This month marks 10 years since Sorted Communications was officially founded on 13 February 2013 – we can’t quite believe it! What started with our director Ali and just one freelance writer has now grown to a team of seven permanent employees and a wider team of freelance writers and proofreaders.
We’ve come a long way, and with all the birthday chat, we’ve not been able to resist reminiscing about everything that’s happened in the past decade. So much has changed – especially in the world of comms – and it’s been fun hearing each other’s reflections on life back in 2013 and how things have changed for us all, both personally and professionally.
And that gave us an idea…why not share those thoughts? So, for the rest of February we’ll be celebrating our birthday with a series of #throwbackthursday posts from different members of the team. First up, it’s our comms and marketing assistant, Laura (who, incidentally, is the youngest member of the team).
Looking back on 2013
Somehow 2013 feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago all at the same time. I was still at school for half of the year and living at home with my family in Merseyside, as I still do now. I took my A-levels (with mixed success) in 2013, so my life was almost entirely consumed by revising for exams, writing piles of essays, and – because I just have to make things as difficult for myself as possible – practising for my grade 8 piano exam. Honestly, I have never been as stressed and hope I never will be again!
At that point, I don’t think I really had any kind of specific career or life plan. But I did know I wanted to do something involving writing. I did an A-level in English Language and particularly enjoyed the creative writing element. I’d written stories ever since I was small – in fact, I wrote my first novel aged 8, called ‘The Haunted House’. It totalled three sides of A4 and I was immensely proud of it.
When it came to deciding what I might study at university, I had weighed up several options during 2012 including, for a short time, musical theatre. To tell the truth, I had a fairly serious teenage ambition of being the next Elphaba in Wicked the Musical. Ultimately, I settled on creative writing and received a conditional offer from Bangor University, for their Creative & Professional Writing course, on my 18th birthday in January 2013. Despite the aforementioned mixed success of my A-levels, I got the grades I needed and moved to Wales in the following September.
Living away from home for the first time was certainly a huge adjustment, but I tried to throw myself into as much as possible: within the first week, I’d signed up for the photography club, the feminism club, the novel-writing club, the orchestra, the choir, a couple of acting societies and the musical theatre society. I’m not sure there were many clubs that I hadn’t signed up for. Needless to say, I didn’t maintain this for very long; by the end of my first term, I’d stuck with the acting and musical theatre (still wasn’t ready to let the Elphaba dream go) and quietly let the other things slide.
Otherwise, aside from a few panicked texts to my mum about reading laundry labels, how on earth to operate a washing machine, and definitely one in which I said something along the lines of: “Doing laundry is hard, I never truly appreciated all you and Dad do for me until I had to do laundry myself, sorry love you”, I settled into independent living fairly quickly. I also really enjoyed my degree, and living in North Wales, with the mountains of Snowdonia to one side and the Menai Straits to the other, definitely went a long way in inspiring my creativity.
What I’ve learnt since
As for where I saw myself in 2023, I don’t remember ever really thinking that far ahead. At 18, 28 seemed so old. I suppose I thought I’d be a super successful author with several best-selling books, loads of money, a spouse and a house. Thus far, I’m running at 0 out of 4, but there are 10 months left of the year; it’s early days…
When I think back, I’ve really learnt so much over the last 10 years. I feel like I’ve done most of my growing up between the age of 18 and now. I think the biggest thing is understanding that you should just go for stuff; think about what you want and take steps to make it happen. Since graduating, I’ve tried out a lot of different jobs – willow weaving, teacher training, temping in various admin roles, freelancing as a transcriptionist and flatly avoiding pursuing what I really wanted to do…because I was absolutely convinced it wouldn’t work.
If I could go back in time, I’d grab myself by the shoulders and say “Listen, Roberts, the next decade is going to be bumpy, with a lot of self-discovery. But you’re going to get to where you need to be, and everything will be fine”. I’d remind myself not to stress so much and accept that everything I would go on to do would shape who I’d become. I still hate making mistakes, but I now appreciate that you learn the most through the things that don’t go to plan. I wish I’d known not to be afraid to try things and see what happens. Without taking a leap of faith, I’d never have applied for this job (on a bit of a whim) and ended up getting paid to do what I love after all.
The next 10 years
Looking ahead to the next 10 years, I think the biggest challenge for the comms profession will be continuously staying ahead of changes in the way people communicate and making sure messages get to the right people, in the right way, at the right time. Also, on a slightly more sinister note, AI is becoming more prevalent these days, and may become more instrumental within comms over the next decade. I saw an example on Twitter of an AI-created email from a CEO to employees about redundancies. The AI had been given instructions on what the email was about and the tone to take, and had been asked to include an appropriate quote from Martin Luther King Jr. The resulting email read completely authentically and could absolutely have been written by a real person…spooky!
As for my future, I still have the ‘super successful author with several best-selling books, loads of money, a spouse and a house’ dream. I am also yet to play Elphaba, and believe me, when the call comes, I am ready. But either way, I would just hope that whatever I’m doing, I’m still enjoying it and that I’m happy – that’s all that matters to me.
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