Photograph of Lisa and Charley courtesy of Marco Prosch Photography

If you’d like MSPA to ‘whizz up’ some festive styling for your special party or gathering please Get in Touch

With a sharp eye for detail, style and design, Andrea is quick to assess a businesses’ marketing and PR needs and can confidently build exposure and raise awareness to a targeted audience. She prides herself on an open and honest approach to the people she works with, ensuring that the most positive results are achieved alongside a highly enjoyable experience.

Andrea has over 10 years experience of Press & PR within the following sectors: Fashion, Homes/Design, Lifestyle, and 2 years experience in the Food/Restaurants sector. Her expertise includes: Brand profiling, Brand awareness, Brand & Product launches, Media Relations; generating press stories, feature ideas and product placement.  She is also highly experienced in Copy writing for both online and offline marketing platforms and materials.  Andrea has also worked within the Charity sector, is regularly involved with charity projects & campaigns, and is hugely passionate about helping N.F.P organisations and ventures.

Andrea will continue to take care of her own existing PR clients but work with MSPA as a freelance PA and PR consultant.  As with each member of the team, she is available to work with you and  / or your company on a regular or project–by-project basis.

Andrea can offer on-site personal assistance in London and Brighton and virtual assistance nationally.

Email. andrea@myspecialpa.co.uk | Mobile. +44 (0)7507 516039 |

Skype. andrealfreeman

Creative Huddle have an exciting and high value proposition – training individuals and companies in how to make creativity a competitive advantage. They are also a brilliant fit as an MSPA client - harnessing creativity in business. 

The company is calling upon Sarah’s marketing and events expertise to help them continue to refine the brand and promote their services.

Next Creative Huddle Workshop –  WHAT MAKES A GOOD IDEA?  26.07.12 – Brighton

Image from the Creative Huddle website

Angel Bakery - Jubilee Cupcakes

Here’s hoping you had a lovely Jubilee weekend. I couldn’t resist the cupcake picture – No more Union Jacks though I promise. I trust you haven’t found yourself too disorientated by landing right in the middle of your working week with a heck of a lot of recycling outside your front door. If you have – don’t worry it’ll soon be the weekend again.

We’ve also had important things to celebrate as My Special PA is 3 years old this June. I can hardly believe it. The time has really flown by and despite all the challenges of starting, running and shaping a business from scratch, it’s been an extraordinary journey already.

We’ve always specialised in working with Creative Professionals because each PA has the specialist and relevant experience to offer them. Our aim is to liberate our clients from the administrative and commercial demands of business, allowing them to focus on the creative core of their work. We are committed to helping creatives succeed in doing what they love.

After 3 years in business, it feels great to see that this key proposition is still at the heart of everything we have done and continue to do for our clients.
Read More About What Our Clients Say

So What Have We Been Up To?

Esme has also been working with Brighton based Photographer Mark Vessey over the last year. She’s been assisting and advising Mark both in mapping out his business strategy and as he gets busier, managing the ever increasing demands of his client and gallery liaison.

The balancing act between my creative work and running a ‘business’ has now found a greater harmony. This is due to crucial help from Esme Lynch. Her 100% support and efficiency has driven my planned projects and organisation forward. I feel reassured and supported by Esme’s experience and confident approach.

Mark Vessey’s fine art photographs have been exhibited in various galleries and key art fairs in London and in Brighton and his signature photograph Attitude (an enormous shot of the entire run of the eponymous magazine) was shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

More recently Mark’s work has been bought for display as part of the permanent collection by the St Pancras Hotel and will be displayed in the Royal Suite. The editions of Mark’s Vogue photograph (pictured below) are now very close to being completely sold out.

Mark’s photography – with its highly personal dimensions – has been equally praised and collected and he is fast developing an international reputation.
Featured images by kind permission of the artist. Find out more about Mark Vessey

Playboy

Vogue

Studio 54

 

Bella Pieroni

Emma continues to work with artist Bella Pieroni helping take care of her client, gallery and supplier liaison. Bella has also recently asked Emma to become co-director for her gallery Pieroni Contemporary Art (PCA). This is great news all round. For Emma who has worked closely with PCA for 3 years it involves now taking on the majority of the responsibilities in the gallery’s management with all that entails. Whilst Bella has vital time freed up to work in her studio. Find out more about Bella Pieroni

Alongside her work for Bella and PCA, Emma is working with other artists and designers to help them further develop their commercial success. She is also working on ideas for new services, collaborations event projects to benefit a host of creatives from graduates through to established professionals. 

Read more about our Business Strategy for Creative Professionals

I’m Just Too Busy for Social Media!

Yes and that’s exactly what we thought….

For a while now it’s occurred to me that whilst Brighton is such a vibrant digital business hub, no-one is effectively servicing the online marketing needs of local individual professionals and SME’s. Since I started My Special PA, we haven’t had a single enquiry from a reputable Brighton business to see if they can create ‘an outstanding social media strategy for us’ I found this pretty surprising, a bit annoying but it also presented a great opportunity.

