Mark Williams

I have worked in the heating industry for over 17 years. I started off in the British Gas office on Newbridge Lane, Stockport at 17 where I held many roles from Dispatch right up to Management Information where I handled complex databases for the Directors of the company. After 5 years in the office, I enrolled in a Gas Apprenticeship Scheme for adult learning within the company, where I stayed as a well performing Breakdown engineer for a further 10 years. I am a person that can’t sit around, I constantly strive to learn new skills and always need a project on the go. In 2015 I started a twitter account aimed at Carp Anglers as this was my main hobby, within the first 6 months we had around 10,000 followers. So, I had the idea at 11pm to develop an online newsletter which would be sent out by email reporting on what fish were being caught and where. This was solely created by UGC, so anyone can send us there capture reports and feature in the newsletter. By 3am I had my first 10 writers and rather than a newsletter I was going to produce an online magazine with no prior experience. 

The magazine was going to be completely free, and we were going to charge companies a small fee to feature in the magazine. I quickly learnt how to use Adobe InDesign and due to the poor quality of the images we were being sent; this developed into learning how to use Photoshop and Lightroom to improve the quality of the images. At the time there was an app on the iPhone called the Newsstand and the idea behind it was that every morning your daily newspaper would appear on your phone ready for you to read. At the time not many of the larger fishing magazines were utilizing this service as they were set in their old ways of print, which as we all know is dying. I am a huge believer in myself and if someone else can do it then so can I, so after 6 months of private learning from YouTube and various other platforms I had created an app which allowed me to use push notifications to let everyone know the new issue was live and it was waiting for them on their mobile. This by no means was easy, I found Apple had very strict guidelines and loopholes to jump through and with no previous experience in any of this I had to find solutions to a problem that was asked in a language I wasn’t familiar with. 

Through running the magazine, it really did push me because we started off with a budget of less than £200 with 0 experience in any digital content creation and within 12 months of running the app, we were the most downloaded carp fishing magazine in the world on the Apple Newsstand. We started to sell merchandise which ended up making us money then the ad revenue, so we changed the business model from a magazine to a clothing and merchandise brand called Hobo Armour, which we have been running up until this day and throughout lockdown was turning over more than £20,000 a month, which enabled me to leave my day job as a gas engineer. 

Word quickly spread around the fishing industry that we were doing incredibly well on social media so I have been hired by multiple companies on a freelance basis to help them with projects that there in house team couldn’t solve. One thing I have found is that lots of companies are hiring individuals who have degrees and formal training in social media marketing and content creation, rather than hiring someone who has built something from nothing, whilst working a 48-hour a week job and still hitting all my targets and achieving bonuses.

Due to running the business with solely my partner if we needed something doing, we had to do it ourselves and do it to a standard that was higher then the larger companies in the industry and with a much smaller budget. I have a high knowledge of most design software including, Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom Classic & CC, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Coral Draw. I have been striving to do things differently on social media than what our competitors have been doing so recently I have been teaching myself digital animation using Adobe Animate and Character Animator, but it’s still early days and I will get there. The idea behind this is to create short Instagram reels that are a cartoon style version funny short clips aimed at anglers.

Regarding social media marketing, I have worked with multiple social media suites for various companies including, Hootsuite, Social Champ, Crowdfire but my preferred platform has been later.com mainly down to the features they offer and integrations with e-commerce platforms. I am an avid photographer and videographer with a range of equipment including DSLR camera and drones and have worked with multiple companies within and outside of the fishing industry. I have worked for HGV Driving agencies right through to tattoo parlours, not only creating content but booking in and scheduling their social media posts.

One thing I have found is that most companies I work with completely neglect email marketing and completely focus on social media. I have previously worked for a company called Carbon Baits and through my help this small one-man band from Wolverhampton used to generate on average £2,000-3,000 a month which was over 20% of their turnover from my email marketing, which they had completely neglected to use before. I would block book in there entire months emails in one afternoon a month using Shopify and Mailchimp integrations and created the content from UGC from their social media platforms and photos they already had on file.

I have built websites for companies on many different platforms including WordPress, Wix, Squarespace and again we all have our favourites and my personal favourite to work with is Shopify, as they offer great design capabilities so you can really let your creativity run wild while having a fantastic, easy to use back-office system that integrates with Facebook and Instagram shops. 

Due to the current financial crisis a lot of people have changed their spending habits so hobbies like fishing have unfortunately been affected; people are cutting there spending so this has meant that I have had to revert to my previous trade as a gas engineer and my partner is now running the website full time. Through my time as a repair engineer, I became a problem solver and I love a challenge and I am looking for a job that I am going to enjoy waking up for. I am most definitely not going to be the most qualified applicant that you receive but I will be the most self-driven individual who has applied. 



 

I have offered freelance social media and e-commerce consultancy work for the past 3 years. This happened due to my own social media accounts and e-commerce sites doing incredibly and overtaking a lot of the larger competitors in the industry.

I studied for an NVQ in HVAC at the British Gas academy and prior to that studied at Xaverian Sixth Form College.