The Saga years. Fifty people, £2m yearly budget to manage, and the best team I'd ever run. So far.

Saga gave me one of the UK's largest in-house creative studios and, reasonably enough, asked me to make it work. Fifty people, a £2m budget, integrated campaigns across travel and financial services, and a fairly pointed brief: beat the external agencies on creativity, speed and value.

Three years later we had. We brought 75% of our external studio work back in-house, which is the sort of number that makes a CFO sit up, and introduced the studio's first proper workflow and content management systems. I led Saga's strategic shift into digital, social and video content, rebuilt the operation around something more agile than a traditional studio, and put training programmes and performance frameworks in place that genuinely raised the standard of the work. None of which would have mattered without the team, which by the end was one of the best I've ever worked with.

Day-to-day, I looked after creative direction on everything the studio produced (concept through to final delivery), managed the budget and the resourcing, mentored the designers, copywriters and content creators, and handled the supplier relationships, the workflow, and most of the difficult conversations. It was strategic and commercial in equal measure, and it required the kind of leadership people actually want to follow rather than the kind they have to.

So what did the work actually look like? Well. The studio put out at least ten pieces a week, which is the kind of sentence that sounds manageable until you remember that ‘a piece’ could mean anything from a direct mail leaflet to a hundred-page travel brochure to a full-page ad in the Daily Telegraph. I was art directing photo shoots, directing video shoots, overseeing print production across every format Saga could throw at us, and running above-the-line campaigns in national newspapers, magazines and on TV. Below is a tiny selection. I've spared you the other several thousand.