What does a Corporate and Technology practice chief at a top London PR agency do with his day?

Chris Cartwright is the chair of Burson Marsteller’s corporate, issues and technology practice in London and also chairs the technology practice across Europe, Middle East and Africa

My day

6.30am: Wake to the dulcet tones of our two-year-old daughter, Orla, who is far more efficient at getting me up than an alarm clock. Dress and feed her and check my email – as Burson Marsteller is a global company, I usually have several mails from colleagues around the world and respond to them first thing.

8.45am: Get into our office in central London and meet with my directors who cover several areas off within my practice – from corporate responsibility, to crisis communications to energy, or technology – just to get up to speed on how each of them is building their business. Each is very focused, not only on business development, but also on creating products and services that will help our clients be successful. We’ve just ‘productised’ an offering around leadership communications training for CEOs – preparing them for communicating with the media, internal audiences, customers and investors, so the talk today is how we market this to our clients and prospects.

10.00am: Meeting with the London leadership team where we focus on our numbers (looking reasonably healthy) and operational strategy. The team spans specialists in healthcare PR, consumer PR, digital and public affairs as well as my area, corporate and technology, but we pride ourselves on taking an integrated approach to our client work, so we usually create the best team for the job, made up of people from across our practice areas.

11.00am: Meeting with a client which wants to create customer-focused messaging for its public sector sales teams but also wants our advice on crisis scenario planning after a restructure.

1.00pm: Lunch meeting with our founder, Harold Burson, who is in town for a week. He still plays an active role in our business despite being in his 80s – and he’s keen to get to know staff in all of B-M’s offices around the world – a tall order as we now have nearly 2,000 staff in over 70 offices around the world.

2.00pm: Conference call with the managing directors of our Tokyo and New York offices to plan a major global initiative for an electronics client. For my Tokyo colleague especially this is a late night call, I am sure it will be my turn next for an anti-social conference call!

4.00pm: Meet with a team planning activity at the Business Week Leadership Forum – we have a partnership with Business Week and help it to secure C-level speakers for this exclusive executive forum as well as organising the media activity at the event.

5.00pm: Hold a 30-minute call with the technology practice leaders across Europe. We have some 300 people in the regional practice, and around 20 leaders, plus 60 per cent of our tech business is pan-European, so the call is a useful catch up on the sector and on business growth.

6.00pm: Leave the office for a quick drink with a journalist who has just moved beats on one of the national newspapers.

7.30pm: Home in time to put the little un to bed!