As Co-Owner and Marketing Director at the award-winning digital agency First Internet, Julaine Speight has over 18 years of experience delivering tailored digital marketing solutions for national and international clients.
She specialises in developing innovative digital strategies across SEO, social media, and integrated marketing to enhance brand visibility and drive business growth.
Julaine has worked with leading brands, including PZ Cussons and Motor Fuel Group, creating impactful strategies tailored to their business objectives. Passionate about digital innovation, she is committed to building strong client relationships and helping organisations navigate the ever-evolving digital landscape.
As Marketing Director and co-owner of First Internet, I’m often asked what it’s like to be a woman running a digital agency.
It usually comes up after an award win, during a panel discussion, or around International Women’s Day. The honest answer is that it’s probably not the answer people expect.
There are countless articles about being a woman in business.
Some tell us to lean in. Others tell us to find our voice, own the room or fake confidence until it becomes real. While there are nuggets of truth in all of them, I’ve often found myself thinking they’re missing the point. That’s because I’ve never really suffered from imposter syndrome, and I actually hate the phrase as EVERYBODY uses it on LinkedIn (oooo, don’t get me started). I know that’s an unfashionable thing to admit these days.
That’s not to dismiss people who genuinely experience it, because many do. It simply isn’t something I’ve recognised in myself. I’ve never lain awake wondering whether I deserved my seat at the table. My doubts have tended to be about something else entirely.
Whether people around the table had already decided I didn’t. There’s a subtle but important distinction.
My career certainly wasn’t planned
When I was eleven, my mum died.
Looking back, it’s impossible to separate that experience from the person I became. It taught me resilience long before I understood what resilience was and gave me a fairly pragmatic view of life’s ups and downs.
My dad was a mechanic by trade who went on to build an incredibly successful business. Growing up around that environment probably planted the first seeds of entrepreneurship, although I certainly didn’t realise it at the time.
I went to an all-girls school before going to Oxford University. (There you are… I’ve done the obligatory Oxford name drop.)
What I didn’t imagine was that I’d end up owning a digital agency, especially when everyone else from university was either becoming a management consultant or a lawyer. Literally, everyone.
I actually started my career in PR before quickly finding myself drawn into digital marketing. I joined First Internet, left to start my own agency, eventually sold my share, and then, in one of those strange full-circle moments life occasionally throws at you, First Internet’s founder Stephen invited me back as a director.
Stephen had a remarkable ability to spot potential in people long before they saw it in themselves. Looking back, that’s something we’ve consciously tried to preserve as the business has evolved.
Following Stephen’s passing, three of us completed a management buyout in 2019. It was a huge responsibility. We weren’t just buying a business; we were becoming custodians of something he’d spent over twenty years building.
Today, First Internet is in a very different place. Since the management buyout we’ve rebranded the business, achieved record revenues and profits, won national and European awards and built a team I’m incredibly proud of. None of that happened because we followed someone else’s playbook. It happened because we kept learning, challenging ourselves and backing good people.
People often look at career journeys as though they’re carefully mapped out. Mine looks more like organised chaos.
Nobody is going to hand you your career
One piece of research I keep coming back to comes from Oxford University’s Saïd Business School (can’t help myself can I), which studied women who had reached CEO positions.
Their conclusion wasn’t that these women were necessarily the loudest, the most confident or the most naturally charismatic. Instead, they shared a different set of characteristics. They didn’t wait to be asked, they actively owned their careers, they sought stretch assignments, they played the long game and developed leadership styles that were authentic to them.
That struck a chord because, looking back, that’s exactly how my own career evolved. Nobody handed me a blueprint. Every opportunity came from putting my hand up, saying yes to projects that stretched me beyond my comfort zone, learning on the job and occasionally taking risks that looked slightly mad at the time. Some worked spectacularly well, while others… not so much.
But every one of them taught me something.
The balancing act women still seem expected to perform
Now, to accurately represent the two sides of me, let’s move from Oxford research to Barbie. The Barbie monologue went viral because it articulated something many women recognised immediately. It wasn’t really about Barbie at all.
It was about contradiction. Be ambitious, but don’t be intimidating. Be confident, but don’t be arrogant. Be empathetic, but don’t be emotional. Be decisive, but don’t be bossy.
Over the years I’ve occasionally been described as “quite direct”. It’s rarely intended as a compliment. Sometimes it’s fair. I can be direct. Running a business often requires you to be. But I’ve also found myself wondering whether the exact same behaviour from a man would simply be described as decisive, commercial or strong.
Either way, it’s made me far more conscious of how easily leadership can be judged through different lenses. The irony is that being direct doesn’t make difficult conversations any easier.
I’ve walked out of meetings and cried in the car afterwards out of sheer frustration. Not because I doubted the decisions I’d made, but because I cared deeply about getting the right outcome and sometimes felt I hadn’t managed to get people to hear what I was actually trying to say.
Leadership isn’t about becoming emotionless. It’s about carrying on anyway.
The best leaders don’t try to be someone else
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that authenticity scales far better than imitation.
For years there seemed to be an unspoken expectation that women in leadership either had to become “one of the lads” or lean heavily into stereotypically female qualities. Neither ever felt particularly comfortable to me.
I’ve learned that empathy and decisiveness aren’t opposites. In fact, the best leaders usually possess both.
At First Internet, two of our three owners are women, although women currently make up around a third of the wider team. That contrast matters because representation isn’t always neat or perfectly balanced at every level. What matters is creating an environment where people have the opportunity to progress, where ideas carry more weight than job titles, and where leadership isn’t expected to fit a particular mould.
We don’t always get everything right, no business does, but we’ve consciously tried to build a culture where curiosity, accountability and kindness matter just as much as technical ability. I don’t think that’s made us a better place to work simply because it’s the right thing to do. I think it’s made us a better business.
Different perspectives lead to better conversations, better decisions and, ultimately, better work for our clients.
Playing the long game
Looking back over the last twenty years, there isn’t one defining moment that made my career. There wasn’t one promotion, one brilliant idea or one life-changing meeting. It’s been made up of hundreds of small decisions: choosing to keep learning, putting my hand up, taking risks, backing myself, admitting when I’m wrong and getting back up after setbacks.
The Oxford research ends with advice I’d happily pass on myself: don’t wait to be asked, own your career, play the long game and develop a leadership style that’s uniquely yours. I’d add just one more thing. Stop worrying so much about fitting someone else’s idea of what a leader looks like.
Looking back, I don’t think the biggest lesson I’ve learned is about being a woman in business. It’s about leadership.
The best leaders I’ve worked with, men and women, have shared remarkably similar qualities. They’re curious. They make difficult decisions. They admit when they’re wrong. They keep learning. Most importantly, they create opportunities for other people to succeed. That’s certainly the kind of business we’re trying to continue building at First Internet.
When three of us bought the agency in 2019, we inherited a business with a history and an even bigger responsibility. Since then, we’ve transformed the brand, achieved record financial performance and won more awards than I ever imagined we’d be celebrating. I don’t mention that to boast, although I do do that; I mention it because leadership advice is easy to write about. It’s much harder to put into practice over years of running a business.
I’ve spent far less time questioning whether I was good enough than I have wondering whether I’d be given the chance to prove it. Thankfully, over time, your work tends to speak louder than perception. Perceptions change and consistently good work has a habit of doing that, which is a much more satisfying way to be heard.
