A Day in the Life of our Operations Director
Operations Director Jane Rowland describes a day in her life at Troubador:
I’ve been at Troubador for over twenty years. I started out freelancing when I left university, helping out on publishing projects as needed while I also worked in the radio industry (writing and producing adverts for a variety of radio stations). Eventually, I picked publishing over the radio, and moved into a full-time position at Troubador, looking after academic books and journals. This does mean that over the years I’ve actually worked in most departments – I used to manage the company’s academic journal programme, before it was sold to another publisher, coordinating and typesetting each issue and handling the peer review process, before moving over to book production for the mainstream academic series. I’ve led the marketing team as Marketing Manager and also worked in the warehouse. Interestingly, the only department I’ve not worked in is Digital – ebooks and audiobooks – which came online well after I’d stopped department-hopping and settled in as a Company Director.
My day-to-day role varies enormously – as Operations Director I look after the financial side of things, HR and all regulatory and company admin, and the marketing and distribution teams report directly to me. I do a lot of work with Heads of Department across the company, to support them in managing their own teams – sometimes advising, sometimes being more hands-on. At busy times, especially the lead-up to Christmas I’ll often be in the warehouse helping to pick/pack and get books out of the door to customers – both myself and fellow director Jeremy are there to help in any way when needed.
This year has thrown up many new challenges, which has meant a change to how we, and others, work. We’ve had the majority of staff at home for chunks of the year – but have managed to keep the offices and warehouse open to keep the books coming in – and going out. The admin surrounding Covid-19 from a business perspective has been huge – and continually changing – and trying to look ahead, adapt and keep the staff and customers safe and happy has been (and remains) a priority – taking up a large part of my administrative time. It’s been a year unlike anything else we have seen. I never thought we’d be running a publishing company in a world where bookshops closed or where we’d be unable to run our own events and workshops.
Day-to-day it’s a mixture of important admin and strategic work, then responding to what the staff, company or customer needs are – this is actually one of my favourite parts of the job and the one that I can never predict. The team here is great and I love working alongside them – even if that is not necessarily in the same space at the moment. Over the years we’ve tried to streamline the numbers of meetings we hold internally to those that are essential. This means that Thursdays are a senior team meeting and the monthly Huddle to bring all staff together for inhouse business – and to award the customer and company awards for that month. The other big meeting is a monthly planning meeting with all departments to look at the books that have publication dates falling within the next two months, books just published and discussions on the books that have just been signed up.
I don’t really have a typical week – normal day-to-day often gives way to special projects that I can really get my teeth into – recently I was writing a chapter for the Writers’ & Artists Guide to Self-Publishing about book production, for example. This week I’ve been doing the graphics and follow-up work on the newsletters for our Christmas reads promotions and Black Friday offers.
I’ve always been really interested in the data management and metadata side of publishing and moved us over to Onix data some years ago, resulting in the recognition we now get for the data with our BIC Basic Award… There’s always more to do and learn on this side. I also run in-house training on this topic.
I am an organiser – so I am always running lists and schedules and tend to be thinking several steps ahead – we’ve got a strategic plan that I am working on for this financial year, so each month we have projects and tasks to bring online, further developing the company, which is both exciting and means that nothing is ever dull!
