It would take a brave heart to consider crossing swords with Flora
Martin
When Citigate Communications revealed last week it had bought Flora
Martin PR and was going to merge the company with Dunseath Citigate to
form a new Scottish subsidiary, the announcement raised a few eyebrows.
Not that the merits of the deal were doubted. With a healthy fee income,
a long list of clients and a strong position in the Glasgow PR market,
Flora Martin PR seemed the obvious target for a company like Citigate
looking to consolidate its position in Scotland. But observers did
wonder how Flora Martin herself would take to being a director within a
larger group after having run the show on her own for so long.
Friendly and charming though she is, Martin has, on her own admission, a
‘strong personality’. ‘She’s a forthright and forcible woman and has her
own views,’ says one former colleague. ‘People either love her or hate
her.
Martin’s reputation for toughness has served her well in an 18-year PR
career. Her working life began in 1969 as an executive officer at the
MoD in Glasgow. But after nine years she began ‘champing at the bit’ for
a new challenge and was introduced to Tony Meehan of PR consultancy Tony
Meehan Associates.
‘I didn’t know anything about PR,’ Martin confesses. ‘I didn’t know PR
even existed. The profession didn’t have the image then that it has now
and I hadn’t a clue what it was, but it sounded like good fun. Tony and
I had a tacit agreement that if I was rotten or if I hated it then it
would only be a three month appointment.’
Three months stretched to six years, during which Martin got to grips
with most aspects of the PR business. By 1984 she felt confident enough
to move to a larger outfit and joined PR Consultants Scotland - now
Shandwick Scotland - as a senior account executive.
‘I needed to have my perspective broadened and I didn’t have anything to
benchmark myself against,’ she recalls. Two and a half years later she
returned as a director to Tony Meehan, whose agency had revamped itself
as TMA Communications. Her tenure there lasted three years until
differences over the firm’s future direction led her to start her own
consultancy.
‘I know now how difficult it is to allow people to take a big role when
it’s your business and you’ve brought it from nothing, and I must have
been quite difficult to work with at that time,’ she admits. ‘I was very
ambitious and Tony and I decided we would part ways.’
At Flora Martin PR she has built up a staff of nine, eight of whom are
women. Although she rejects the ‘all women agency’ tag as irrelevant,
Martin does think that women can bring advantages to the PR business. ‘I
think women are good at PR because they are good at juggling more than
one job, and in consultancy that’s important,’ she says. ‘In some ways
women are often more team spirited than men. There are less egos
involved.’
She also thinks Scottish PR professionals could teach their English
counterparts a thing or too about the PR business. ‘It’s a different
market,’ she says. ‘They have a hard training up there and I think a lot
of Scottish people that come to London are very successful because
they’ve been in the school of hard knocks. We go all out to get the best
programmes for the client without propping it up with things that I
wouldn’t really consider to be traditional PR disciplines. I think
people expect a lot more for their money and we have to work a lot
harder.’
Martin certainly plays as hard as she works. She and her husband Sandy
are familiar faces on the Glasgow social scene. Until recently the
couple organised an annual golf tournament for friends called the BOG
classic which, by all accounts, provided some memorable moments. ‘I’ve
got fabulous video footage of people trying to play golf which I’ve
often threatened to send to Jeremy Beadle,’ she laughs. And you get the
feeling she probably would.
HIGHLIGHTS
1978 Account execcutive, Tony Meehan Associates
1984 Senior account executive, PR Consultants, Scotland
1986 Director, TMA Communications
1989 Managing director, Flora Martin Public Relations
1996 Director, Citigate Scotland
