So my career took inevitable turns into the private sector (I did a stint at Unilever), the charity sector (did a stint at the Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation), freelancing and temporary secretarial and administrative and somewhere along the line, switched career options. In the early 1990s, I left the private sector to temp (hoping to get a part-time job which I did) and do a law degree. My friends said I should pursue that on the grounds that I was good at arguing, a quick thinker, and was well able to play mind games with verbal dexterity. I decided to do my law degree because I was frustrated in getting nowhere fast in my journalistic career and the law was my second choice. PR had never occurred to me as a viable option.

Fast forward five years: just before the new millennium, I graduated – as a mature student – with a 2.2 and a career crossroads. By then I also discovered I didn’t want to be a lawyer – and had missed writing with a vengeance. Don’t get me wrong, doing my law degree was one of the best things I ever did: besides making me much more aware of my rights, my employers were on notice that I wasn’t a “regular” minority woman. I was handled very differently from most of my contemporaries.

Now at the career crossroads for what seemed to be the umpteenth time in my life, I sat down with that blank sheet of paper and worked out where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do and how was I going to get “there” – wherever “there” was. By 2000 when I landed my first – and only – PR post at the third time of applying in the criminal justice field (enabling me to keep my fingers on things legal), it was post-Macpherson. I suppose my previous employers had to be seen to be promoting minorities on meritocracy to “privileged” posts. I had also been out of the media a whole decade and had found myself furiously taking short courses in a bid to bring me up to speed with the entire Adobe package of Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator, a swift return to writing like a journalist instead of a law academic and a short course on basic PR.

When I first landed my PR post, I was happy to be back on somewhat familiar ground: I got to write, I did some event planning, I did exhibitions (which I liked as it took me away from the office!), I organised photo-shoots and visits for overseas visitors and I discovered I was good at delivering presentations and public speaking – something that one of my former bosses seemed to hate doing. Best of all, I was back to being myself – that is being in the media as a front-line person (i.e. a press officer) instead of being a secretary which I did in order to get my law degree but knew it wasn’t and was never going to be me.

I thrived in that environment until Jack Straw as the then Home Secretary decided to streamline the part of the criminal justice field I was working in. In a single move, the five London areas became one, and I suddenly had two bosses. Not good. From doing a bit of everything and having a fair degree of autonomy to finding myself working for and with two bosses, who appeared to staff outside my department that they couldn’t stand each other but remained professional, was not a situation of my own choosing. For the most part, though, I did enjoy my job and I was good at it, although being the only minority person in the press department sometimes did present its own challenges. I often felt the pressure of what white America would call “a credit to your race” on one hand, and on the other, people generally trying to get their heads around the idea of a well-educated black, British-born woman being a press officer at all, given the general stereotype of a press officer is usually, white, tall, leggy, female and middle-class. I can only qualify on the middle three attributes – I’m in no position to do a Michael Jackson (and nor do I want to) and as my head teacher friend pointed out to me several years ago, I stopped be working-class on entering my old secondary school and learned a middle-class curriculum which subsequently informed my career choices.

I became better at exhibitions and got better at presentations and public speaking – I was able to weave in my legal training with the criminal justice press work I was doing but when I realised that the newcomers to the press team were being groomed in ways that I wasn’t (and that in spite of me becoming an Associate Member of the IPR), I made alternative plans. I became a volunteer for a women’s online publishing magazine and started my path to striking out on my own.

I left my day post in May 2003 to set up my company, The Editor’s Office. For me, it was the result of a twenty-year detour to go independent and, so far, it’s been the best career move I’ve ever made. Running your own business is always going to be a tough call, not least because you do wonder at some point, you are really the person to be doing this or is someone better placed than you to lead the company?

Running The Editor’s Office has in some ways made me even more confident than I ever was in corporate UK, not least because the buck does stop with me. Everything done in the name of the company is down to me. Part of the work I now do to raise my own profile and that of my company is educating small businesses run by ethnic minority owners about the value of public relations and occasionally correcting misconceptions from that audience may have about what is public relations is all about. I have great fun networking (being sociable is a pre-requisite for public relations but so is hard work!) and use nearly opportunity that comes my way to promote The Editor’s Office or my new project – which I hope to launch next Spring – Sister Business UK.

Mind you, I still have some people surprised I do public relations but once they see that I do know what I’m talking about (never mind my experience is underpinned with a law degree), they’re often intrigued by the company name – The Editor’s Office doesn’t immediately spring to mind public relations but as I always point out, every media discipline needs an editor and most editors have an office…. Needless to say, my company name is a great conversation opener- especially as the long-term plans are to create a cross-media company!

When I first started in the media all those years ago, I didn’t expect my career to be so turbulent - and in some ways, it still is and there’s a long way to go before the UK can even begin to compare itself in terms of PR practice to our American cousins who are adept at seeing that diversity as a business case has a major role to play. With that said, being in PR allows me to do several things I do best – network extensively, work autonomously, and in my opinion, write brilliantly. PR’s not a bad career choice after all, and I came to it late.