This is Top Cat Blog – news, thoughts and stories from me, Elaine Gunn.
I run the copywriting and website consultancy Top Cat, and I’m going to be writing in this blog about the life and times of a fledgeling business owner. This is my first experience of self-employment, so it’s all very exciting!
Firstly, it might be worth giving you some information on who I am and what I’ve done with my life so far…
I moved to Edinburgh from Thurso (very far North of Scotland) in 1997 to get a degree. I’d been working on and off in various waitressing and supermarket jobs since I was 12, and found out pretty quickly after moving to Edinburgh that I was completely unsuited to academic life.
However if I was a rubbish student, then I was even more rubbish at realising that! After very nearly failing my first year, I changed degrees and colleges and did slightly better – mostly because the lectures were smaller and there was more danger of getting caught sleeping. However I finally figured out that Uni life just wasn’t for me, so I gave it up and made a part-time bar job into my full-time career.
A couple of years working 80 hour weeks in various Edinburgh pubs were enough to convince me that staying any longer would leave me gnarled and cynical, so I got myself an easy, responsibility-free, every-weekend-off job inputting numbers for the Bank of Scotland – just for 6 months before I planned to go travelling. Six and a half years later I was still there – not so much well-travelled as well-versed in the arts of data processing, office politics and Microsoft. I had clawed my way up to junior management level, and taken on a project/marketing/communications type role in the bank’s Women in Business team.
At the end of a truly nightmarish week-long conference organised by my WiB colleagues in November 06, I was in the pub for a post-conference party, drinking many large glasses of white wine. My duties during the week had mainly involved sprinting about randomly according to the whims of 20 or so high-powered businesswomen who might have strolled out from between the pages of The Devil Wears Prada, so I was ready for a drink. I gravitated towards the two people at the party who looked least likely to demand that I perform some demeaning task for them, and that’s how I met the directors of SK Chase Ltd. After a good laugh in the pub, 8 months, and a bit of cheeky headhunting, I joined them as their projects and communications manager in September 2007.
In terms of my role in their business, this was dictated to a certain extent by my skills. I’m naturally creative, but 6.5 years of working for a big corporate machine bent that into a more structured shape. Therefore (and a bit bizzarely) I was as comfortable writing poetry for their consumer brand as I was coding databases. Don’t ask me to count anything though, as I have absolutely no head for numbers.
In November 2008, SK Chase and I reached the end of the road when we realised that there wasn’t really enough room for me in the business. I’d been wistfully dreaming of the opportunity to set up on my own for some time, so my sudden and unexpected redundancy seemed like the perfect opportunity to make a go of it. With a bit of help from friends and family (particularly my gorgeous and very understanding husband Angus) I intend to make Top Cat Copy a great business that will keep me in good french cheese for many years to come.
At home, I live with the aforementioned pillar of patience, Angus, in a cutesy wee house in the West of Edinburgh. We’re expecting our first baby (temporarily named Bob the Blob) in early December.