So, frustrated with our distinct lack of social media savvy at the end of 2011 the My Special PA team took a day out to invest in the business, find out why everyone’s talking about social media and how it could add some real value. Far from wanting to find out what Ashton Kucher had for breakfast, we wanted to find out how to attract new business by effective networking online.

We had already met Alicia Cowan and signed up to her newsletter, free resources and anything else we could get our hands on. When we found out Alicia was co-delivering a day long workshop in London with Keren Lerner – Director of Top Left Design We booked tickets straight away.

Keren and Alicia’s workshop was so refreshingly clear and helpful and dispelled many of our beliefs about how time-consuming social media marketing really needed to be.

Since then, we’ve noticed the following results:

• A remarkable increase in our confidence in using these invaluable and FREE platforms for marketing our business
• A large increase in our Twitter followers
• Our followers are now potential clients and useful contacts rather than just competitors, prospective recruits and spammers
• An increase in web traffic and web form enquiries
• An increase in new business
• An increase in’ Likes’ and interaction with our Facebook page
• A significant decrease in the time we spent Tweeting, Posting and Blogging

After the workshop, we were determined to share what we learnt with colleagues and contacts in the Brighton/East Sussex area as we knew that they would benefit as much as we had. After a delightful dinner at Soho House and 2-3 Skype conference calls with Keren and Alicia, we had Friday May 18th firmly set in our diaries.

My Special PA’s debut collaboration with  Alicia and Keren was really successful. Along with the help of our brilliant Brighton based PR partner Andrea Freeman PR, We were able to take a majority of the event promotion, administration and organisation off Alicia and Keren’s hands so they could truly focus on their content and delivery.

Alicia & Keren delivering their social media pearls of wisdom

Glorious branded cupcakes by @Anthea Spooner

Lunch by @AntheaSpooner

There’s a lot to take in at these sessions so the troops really needed quality refreshments to keep them going. We were incredibly lucky to book Anthea Spooner to provide a lavish but healthy buffet lunch. This was followed by her beautifully hand finished branded cupcakes – butterflies for My Special PA, owls for Top Left Design and Alicia’s more challenging brand design ;/ which we decided looked a little bit too like cartoon boobs in blue and green gel icing.

After a lot of planning and hard work all round our sell-out workshop went brilliantly. The glowing feedback we’ve all received since has been accompanied by lots of enquiries for dates for the next session.

Thank you so much to all who attended and gave their feedback!

Alicia Cowan and Keren Lerner really enjoyed all the smart and challenging audience engagement and questions.

We’re aiming to bring Alicia and Keren back in early Autumn 2012 and we promise to keep you posted. Also, if you know someone who’d like to attend a future session – do forward them This Link so they they can sign-up to receive our up-coming event news

My Hotel After-Party

This March we ran our second workshop at the Rosvik Gallery

Bella guides the workshops rather than teaching. This provides her with the opportunity to produce plenty of her own work for her upcoming exhibitions and art fairs. It also gives the ‘students’ the chance to truly explore their creative freedom, once they have learnt some basic exercises inspired by the art practice and drawing tuition of visionary artist Cecil Collins

We always use 2 models (2 x males or 1 male and 1 female) and they move to a carefully selected music playlist either together in the same space, with minimal contact or independently. The aim is to capture a dynamism in the movement we draw – hence the title ‘Lively Life’ rather than static life or ‘deadly life’ as Bella likes to call the more traditional teaching methods available.

We use a broad range of media – which is only revealed if you attend a class

The workshops are wonderfully energetic and invigorating and the students range from incredibly established selling artists to total novices.  Lorraine, Bella’s accountant attended one session and absolutely loved it. This work crosses personal and creative boundaries – it touches people very deeply and can change the way some artists work forever.

I have selected the following images to give you a taster of the workshop.

If you’d like to come and join us for the next one please get in touch emma@bellapieroni.com

Pynor trained initially as a biologist, before completing a BA in Visual Arts from the University of Sydney, and much of her work involves extensive archival research and close collaboration with a variety of scientists.

Pynor’s work has spanned a range of styles and subject matter, but two central continuous themes are water, as source of life, and the body – both as biological entity and social or cultural construct.

Pynor is back in the UK after a lengthy period in Sydney working on numerous collaborative and personal projects. Her work can be viewed at the following establishments:-

'Headache' by Helen Pynor

Brains: The Mind as Matter

THE WELLCOME COLLECTION, LONDON 29 Mar – 17 Jun 2012

Helen’s work ‘Headache’ will be included in this major exploration of the physicality of the human brain. A detail from Helen’s work will be used to promote the exhibition so if you’re in London watch out for her image on billboards in tube stations and other locations.

Polymath - GV Art

Polymath

GV ART, LONDON - Until 14th April

The polymath creates synergies and connects disparate ideas and schools of thought. This group exhibition explores the notion of the polymath in the context of art and science.

