LJ idol Week 4 - “I don't skate to where the puck is. I skate to where the puck is going to be. "
I met Vivien on a miserable cold autumn morning in Glasgow in 2011. At the time, I was freelancing and doing some digital marketing for events and had been recommended to her, so she had called and left a message with my receptionist (my mum) requesting a meetup.
‘Are you coming down for dinner, I’m making curry, oh and ive got a work message for you. Bev from I3 Squared called, she has something to do with Microsoft and wants to talk to you about the internet stuff. Microsoft, that’s exciting isn’t it?’
“When did she call?”
“Yesterday I think, about 1pm it was during Peak Practise”
*deep breath*
“Cool, did she leave a number?”
“Yes, but I think I forgot it”
“So how do I call her back then?”
“Maybe she will call back?”
My mum was great at a lot of things, but being my (unpaid) receptionist wasn’t one of them.
Luckily, she did call back and during the conversation I found out her name wasn’t Bev, it was Viv, her company name was actually IA Cubed and that she was running an event for Microsoft and was looking for help promoting it. We met in a small Italian restaurant called Sartis and hit it off instantly. I was on crutches at the time, had been caught in the rain, and remember struggling down slippy stairs, cold, wet and miserable thinking this better be bloody worth it.
It was.
I remember nonstop conversation between oodles of garlicky pasta and a nearly empty bottle of wine. After two hours at breakneck speed, I learned that Viv had recently discovered she had breast cancer. That she was more terrified of losing her eyebrows than her operation (or losing a breast) and that she was looking for a partner in crime. A business soulmate. We knew in less than the full two hours, that no matter what happened going forward, we were in this together.
Within six months I had stopped freelancing and was running IA Cubed with Viv full time. In less than three years we turned ourselves into one of the top 10 Microsoft partners in the UK. She remained saved in my phone as Bev from IA Squared (because we both found it funny) and she became one of the closest people in the world to me. We both had kids of a similar age, and both had a burning ambition to see our little company’s name in bright lights. We spent our days brainstorming, jetting up and down the country, building the business together and quite honestly having a ball.
Despite hitting it off so well, we had very different personalities. She was hard, I was soft. She was a visionary, I was a planner. So we took on very different roles in the company, she was Marketing, I was Sales. But in broader terms, she brought the ideas and I made them happen. Her brain never seemed to truly stop. Some of her ideas were good, some bad, some brilliant. She didn’t have a pause button and was constantly moving at one hundred miles an hour, so I had to learn to run at one hundred and one.
My entire job became making sure I was always one step ahead of not only her but the competition, predicting her and the markets next move and planning how to turn it to our advantage. I learned how to anticipate, how to read the situation and watch where the next step would be, before the other person had even thought to take it.
Of course, it didn’t always go our way. Hits would come from off field. Viv lost her father to cancer, I lost my mother a few months later. The team would falter, key staff members leaving for better offers. The game would shift when a competitor we didn’t anticipate would sneak up the side-lines and poach a key customer. But the majority of the plays, we called quickly and correctly, pushing us ever forward and we won far more than we lost. We joked once about writing a book of our adventures and then jacking in the IT game and living off the royalties. From then on whenever something of note happened, good or bad she would wink at me, with a wicked smile and a twinkle in her eyes. “One more for the book M”.
She was never easy, she would demand perfection, not only in work but in life. She could be thoughtlessly cruel and deliberately tough, but she pushed me harder than anyone else I had ever known. She taught me that ambition wasn’t something to be afraid of. She taught me that I was capable of anything, she believed I was, truly believed it and her belief made it so.
In April 2015, in the middle of a client dinner she took ill with a tummy ache. We drove home, an hour in the car with a tenseness in the air that had never been present with us before. More silence in the gaps than chatter. Within a week we found out that her cancer had returned, this time it had spread to the liver and bones. We took the kids away on holiday the next week. We worked and played on the beach, warm sand between our toes and the salty smell of the air as water splashed on us. We watched our children giggling as their tongues tried to catch sticky trails of ice cream running down their arms with their tongues, and she explained to me her plan of eating right and exercising. We didn’t discuss timelines, didn’t plan for the end, but we knew things didn’t look good.
For the next few months she just kept on going, No she went faster than ever, leaving everyone else dizzy in her wake. We never told anyone, not Microsoft, not the clients, and no one guessed. People sat in her company at events as she charmed and dazzled, and no-one ever knew. She actually had me believing for a while that through sheer force of will, she could beat the unbeatable. Then September hit, midway through a conversation I realised she wasn’t answering. I stopped talking to see she had fallen asleep.
As September progressed, more and more work was done in hospital. She acted like it was a world class hotel. Every doctor knew her, nurses smuggled in candy and coffee whenever we flagged. Then as she grew more tired we moved to calls, hour long chats about our next move, then when she got tired of talking we moved to texts.
Towards the end of October she sent me a text, thanking me for the time we had spent together. Telling me how she couldn’t have done it without me, and maybe she wouldn’t have. I know I couldn’t have done it without her. That race to keep up with her, to stay one step ahead, to predict where her brain was taking us next was the challenge that turned her vision into our reality. It sparked an ambition in me that I didn’t know I even had. I went from working as a freelancer to becoming the Managing Director of one of the most respected IT partners in the UK. She brought that out in me. She brought out my ambition, my desire to be the best. To always be one step ahead of the competition, to see where the next idea will be, and to get there before anyone else.
We lost her in October, less than six months after her diagnosis and two days after her last text to me. She was forty two years old and left behind two beautiful little girls. My grief was and still is nothing in the wake of those who loved her most. But I did love her. She changed me, changed my life and changed me as a person.
