Marketing Manager
Sheffield United Football Club

Sarah S

00:00:04 My name is Sarah S. I’m the Marketing Manager for Sheffield United. We are trying to tell all of our customers, that’s our season tickets and fans, what is on offer from Sheffield United, so things like about season tickets, the price of games, weddings, about our hotel, about our academy, about football camps, about birthday parties, everything that’s involved with the football club.

00:00:28 I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to be when I was a child, absolutely no idea. But what I did do is choose marketing…well, business as a subject. I knew that you could use that in anything that you wanted to go into, so I chose that at GCSEs. I loved it. I just thought it was really easy at the time.

00:00:45 My parents, when I was younger, always tried to encourage me to choose something… if I didn’t know what I was going to do, to choose something quite general, which is what I did. I think they would have loved me to go into music but it’s just not something I was wanting to do. I did do piano. I did quite well, but I was never my thing. After A levels, I wasn’t quite ready to go into work yet. I needed a few more years to get my head round everything and to figure out a plan of what my next move was. My parents definitely wanted me to go to university. They didn’t go themselves. My dad did night courses. My mum has done a degree in management as part of her role now, and I think they would have loved to do it when they were younger, so it was definitely something that was encouraged.

00:01:28 When I chose a degree course, it was a sandwich course, so it was a four-year stint, and the third year was in industry. I’d looked at all kinds of things, and I saw marketing and I thought ‘Oh, that looks really interesting. I could do that.’ I went for a job at a sandwich manufacturing company and I got that. For me that was a great introduction into working life, getting up nine to five, and then going back and doing that last year really spurred me onto put my all into getting that last year done and dusted.

00:02:00 I worked for a solicitors at the time who had a legal expense company, so that was mostly legal expenses, which was totally different to sandwiches and totally different to football. I wanted to progress. I’d been doing that job for about a year and a half. It was not as challenging as it used to be, so I needed my next job, my next challenge. I saw a job advert, applied to the recruitment company, they got me the interview, and then it was when I was going for the interview that I found out it was a football club. It was quite daunting at the time because I was thinking ‘Oh, gosh, football, it’s a man’s world’ but it’s alright.

00:02:37 This is a picture of me when I was about nine-years-old at Tony Currie football camp. We used to go to these in summer. Obviously, you can see there that I’m in full kit, full Sheffield United kit, with my cousin who is a Wednesday-ite. He also used to come with us. I used to love football at that age. I used to think I was one of the boys.

00:02:54 I’ve just got this new role as marketing manager now, so I’m throwing myself into it, trying to do everything that I can to change things, to put a hundred percent in, so I think at the moment it is living to work at the moment, but I think the balance is addressing itself. It is important that I want to keep on progressing, that I want to get into more management, that I want to be more proactive. I want to keep coming up with ideas and new ways to do things, keep up to date with everything, and to slowly progress further in the company.

00:03:28 My mum has been in her job since she was eighteen. She has slowly moved up in the hospital but it’s definitely a different case, a different scenario now. I’ve definitely preferred to try a few industries before I’ve got to where I am now. I think the differences in different companies is amazing really. I don’t think I could have stuck to the first job that I had in sandwiches. As good as it was, I’ve liked to try the different ones and finally get to where I am.

00:03:56 End