The Sky is the Limit: From Mentee to Founder
Meet Daisy Rose, a content creator and co-founder of The Content Cloud Network - a social-first creator and influencer agency. Daisy enjoys staying active, going to the gym and pilates. When winding down, she also enjoys practising her nail art and thrifting in London. When she’s working, you’ll find her working with brands or influencers to build social media strategies alongside shooting and editing content.
Daisy was a mentee with Creative Mentor Network in 2020. Read more about her reflections on the programme and how she has advanced her journey since.
Tell us about your time as a mentee
How did it help you?
So at the time, I had recently been made redundant from my full time role working at Debenhams working in the beauty marketing department. I’d had one freelance job when that happened alongside this full time job, which was looking after a social media account for a food brand, back in my hometown; the next role I was offered after the redundancy was also a freelance position, I essentially really needed help kick-starting my freelance career. This was where Ben, my mentor, came in!
Tell us about your mentor?
Image from Bad B*tch, not a Sad B*tch - A fundraising event Content Cloud held to fundraise for Creative Mentor Network.
Ben was the Content Specialist at Lululemon and also had experience as a freelancer, so he was really able to help understand some elements that I needed to be fully freelance - from insurance to my portfolio. He also helped build out my network, which is also super important when being freelance!
What did you work on during your programme?
A lot of the time we worked on my website and portfolio which he set me deadlines on each week/fortnight - which I needed to keep me accountable, as it was just one of those jobs I really kept putting off, but knew the importance of marketing myself when you’re freelance. He also helped me prep for interviews for some roles I really wanted at the time, so it was really helpful to have a more senior eye over the social media interview tasks I was working on.
How has the programme supported your career?
It helped me at a really pivotal moment in my career where I was about to be freelance for the next 3 years or so. I was also able to stay in touch with Ben afterwards, and he actually asked me to cover his role about 1.5 years later, when he was at an agency called Public Nectar (after Lululemon)! He was going on his honeymoon and needed someone to cover him for 3 weeks, and he was Head of Creative, so I was pretty surprised when he asked me to cover him as I felt like it was a much senior role to what I was doing, so I was pretty honoured to take it on. However, I did the job, learned a lot and enjoyed it!
What skills did it help you learn?
Understanding how to pitch for work as a freelancer/how to reach out. How to successfully showcase your work and actually show results - not just what you did - but what that drove & delivered for the client/brand (key!) More of an understanding of working with an agency and how agencies work with brands (I hadn’t yet worked for an agency at this point & was quite clueless) and how to really sell yourself in a portfolio/cv sense.
Tell us about your creative agency, The Content Cloud
What inspired you to found it?
It literally came from wanting to solve a problem that me and my co-founder were experiencing. I was managing a few clients’ social media accounts on a freelance basis, and Liv was running influencer strategies for a small sustainable underwear brand. We had met a couple of months before working together as influencer marketing managers at VMLY&R (our client was Boots!) We found two problems - big and small brands were needing content, and could really benefit from working with micro creators as a solution to:
Keep up to the demands of social media & how much content is needed to be put out to cut through the noise.
Be able to keep up with reactive TikTok content trends
Create an online community
Represent your customer through a community of micro-creators
Create content that is authentic and relatable to the customer.
In addition to this, we found that when working with big influencers, you’d repurpose the content on the brands’ channel after, and the content wouldn’t do as well because Instagram/TikTok algorithms had already seen it. Brands needed content to fuel their own channels - these two factors were how The Content Cloud Network was born! We’ve got an AMAZING cloud of creators, all with different niches (haircare, beauty, sports, fashion, foodies) and we partner them with brands to create genuine content & communities.
What are your goals for The Content Cloud?
To continue working with incredible brands and build them authentic, genuine communities through our cloud of content creators. We want to continue growing our cloud of creators into a community of our own - nurturing up & coming creators, giving them amazing opportunities, helping with creative strategy and continuing to bring our creator community together through events.
What kind of challenges have you faced?
Oh, soooo many! Launching a business is a minefield, and while there are so many amazing moments, like, getting great client feedback, landing dream clients, seeing projects come to life, meeting amazing creators & people at brands, there are also a lot of learnings. From navigating corporation tax and cash flow, learning how to manage a team, to juggling multiple projects, having to market yourself on social media in the busy periods, these are just a few of the challenges when running a new biz!
Now that you’re a business owner, what problems can you see within the creative industry (regarding socioeconomic diversity) that you’d like to see fixed?
While I think that more opportunities for young creatives with lower, socio-economic backgrounds are slowly becoming more available, with the likes of adidas setting precedence with schemes such as Merky FC with Stormzy; one of the most prevalent things to me in the industry is that the majority of getting work/jobs (especially when you’re freelance, which is the case for so many creatives) it is all around WHO YOU KNOW.
If you're not born with this ‘social capital’ or a network of other creatives, then ultimately, a role in the creative industry is going to be harder to achieve. For instance, a lot of creative roles that need filling fast, get ended up being posted on Instagram Stories ‘looking for a photographer for xxx shoot’, as opposed to a good old job board - if you don’t see that Story because you’re not connected to that creative, you’re essentially going to miss out.
Networking is hard full stop! However, mentoring through CMN makes the start of networking that bit more easier. You need to be confident enough to approach people, hold a conversation, understand what to say to be able to get contact details to follow up, and have all the right social platforms etc to be able to connect with them on - it’s actually not an easy task.
So, while things to help make networking easier would be a positive step change, like more community events targeted at young creatives, I think there also needs to be more mentoring/teaching more generically; young people of all backgrounds need the tools to learn the invaluable knowledge that lands us creative work, but we don’t learn at school - how to pitch for work, how to write a CV/portfolio, all of those things. We all know that too many businesses focus on the whole ‘culture fit’ and that more needs to be done to accept young creatives that may not sound or look like their stakeholders, but also, it’s important for those younger creatives to gain further support on all the nuances around how to land work in the industry, because it’s no easy feat.
If you’re interested in joining one of our programmes as a mentee like Daisy, head here.
If you want to mentor on one of our programmes, get in touch here.
Check out The Content Cloud here.
