved so that they feel comfortable enough to let their barriers down and share their experiences to ultimately learn from one another.”

“For somebody that was at first, very dubious about joining the programme, it has been amazing seeing Sharon totally change her mind-set, very quickly become actively engaged and even go on to work on a new project with members of the alumni.”

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