This week, on the PRmoment Podcast, I’m interviewing Vanessa Pine, co-founder of Atlas Partners. What I love about Vanessa’s career is that it’s real! She says she doesn’t have any regrets, but there are a few career decisions which I suspect, in hindsight, she could have played out differently.

Vanessa is currently a director at Atlas Partners which employs 10 people and has a fee income of £600K. Atlas was founded in 2015.

Here is a summary of what Vanessa and I discussed:

• Vanessa tells us what it was like to work on the Lib Dem campaign in the 2010 general election when “I agree with Nick” briefly became one of the nation's favourite phrases
• How the TV debates changed the dynamic of UK election campaigns
• Why the Lib Dems went to 40% in the polls for a brief period
• How a very small Lib Dem general election team were almost over-run by the momentum of the 2010 Lib Dem campaign
• Why Vanessa left the UK public affairs scene to go to Australia when the Lib Dems went into coalition government – at precisely the point when she was most valuable from a UK-career perspective
• What the differences are between the UK PR scene and the Australian PR scene
• Why UK PR people are highly prized in Australia
• How Vanessa ended up working on the “Australian Year of the Farmer” campaign
• How Vanessa coped with being made redundant from her job in Australia – with the risk of her being deported
• Why the uncertainty is the worst part of being made redundant
• How Vanessa became PR manager in Australia for Coca Cola – a job she doesn’t think  she would have had in the UK
• Why recruitment in public relations has become such a conservative process of risk management
• What does a political special advisor (SpAds) actually do?
• Why the SpAds role is a blend of media and policy
• How politics is the art of the possible – it’s not an ideological exercise
• The role SpAds play in the presentation and politics of policy
• How SpAds coordinate with civil servants
• How Vanessa’s previous career influenced the positioning of Atlas Partners
• Why minority partners in coalitions “get slammed every single time” in elections
• Why Vanessa launched Atlas Partners
• The virtuous circle of running a consultancy business: Why happy staff mean happy clients
• Why it took Vanessa 10 years to gain the confidence to launch her own business
• How the overlap between media and politics is creating opportunities for firms like Atlas Partners