Curated by Robert Devcic and Dr Jonathan Hutt

]]> http://blog.myspecialpa.co.uk/2012/04/11/helen-pynor-at-the-wellcome-collection/feed/ 0 http://blog.myspecialpa.co.uk/2012/03/15/mspatip-how-to-maximise-your-iphones-battery-life/ http://blog.myspecialpa.co.uk/2012/03/15/mspatip-how-to-maximise-your-iphones-battery-life/#comments Thu, 15 Mar 2012 23:03:22 +0000 My Special PA http://myspecialpa11.wordpress.com/?p=215 Continue reading →]]>

Image taken from a 'Stuff Review' post by Alexis Phi

Let’s face it our beautiful, shiny, colourful little friends with all the ‘luverly’ useful apps have a pretty pitiful battery life. Much of this may be obvious to some, but I’ve seen very tekky friends of mine utterly puzzled by the low battery alert at the exact time of day they need their phone the most.

I decided to stop getting frustrated about this and find out how to squeeze the maximum juice out of my horribly indispensable piece of hardware. Less device charging is obviously a good thing all round, so I’ve collated the following from various reliable sources – hope they help!

• Always run the battery down to red
• Never charge it overnight, it’s too long a period
• Switch it off at night – unlike a Blackberry it won’t switch itself on at your set alarm time (grrr) so you might need to invest in a fancy Casio watch or even a good old-fashioned alarm clock 
• Don’t use WIFI for hours when you’re out and about unless you’re able to charge your phone  - learnt this the hard way at a conference last week!
• Go to SETTINGS > Turn down BRIGHTNESS  / switch on auto-brightness
• Also in SETTINGS > Turn off LOCATION SERVICES on as many apps as you can and turn LOCATION SERVICES to off when possible.

I think you’ll be suitably pleased with the results – mine’s just run for nearly 2 days.

Don’t work too hard tomorrow and enjoy your weekends.

We got there just before 10am in the peak of big freeze temperatures and stood in line to get our tickets. Just before we got to the front of the queue inside the foyer, I noticed a screen showing the ‘Friends of the RA’ promotional video presented by  the delightful if totally ubiquitous Stephen Fry. Much of the content was as expected, but I really honed in when he got to the part about using the RA as an affordable London club for meeting clients and having lunch.

My grandmother was an artist and a friend of the RA and as a little girl I remember sitting with her in the spacious  and uncrowded ‘Friends Room’ drinking hot chocolate after  wandering through the vast galleries.

I got straight onto it and bought a joint annual membership with my mother also an artist for £130.00. For a total bargain of £5 each per month this offers us the following benefits: -

• Free entry to exhibitions for you, an adult family guest and up to four family children under 16 years of age A whole year of exciting and wonderful exhibitions
• See it first at Friends previews Visit each exhibition before it’s open
• Relax in the Friends Rooms Enjoy a coffee and light refreshment from our buffet service café
• Receive the quarterly RA magazine The RA magazine delivered to your doorstep

My Special PA’s services have all been carefully moulded and refined from what our clients tell us they need and could most benefit from in the future.  Esme and I have also drawn on our own past experience (as overworked creative professionals) to identify the most beneficial and time-saving formats in which to package our services.

We’ve found that for a JUST TOO BUSY creative professional we need to take as much off their hands as possible. Thus allowing them to get back into their studio, workshop or office to create, whilst we handle the rest. This working relationship has usually manifested in a mutually beneficial weekly commitment.

But what about a creative professional who is trying to BUILD THEIR PROFILE  both on and offline? They want to be JUST TOO BUSY but they’re not there yet. They may have a more restricted budget so need to invest wisely, but perhaps not sure where to start?

From experience, we’ve found that for certain clients the best way to help them move forward, is to create a bespoke strategy which is formatted as a detailed TO DO list.  Esme and I met with the lovely Alicia Cowan the other day and she asked if we had actually advertised this service yet – I said ‘No’ and she replied well ‘get to it – it’s great!’

So Introducing……

BUSINESS STRATEGY FOR CREATIVE PROFESSIONALS 

One-off fee – £200

What’s on offer?

2 hour consultation to find out about you, your creative work and your business goals. We then take this information away and covert it into an achievable and easy to follow strategy or action plan. We will look at your short and long-term goals and break them down into manageable bite-sized chunks to help you schedule your time and activity.

The strategy will cover:-

• Your Creative work – Format, presentation and development
• Your Branding – is it working for you?
• Your Market – Who buys your work and suggestions on how to reach other target markets
• Your Online presence – maximising your online profiles, ( e.g. Linked In, niche sites, directories etc) Your website and advice on Social Media interaction.
• Your Competition – Analysis and suggestions on how to get and stay ahead
• Marketing and promotion ideas
• Sales opportunities
• Recommendation of niche contacts and suppliers that can help you achieve your goals

We would propose to spend a minimum of a day (8hrs) on this strategy to cover the above areas and any you wish to add or subtract.

From there you’ll have a PLAN OF ACTION which you can run with or you can appoint certain tasks to us.

For more information please - get in touch