The Journey from Marketing Graduate to Managing Director

An interview with Charlie Nettle, by our Associate Director Chris Kent

I recently met up with Charlie Nettle (Group Managing Director of AV Dawson) at his  Teesside headquarters. Our longstanding connection through the North East marketing network, particularly via the North East Marketing Awards (sponsored by Nigel Wright Group), provided a unique opportunity to delve into Charlie’s career path. His story stands out as an achievement worth celebrating, as such trajectories are less common for marketers in the region.

Marketers often aspire to reach the pinnacle of their field, but not necessarily the highest overall position within an organisation. The perception sometimes lingers that marketers might be overlooked for roles like Managing Director or Chief Executive, with finance or sales leaders often being favoured. Charlie’s journey defies this stereotype, demonstrating that marketers can indeed ascend to top leadership positions.

Charlie secured a marketing role swiftly after graduating and progressed into a management role with budgetary responsibility. After a few years, he made the decision to relocate to the North East when he met his now wife, which meant taking a more junior role and it took a couple of years to get his career motoring again.

Building a broader skillset 

Despite taking a step back job title wise, Charlie began building his broader skill set with out of work activities. He became a volunteer for the Samaritans and also a special constable for the Cleveland Police, both of which Charlie believes provided him with fantastic life skills that have served him well in his career, enabling him to adjust his style to suit his audience.

When Charlie joined the North East Chamber of Commerce in a relatively junior role in 2004, he saw this as a long term move, which would provide him with the opportunity to really  progress his career. He could have taken a higher paid, more senior role elsewhere, but was more focused on building the foundations for long-term career success rather than making a more hasty decision, simply for a job title or a salary. Charlie’s skills and abilities enabled him to rapidly progress up the hierarchy and to achieve the position of Head of Marketing.

Charlie harboured the ambition of becoming a Marketing Director, which ultimately he wasn’t able to achieve with the Chamber, but his mindset and focus on building his skills and experience, as well as taking feedback, during his 11 years with the organisation, were critical to him being able to achieve this further down the line.

Whilst progressing up the ranks Charlie continued his involvement in taking on projects outside of his core remit. In 2010 he took on a non-executive board position with a local charity, Middlesbrough & Stockton Mind, a role he held for over 13 years.

This was followed in 2014, by him taking on the Chair role for the North East Regional Board of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM). This position has enabled him to be at the forefront of developments in the region’s marketing community and to build up a vast network of contacts across industry sectors.

When Charlie was interviewed for a Director role at the Chamber, he received some feedback around not having enough gravitas for the position at that time. Feedback like that can be tough to take, but with the benefit of hindsight, Charlie acknowledges that he may not have been ready for the role at the time and said he sees the importance of viewing any feedback as a gift and it probably helped him in the long run.

Charlie was involved in some major projects with the Chamber, finishing his time there with taking the organisation through a full rebrand and leading the 200th anniversary celebration programme. This involved him leading on selling significant 5 figure sponsorship packages to some of the largest organisations in the North East (the first time Charlie had been involved in direct sales).

He had developed a yearning to move into the B2B industrial sector as his career was progressing and the opportunity materialised in late 2015 with AV Dawson. As a well networked individual through his Chamber and CIM roles, Gary Dawson, the owner of AV Dawson, had asked him for some advice around marketing recruitment for the organisation. Without any agenda from either side, the discussion progressed to Charlie being the individual that AV Dawson actually needed and the two of them thrashed out a Marketing and Business Development remit, which Charlie commenced in December 2015

Director role

This move took Charlie into a hybrid role between marketing and sales. With his engaging and intelligent personality, he was successful in bringing in a number of large commercial deals, whilst developing the marketing and commercial functions. Charlie progressed into a Head of Commercial and Marketing role in 2017, after which, he continued to perform extremely strongly. A four year project to create a full Group structure with subsidiary companies commenced in 2019, and it was at this point Charlie was promoted to the role of Commercial and Marketing Director, realising his ultimate career objective. 

The Group structure continued to progress, including the creation of the Port of Middlesbrough brand in 2020. Having achieved his ambition of becoming a Marketing Director, the prospect of becoming a Managing Director hadn’t particularly been on Charlie’s agenda. With the Group strategy and succession planning in mind, Gary approached Charlie around taking on a Group MD Designate role, which he commenced in January 2023.

He hadn’t sought out this conversation and had to consider whether he wanted to move upwards and away from marketing and from commercial. He also said that he felt honoured, excited and cautious all at the same time, and had to think long and hard about whether he thought that he could actually deliver in that level of role. Gary had seen the development in Charlie since he started with the Company and also the huge value that he had brought to the business in many guises (not simply commercial revenue generation). With the final part of the Group structure completed in October 2023 with the Port of Middlesbrough becoming a distinct legal entity, Charlie’s role of Group Managing Director was made permanent and Gary moved into the role of Chair.

Summary

As part of writing this article I asked Gary for his summary thoughts on Charlie and he provided the following insights:

“I guess we saw the potential in each other.”

“Brand building was clearly in his DNA and he raised our profile in his first year, with several industry award wins, locally and nationally. We were no longer the best kept secret in Teesside!”

“Marketers have to be able to ‘read the room’ and Charlie is almost chameleon like in that respect, but at the same time never compromises his integrity. It’s this ability to learn and adapt that has helped Charlie progress rapidly through the ranks at AV Dawson.”

“At all times he gains the trust of colleagues and clients, takes his team with him on the journey, and shares with them the credit from wins and successes.”

Charlie and I reflected on the discussion and concluded our meeting by summarising the key themes that have enabled him to progress from marketing graduate to Group Managing Director:

• A thirst for learning in and out of work, and beyond the remit of your role.
• Striving for involvement in major projects throughout your career.
• Involvement in outside of work networking groups, projects, committees, skill set building roles etc.
• A drive for networking and building your network despite being an introvert.
• Willingness to consider sideways moves to achieve the longer term outcome.
• Gaining experience in different organisations and different sectors, whilst demonstrating loyalty to employers. Make sure you see the job through before departing and never burn your bridges.
• Getting closer to the customer to build and broaden your knowledge, understanding and experience.
• Showing willingness to help others where you can.

We have phenomenal marketing talent in the region and both Charlie and I hope that this article will help to boost the confidence amongst the marketing community, that there is no reason that marketers can’t progress to MD roles.

Career Timeline

2015 – To Date
AV Dawson
Head of Marketing & Business Development to Commercial & Marketing Director to Group MD

2004 – 2015
North East Chamber of Commerce
Commercial Services Operations Manager to Head of Marketing

2003 – 2004
Relocation to North East
Interim / stop gap roles

2000 – 2003
Tektra
Graduate to Marketing Manager