Life/Job Talk

17th April 2025- Job/Life Talk –– Karen Marsh

Mike Twells announced that at 88 he felt it was time for him to retire from Rotary. He said it had been a wonderful time for him, with Maureen and he making many friends through our Club and he’s sure he will miss it, but may make the occasional return to join us.  Naturally, Mike received a very warm round of applause.

So on to one of our newer lady members Karen, who had decided to give us a potted history of her career.  Not the ‘traditional’ path of steady progress, but ‘here, there and everywhere’, finishing as a Customer Success Manager, her current post, working on-line, at home for an American company, appropriately called Smarsh, but no relative!

Born in Cumbria and moving to Newcastle for her University education in French, German and Economics. Then off into Scotland, newly qualified to work for BP as an account assistant. She often had to take helicopter rides out to conduct end of well audits on oil rigs. BP accounting department was taken over by Andersen Consulting and she was sent by them to London because of her language skills.  They next asked her to move to the south of France, where she settled for 18 years, managing the ‘help desk’ until along came the Enron Corporation fraud scandal in 2001, in which Arthur Andersen was involved, which meant that a lot of people had to be made redundant, which in France was a very slow process, at which time Karen had her first child. She decided to try and set up her own business, employing 6 people to assist anglophone start-up businesses, which eventually failed due to excessive social charges, and she declared bankruptcy. She then moved back to the UK, settling close to Harby, where her sister lives.  And entered the world of being a ‘Customer Success Manager’.  This is a very new job function that really came about approximately in 1995.  The role is a ‘post sales’ activity, bridging between the company and the customer.  They deal with big banks and insurance companies, attempting to give support and technical guidance, ensuring the customers know the right people or department to contact with any problems. A battle between trying to keep customers happy and the revenue coming in! This American company have about 20 staff who operate in this Customer Success activity.  Smarsh has around 2,000 employees worldwide. The company provides the archiving of all forms of data for compliance reasons (both written and audio forms of communications) for Banks and Insurance companies globally, as well as some archiving work for the US Government! Their new CEO is trying to get the company onto the stock exchange, as they are in the top 3 companies operating in this field.

Her personal role has recently changed where she used to look after about 60 companies (50k to 500k), now having just two major banks, mainly working with the legal departments on contracts and escalations. Obviously, the fact that some of her activity is with the USA, the ‘time difference’ does have some impact, but she’s at that stage in her career that she is no longer wanting to work very long hours!

Many questions followed from the members, as it is a different technological area compared to what most of us had experienced, but Karen had all the answers. President Gerry proposed the vote of thanks commenting on the fascinating information Karen had presented, “ a whole new world” to most of us, a tough audience, thanking her for her preparations and slide presentation, receiving an appreciative round of applause from members             .              AR