Fulfilling career potential while juggling a busy family life – meet Sales Director Sarah Hamilton

Nine years ago, Sarah joined the People Puzzles Central team to take care of marketing while looking after her three young children.  Since then she has been promoted to Regional Director of the East and recently to Sales Director, all whilst prioritising health and wellbeing.

In what way has People Puzzles helped you to thrive? 

Working at People Puzzles has allowed me to fulfil my potential career whist juggling a busy life and other responsibilities.  I joined 9 years ago, initially as a single mum raising three young children and it offered me full flexibility, only measuring success based on outputs. I never missed school plays, sports days or parents’ evenings and our children and families have always felt a really important part of everyday life of People Puzzles, appearing in Teams calls well before Covid made this the norm! More recently, People Puzzles has supported me to change career and find out I love doing sales – who knew!

Have you had one stand out moment when you have felt lucky to work with People Puzzles?

The Pandemic period was a standout time, as we pulled together as a tight knit team to produce some of the best free content, webinars and free advice for our team, clients and contacts on a skeleton team of just two in the marketing team. It was hard work and I personally worked more than full time throughout (a good distraction from home schooling!) but we rolled out some innovative ways of working and tech and became a super-efficient little team. We created some brilliant content in a very short period whilst learning new skills and adapting to new tech along the way! We also generated our highest level of meetings with new clients and worked with 150 new businesses as a result in the Covid period.

What have you found most meaningful about your work with People Puzzles and their clients? 

This has to be our win:win value of working with growing businesses and making a real difference to the clients we work with by helping them achieve their visions for their business and making a difference to their personal lives whilst allowing our team, who are usually juggling other demands outside of work, with still being able to have fulfilling and rewarding careers. I enjoy the vast variation in different sectors we work with and always with business owners who are passionate about wanting to create the best environments for their team to work with. We always give more back than we charge to a client. My team all really care about the businesses that we work with. We are fully embedded into our clients and really want the best for them to succeed and will always step back when we need to if it’s the best thing for the client. I love watching our clients achieve awards and attract brilliant people through the work that we do with them.

What areas are you passionate about outside of your work? 

Having time for my health and wellbeing and having time to exercise, which People Puzzles has always allowed me to make time for, relaxing, enjoying the Suffolk countryside and spending time with family, three now almost adult children and dogs!

What excites you most about the next 5 years of your career with People Puzzles?  

I hope to watch more businesses see the difference that being able to afford our kind of service makes to their growth. Realising that even in as little as one day per month we can really help business owners manage their people issues more proactively with our support.  I am excited about helping more of our clients build great paces to work, creating cultures that people deserve to work in whilst allowing business owners achieve their dreams faster with our support. I am also excited about growing the increasing network of partners in our ‘SME Ecosystem’ to help the clients we work with get the best trusted advice.