In March 2009 Niki Hutchison, now 45, suffered a ruptured ectopic pregnancy while she was working full time for an ad agency.
This medical emergency was a catalyst for change and altered the path of her future career.
Now Niki is a self-employed marketing strategist and CEO, she runs Enjoy Marketing with a team of five.
Struggle to get a diagnosis – then Blue Light Emergency
The married mum of two from Edinburgh said: “Because I had the coil fitted the pregnancy went undiagnosed and despite heavy bleeding and excruciating pain I was turned away from the Doctor’s surgery and A&E multiple times over two weeks without any answers.
“At no point was I offered a pregnancy test.”
Finally Niki’s fallopian tube ruptured at 4am in the morning, which can cause deadly internal bleeding.
She says she woke up in the worst pain she has ever experienced and told her husband, “I am dying.”
Niki was blue-lighted to hospital where she needed an operation to remove one of her fallopian tubes, depleting her chance of future pregnancy.
Return to Work – with a dismissive boss
She had three months of bed rest after the procedure and was signed off sick. But on her return to work, her boss said her work from the day that she was hospitalised was substandard.
Niki was outraged that she could have died and her boss’s concern was for how her work had suffered in the fortnight that she had been so ill. His response when she explained how ill she had been at the time this piece of work was completed was to say “everybody has off days.”
Calls for Improvements to Healthcare Training
After her physical recovery Niki gave feedback to the Scottish health board that had treated her to ask them to improve their training to recognise the risk of ectopic pregnancy in female patients with abdominal pain and to test for pregnancy in all women with symptoms.
The experience also helped Niki to decide that she would start planning to eventually work for herself in an environment that was flexible and respectful to everyone.
In July 2010 Niki’s second child, a daughter, was born and she never returned to her permanent role. It started her on a journey of entrepreneurship that took her to unexpected places.
Niki said: “I knew I wouldn’t go back after maternity leave. But I didn’t get started on my self-employed business for almost 15 months because I wanted to really soak in every moment with my young family.
“My experience damaged my confidence and I decided not to freelance as a marketing professional immediately.”
Instead Niki used her creative talents to build a completely new business using market research to identify a gap in the market in the Scottish education and children’s activity sectors.
She founded and ran a Hip Hop dance company that grew in popularity thanks to her expert marketing skills to have over 3000 weekly participants.
Their activities were tailored to tick multiple boxes of the Scottish curriculum so that nurseries could hire Niki’s dance company to come and engage the children and allow staff and managers to hit their markers of performance.
Covid affected the business, with all in-person activities being immediately cancelled, resulting in a loss of six of the company’s seven revenue streams overnight and Niki made the decision to close the company.
But her prior success gave Niki the confidence in her ability to market small businesses. She says she learnt transferable skills that help her to coach and guide other business owners.
A new Marketing Venture – and a new Podcast
Niki decided to go back to her marketing roots and Enjoy Marketing, the agency, was born.
Now everyone at Enjoy Marketing is treated with respect and trust.
Niki said: “There are no time sheets, everyone uses their skill set to complete their tasks and the business runs smoothly and collaboratively.
“Growing a business takes graft and resilience. Not everything is going to go right but I help people to see where there is opportunity to create sustainable and enjoyable business growth.”
To support other business owners on their journey Niki has just launched a podcast, “From Overlooked To Fully Booked” the podcast.
Over 12 episodes she shares a framework for entrepreneurs to build strong foundations that will make it easier for them to achieve their business goals.
BRIGHT Framework
Niki’s BRIGHT framework forms the basis of the podcast. BRIGHT stands for Brand, Innovation, Goals, How and Tell.
In each episode Niki tackles one of the six aspects of the framework and is also conducting six guest interviews to help business owners with their own strategy and marketing goals.
Episodes have been released weekly since the series launch on August 9th.
Niki added: “When I launched my first business, off the back of a career spent in brand and marketing strategy, I wasn’t fully aware that I was applying this framework, I simply did what I knew how to do, it was instinctive.
“I scaled that business from one teacher, delivering one class per week, to a team of 40 teaching thousands of children every week, in schools, private nurseries, after-school clubs, holiday camps and at birthday parties all over the country.
“When I launched my marketing business five years later, I was inundated with enquiries from women who had watched me use my brand and marketing skills to grow that dance business and wanted me to teach them how to do the same.
“Nowadays, as well as teaching other entrepreneurs how to become fully booked, I have an agency where we create the strategies and content marketing that will do it for you. My big desire – and the purpose of this new podcast – is for entrepreneurs to have the confidence to do things their own way in business and to become fully booked.
“To never have to work for a boss so completely lacking in compassion.
“To be financially self-reliant and able to take decisive action, safe in the knowledge that if anything doesn’t work out, they have the resources, support and self-belief to try again.”
