Tanya Garland, Managing Director, Cool Blue

Dec 1 2009 by Jez Davison, Evening Gazette

Tanya Garland's a cool customer. As chief of one of Teesside's most successful PR and marketing agencies she kept her head when the business was swept up in the Northern Rock collapse. Jez Davison discovers how she turned it around in the second of our series of interviews with Tees Valley finalists in the recent North East Business Executive of the Year Awards.

FOR someone who has built a career from promoting her company and clients, Tanya Garland seems a tad diffident in front of a journalist’s dictaphone.

The MD of Middlesbrough communications agency Cool Blue shuffles awkwardly in her seat.

“I don’t often do these interviews, to be honest. It makes me kind of (she pauses) uncomfortable to be talking about myself.”

The Teessider feels more at home talking shop, how she and her team have built an award-winning, seven-figure turnover business on her own patch working for national brands including Johnson Matthey, Unilever, BNS Telecom Group and furniture retailer Barker & Stonehouse.

She’s at pains to deflect any praise away from herself and towards her 12-strong team, which helped Cool Blue scoop eight awards in the recent regional heats of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ PRide Awards.

“We’ve got a good mix of journalists, designers and specialists in marketing and digital media. Some of the work they turn out is fantastic,” she says.

And together they’ve had to ride some pretty turbulent times. Cool Blue’s former 17-strong portfolio of property-based clients crumbled to zero following the Northern Rock collapse and subsequent recession.

“We lost around 20% of our turnover overnight. I was on holiday reading about Northern Rock - nobody could have predicted what would happen after that.”

She’s honest about her weaknesses, but foresight has to be one of her biggest strengths.

Even before the financial and construction crashes, she had built a protective wall around the firm in the form of a diverse portfolio of clients spanning science, technology, retail, property, education, professional services and regeneration.

While some Leeds and Manchester-based PR agencies were crushed when their predominantly property-based clients savaged their budgets, Cool Blue has been able to emerge from the wreckage.

Tanya estimates that turnover will be 15% up on last year and will grow further on the back of bosses’ growing appetite for colouring their communications strategies with a social and digital media dimension.

What started out in 1999 as a fledgling PR company has evolved into a brand communications agency that’s part of a regional creative and digital powerhouse now worth £1.2bn a year to the North-east economy.

Tanya had already cut her teeth in the industry before going solo, helping former ICI employee Fiona Bell build a six-figure turnover PR business from scratch in the 1990s.

All this while raising her son Cameron as a single parent and having to trade blows with bigger, established North-east PR agencies.