By Jenny Clarke, Associate

As part of our business innovation training programme, sponsored by the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, DigiKind have invited inspirational businesses to join us for Breakfast Briefings to share their lessons learned. This week, DigiKind’s Director and Co-Founder, Kathy Kyle Bonomini spoke to the very impressive and multi-award winning entrepreneur, Christine MacKay.

Christine is CEO and Founder of Salamandra.UK, animation studios and ‘visual problem solvers’ to the business world. She and her brilliant company have an array of awards to her name – picking up 20 awards in 2020 alone. As well as accolades for their animation and graphics work from the likes of the Cardiff Animation Festival, the Orlando International Film Festival and the LA Independent Shorts Awards, she has also been awarded for her talents in leadership. Christine has won Gold for Best Business Woman in Business Services and Silver for Best Boss in a prestigious competition which seeks to find the very best female business talent from across the UK.

She’s one of Small Business Britain’s 100 inspiring female entrepreneurs, a small biz 100, a mentor, an author, and award winning entrepreneur and force of nature!

I caught up with the playback of Christine’s talk and enjoyed hearing her perspective on running a super successful and happy business.

What are Christine’s key points for success?  

  1. Build and nurture the team. Christine believes in having a happy workplace and ensures Salamandra is a great place to be, and for her it’s all about having the right people. Her team at Salamandra are bright and funny and make a great team. Together they have developed a set of ‘core values’ which they aim to live each day, and they also use these to ensure new employees are aligned. The team make work fun by having lunch and learn sessions, coffee catch-ups and work yoga sessions, and above all, have an ethos of being ‘frictionless’ by keeping communication open.

  2. Love your work. As Christine points out running a business is a 24/7 job, you never switch off. But if you love what you do it will be like having a favourite hobby.

  3. Delight clients at every touch point. Christine has an ethos that human connections are the most important thing and Salamandra always puts people at the centre of what they do. Instead of ‘B2B’ her team always think of ‘H2H’ instead.

Top tips on using animation in business

  1. Images are irresistible and animations even more so. Your eye always jumps to any image on the page. Use an image in your email sign off for top impact.

  2. The perfect length for animated videos for social media is 60-90 seconds long. Although if something is educational it can be as long as it needs to be.

  3. There’s a huge array of animation types to choose from: 2D, 3D, augmented reality, virtual reality, stop motion and can be mixed up with live film footage, to suit your project’s needs and brand style.

This is what our attendees had to say about Christine’s talk:

“I wanted to work for the guest speaker! She was fun! Well done, Kathy, on another brilliant choice!”

“More of this!”

“Hi had a really good experience for my first time at a breakfast briefing. Came away with a few tips!”

Be sure to check out Salamandra.UK and Christine’s book Destination Animation: How smart marketeers convey complex messages memorably

This Wednesday at 10am, we are welcoming the amazing Chef Ruchita Green, Masala Masters to our breakfast briefings. You can RSVP here.