Spotlight On… Sophie
Meet Sophie Pentony, our foraging, babysitter meerkat. As an awesome cook, Sophie can rustle up pretty much anything simply by hunting through a few kitchen cupboards. Technically, we know this makes her a hunter meerkat, but her warm and kind nature also makes her a natural babysitter. Colleagues, clients or family – Sophie loves to keep everyone happy.
As Cosy Meerkat’s Chief of Content and Client Experience, Sophie’s job is two-pronged: she can write you an elevator pitch or an onboarding handbook while also project-managing all the other internal comms work your company needs. Sophie is the kind of women who gets things done. Practical, efficient, with a ‘no fluff’ attitude to both her storytelling and project management, she keeps everyone organised and on track.
There are only two things that are constant in Sophie’s typical day: she will always find time to fit in a walk and she brings her brekkie to work. Like every busy working mum Sophie’s mornings are a hectic round of last-minute spelling learning, book reading and cajoling of the kids into getting dressed and out the door, so sitting down at her desk is her first opportunity to breathe. What she does next always varies. She could be writing a speech for a leader, setting up an Eventbrite page for a client’s company conference or brainstorming for a change campaign, what she loves is that she’s always learning and that it’s definitely never dull.
The most common problem she fixes for clients is something seen by many in internal comms as a big communications bottleneck: the reluctant line manager. Often great at their main job, many aren’t natural born communicators. But with a little help and support, that can change. You can often hear Sophie on the phone talking about how training line managers will transform what employees think of a company’s overall internal comms.
Her favourite part of the job is a big, chunky change campaign. From the plotting and pitching to the communication and execution, Sophie finds getting stuck in energising. She loves working with the in-house team, thinking about the different audiences, where they sit in the business and how they like or want to be communicated with; she loves the creativity and fun that can be had developing a campaign through words and pictures and she loves the challenge of engaging people and trying to get them onside, because, let’s face it, while everybody loves transformation, nobody loves change.
Her most interesting job before working with Cosy Meerkat was facilitating a big move from an old doctor’s surgery to a swanky new building. Why a recruitment agency thought a 22-year-old fresh out of university would be capable of this, she has no idea. Honest enough to admit she only did an okay job (all she really wanted to do at that age was party and cook!) she does credit it with being where she developed her love of chaos. Because Sophie thrives on stress. She might flap (she does love a bit of drama), but secretly she knows a stressful job is also the most rewarding.
