Esther Dawson of Ridgeview Wine Estate also scoops award for Best External PA Network with colleague Emily Darnell of PVL UK Ltd at the Manchester PA Awards
In their own words Emily and Esther take over the story…
As you may remember we were lucky enough to attend The Manchester PA Awards on Wednesday evening to help celebrate the business assistant community. These awards are recognised as the biggest awards in the UK for PAs, EAs & VAs and include a category called Best External Network to recognise the other regional networks around the country.
We’d been anonymously nominated and we travelled to Manchester in September to meet Michaela Wakeman (EA to Gary Neville) & Victoria Wratten (Founder of EPAA) who were judging the Best External PA Network category. We were pleased with how our interview went but knew that we’d be up against some very strong competition!
We were so chuffed when it was announced that we were shortlisted for the final six, up against other networks including Birmingham, Essex, Belfast, Bucks/Berks/Oxford, and Chester/North Wales. We had a fantastic evening at the Lancashire County Cricket Ground to celebrate our amazing community of assistants with over 720 people in attendance! It was so interesting to meet with the other networks, find out how they are organised, get tips & hints and share ideas.
We were so chuffed (but mainly shocked!) to be announced as winners and to have already received so many messages of congratulations via LinkedIn & Twitter. It was lovely to meet Gethin Jones as well!
We have a lot of people to thank and these must include our CEOs, Tamara Roberts & Nick Broom who supported our idea of setting-up the network without hesitation four years ago & continue to do so.
But our biggest thanks must of course go to you though, who support us by attending our events, offering your time and being enthusiastic about being part of our network. We’ve grown from just being Mid Sussex PAs in July 2015 to now being the Sussex PA Network, with PAs attending from London, Surrey, Kent & Hampshire. Our last event at Malmaison, where we heard from Maarten Hoffmann about the new Dynamic business magazine was a huge success. We know everyone who attended was chuffed with receiving a copy the day before it’s official launch.
We spent about 12 hours travelling together over the last couple of days and talked about our ideas for 2020, so please do watch-out for those!
Emily Darnell, Executive Assistant to Nick Broom, CEO at PVL UK Limited
Esther Dawson, Executive Assistant to Tamara Roberts, CEO at Ridgeview Wine Estate