From freelance writer to digital marketing CEO: CMI helped me “learn on the fly”

Ask Charlie Marchant ACMI fCMgr about her route into senior management and she’ll tell you she couldn’t have predicted it.

“Goodness, absolutely not,” she says. 

When Charlie joined digital marketing agency Exposure Ninja nearly 12 years ago, it was as a freelance writer. She loved writing and considered it her calling. But just three months later, the founder asked if she’d mind “managing a couple of writers”. Charlie ended up building a 20-strong content marketing and digital PR team – a cohort of editors, writers and PR specialists who soon became the company’s most profitable department. 

It turns out Charlie had a strong logical mind for tackling organisational problems. That initial success led to her becoming chief operating officer and transforming other operations across the company. Then came the “massive surprise”. 

“The founder said he wanted to take a step back from being a CEO, to start buying businesses in areas like renewable energy,” she explains. “He asked if I’d run Exposure Ninja for him”. 

Accidental manager

Charlie is a great example of an accidental manager, someone who’s risen through the ranks without any formal management training. She says that one of the “trickiest parts in becoming a manager” came in figuring out how to balance her empathy for the team with the setting of boundaries. As the start-up grew, she had to formalise processes around things like performance management and annual leave. Some people struggled to adjust.

• Read more: How CMI training helps me push for change and ‘manage up’

“I suddenly felt a bit like a school teacher,” she recalls.

“I learned on the fly, figuring it out from my mistakes as I went. Where to set boundaries, how to communicate, what motivates people – I picked it all up from the founder, Tim, and my other colleagues. But Tim was arguably an accidental CEO himself; he started the business when he was in his mid-20s. And many of the others had never had any formal management training either.”

Intentional developments

Winging it can only get you so far. In 2023, Charlie decided it was time for Exposure Ninja to formalise its training provision, to make its managers feel more appreciated and better supported.