Thanks to her, I am exactly where I am supposed to be, analysing the competition, anticipating the next move, and getting ready to run.
‘Are you coming down for dinner, I’m making curry, oh and ive got a work message for you. Bev from I3 Squared called, she has something to do with Microsoft and wants to talk to you about the internet stuff. Microsoft, that’s exciting isn’t it?’
“When did she call?”
“Yesterday I think, about 1pm it was during Peak Practise”
*deep breath*
“Cool, did she leave a number?”
“Yes, but I think I forgot it”
“So how do I call her back then?”
“Maybe she will call back?”
My mum was great at a lot of things, but being my (unpaid) receptionist wasn’t one of them.
Luckily, she did call back and during the conversation I found out her name wasn’t Bev, it was Viv, her company name was actually IA Cubed and that she was running an event for Microsoft and was looking for help promoting it. We met in a small Italian restaurant called Sartis and hit it off instantly. I was on crutches at the time, had been caught in the rain, and remember struggling down slippy stairs, cold, wet and miserable thinking this better be bloody worth it.
It was.
I remember nonstop conversation between oodles of garlicky pasta and a nearly empty bottle of wine. After two hours at breakneck speed, I learned that Viv had recently discovered she had breast cancer. That she was more terrified of losing her eyebrows than her operation (or losing a breast) and that she was looking for a partner in crime. A business soulmate. We knew in less than the full two hours, that no matter what happened going forward, we were in this together.
Within six months I had stopped freelancing and was running IA Cubed with Viv full time. In less than three years we turned ourselves into one of the top 10 Microsoft partners in the UK. She remained saved in my phone as Bev from IA Squared (because we both found it funny) and she became one of the closest people in the world to me. We both had kids of a similar age, and both had a burning ambition to see our little company’s name in bright lights. We spent our days brainstorming, jetting up and down the country, building the business together and quite honestly having a ball.
Despite hitting it off so well, we had very different personalities. She was hard, I was soft. She was a visionary, I was a planner. So we took on very different roles in the company, she was Marketing, I was Sales. But in broader terms, she brought the ideas and I made them happen. Her brain never seemed to truly stop. Some of her ideas were good, some bad, some brilliant. She didn’t have a pause button and was constantly moving at one hundred miles an hour, so I had to learn to run at one hundred and one.
My entire job became making sure I was always one step ahead of not only her but the competition, predicting her and the markets next move and planning how to turn it to our advantage. I learned how to anticipate, how to read the situation and watch where the next step would be, before the other person had even thought to take it.
Of course, it didn’t always go our way. Hits would come from off field. Viv lost her father to cancer, I lost my mother a few months later. The team would falter, key staff members leaving for better offers. The game would shift when a competitor we didn’t anticipate would sneak up the side-lines and poach a key customer. But the majority of the plays, we called quickly and correctly, pushing us ever forward and we won far more than we lost. We joked once about writing a book of our adventures and then jacking in the IT game and living off the royalties. From then on whenever something of note happened, good or bad she would wink at me, with a wicked smile and a twinkle in her eyes. “One more for the book M”.
She was never easy, she would demand perfection, not only in work but in life. She could be thoughtlessly cruel and deliberately tough, but she pushed me harder than anyone else I had ever known. She taught me that ambition wasn’t something to be afraid of. She taught me that I was capable of anything, she believed I was, truly believed it and her belief made it so.
In April 2015, in the middle of a client dinner she took ill with a tummy ache. We drove home, an hour in the car with a tenseness in the air that had never been present with us before. More silence in the gaps than chatter. Within a week we found out that her cancer had returned, this time it had spread to the liver and bones. We took the kids away on holiday the next week. We worked and played on the beach, warm sand between our toes and the salty smell of the air as water splashed on us. We watched our children giggling as their tongues tried to catch sticky trails of ice cream running down their arms with their tongues, and she explained to me her plan of eating right and exercising. We didn’t discuss timelines, didn’t plan for the end, but we knew things didn’t look good.
For the next few months she just kept on going, No she went faster than ever, leaving everyone else dizzy in her wake. We never told anyone, not Microsoft, not the clients, and no one guessed. People sat in her company at events as she charmed and dazzled, and no-one ever knew. She actually had me believing for a while that through sheer force of will, she could beat the unbeatable. Then September hit, midway through a conversation I realised she wasn’t answering. I stopped talking to see she had fallen asleep.
As September progressed, more and more work was done in hospital. She acted like it was a world class hotel. Every doctor knew her, nurses smuggled in candy and coffee whenever we flagged. Then as she grew more tired we moved to calls, hour long chats about our next move, then when she got tired of talking we moved to texts.
Towards the end of October she sent me a text, thanking me for the time we had spent together. Telling me how she couldn’t have done it without me, and maybe she wouldn’t have. I know I couldn’t have done it without her. That race to keep up with her, to stay one step ahead, to predict where her brain was taking us next was the challenge that turned her vision into our reality. It sparked an ambition in me that I didn’t know I even had. I went from working as a freelancer to becoming the Managing Director of one of the most respected IT partners in the UK. She brought that out in me. She brought out my ambition, my desire to be the best. To always be one step ahead of the competition, to see where the next idea will be, and to get there before anyone else.
We lost her in October, less than six months after her diagnosis and two days after her last text to me. She was forty two years old and left behind two beautiful little girls. My grief was and still is nothing in the wake of those who loved her most. But I did love her. She changed me, changed my life and changed me as a person.
Thanks to her, I am exactly where I am supposed to be, analysing the competition, anticipating the next move, and getting ready to run.