How I Got Here: HerCanberra Founder, Amanda Whitley
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Admit it, we’ve all been there—stalking social media and LinkedIn profiles, trying desperately to figure out how the hell someone got their dream job.
It seems impossible and yet there they are, living out your career fantasy (minus the itchy business suit). It might seem hard to believe, but once upon a time, they were also fantasising about their future career, and with some hard work, they made it.
Welcome to How I Got Here, HerCanberra’s series that reveals everything you wanted to know about the secrets of career success. This week we meet HerCanberra Founder, Amanda Whitley.
Existential crisis time: Who are you and what do you do?
That’s a big question. In a work sense, I’m the founder and Editor-in-Chief of HerCanberra and Head of Communications for our parent business, Supercurious.
Bigger picture? I’m a Zumba-obsessed country girl-turned-Canberra-lover, partner to a marathon-running management consultant, mum to two wonderfully warm-hearted teen girls, and cat mum to a very naughty Burmese cat who thinks he’s a dog.
Let’s go back to when you were a kid, have you always dreamed of working in this industry?
Growing up in the tiny town of Tarcutta, I was always writing – mostly poetry. I had my first poem published in The Daily Advertiser – a fraught meditation on fractured friendships – when I was 10. I was a deep-feeling kid (now a deep-feeling adult).
I “published’ my first magazine, called Wombat – a cracking read – when I was 11. It had a print run of one and a readership of about 20 kids from Tarcutta Public School…I was a media mogul in my own backyard. But, looking back, it was an early sign of what my future held.
From teen dreams of being a journalist, it took until university for me to realise that my need for variety (some would call it ‘shiny thing’ syndrome) and a high school ‘career’ spent organising fundraising events, speaking as school captain, working on the school magazine, etc. was better suited to PR, but I was still drawn to the world of print.
I pursued my dream of working in women’s magazines – all the way to Sydney, where I spent all my uni holidays working in the publicity department of Australian Consolidated Press (ACP), home to Dolly, Cleo, Gourmet Traveller and more.
I was sure working in media was my future. Turns out I was right, but it took about 20 years to eventually get there!
Tell us about when you were first starting out, what set a fire in your belly to get here and how did you do it?
I have always been driven – I don’t know where it came from (my parents were always gently encouraging but they never had to nag me to do things). Since I was a child I have always been determined to be the best I could be – I’m never satisfied with ‘just doing enough’.
After university, I desperately wanted to work in magazines with ACP but jobs in the industry were tightly held and usually went to people with contacts (my dad worked on the RTA and my mum was a part-time library assistant, so…). So I went for the next best thing – my first job was with a small boutique publicity firm in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs that handled accounts for Maybelline, Yardley, Ray Ban, Redken and a few others. I was living the dream! And I hated every minute of it. Turns out the Sydney fashion and beauty industry wasn’t really a great fit for a country girl who didn’t know how to pronounce Versace.
In 1995, life threw its first major curve ball at me in the form of my father’s diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis. He was just 43 and staring down life in a nursing home. I felt a responsibility to be around my family as they dealt with this huge shock, so I moved from Sydney back to the Riverina to live in Griffith, about an hour from my teen hometown of Narrandera.
I started working as a Communication Assistant with a little organisation called Riverina Citrus Marketing – surprisingly, I had more scope to flex my skills here than I had ever had in my city role. My advice was appreciated, and I was given great opportunities to grow and develop. It turned out to a pivotal point in my career and was a great lesson that career progression doesn’t always need to be a linear journey – sometimes it’s the detours you take that teach you the most.
What was your biggest break?
That job with Riverina Citrus Marketing. After about a year, my boss departed suddenly, and the Management Board asked if I wouldn’t mind ‘looking after things for a while’. And so, at the age of 22, I found myself Executive Officer of an organisation and managing four staff, most of them older than me. My learning curve was huge.
As background, the organisation was funded by a levy administered under the Marketing of Primary Products Act – for each tonne of oranges that was produced, $3 came to our organisation. I needed to keep the 450 citrus growers who essentially paid for my job – most of them middle-aged men – happy. I had to stand up in front of them at meetings twice a month and sound like I knew what I was talking about. I suddenly found myself as a representative on a national export marketing forum. I frequently thought to myself ‘what on earth am I doing here?’ – but I must have been doing something right, because they never did advertise for a replacement, and I did that job until I resigned four years later, ready for another challenge.
I never…NEVER…imagined that I would do a job like that. Wasn’t even on my radar. But it was, without a doubt, the best learning experience of my career.
At the end of those four years, I had lobbied politicians, met with the Deputy PM, hosted food media and celebrity chefs to the region, run national advertising campaigns, and appeared regularly on local television news and on live radio. I could write press releases, address hostile crowds of hundreds, I’d travelled to South Africa to study citrus marketing techniques, I could tell you the difference between drip irrigation and microjet (and can still sound reasonably intelligent talking about mealybug and fruit fly).
That experience taught me so much—most importantly, it taught me resilience.
How did you go from citrus to starting HerCanberra?
Ok, sit back and relax – it’s not a story I can answer in a paragraph (even this is a very abbreviated version!). I never set out to be an entrepreneur – starting HerCanberra was not about me being a savvy businesswoman and doing a gap analysis or seeing an opportunity to build a media empire.
In 2008, I was 25 weeks pregnant and happily working as a public service Communications Director when I found myself admitted to hospital on bedrest, which is where I stayed for the next six weeks, until I went into labour. Our youngest daughter Sophia was born at 30 weeks and one day, weighing just 1.4kg and came home 10 weeks later with Chronic Lung Disease. Essentially, what would have been a cold for any other baby meant almost certain hospital, oxygen and drugs for her. Childcare was not an option for at least her first two years.
Fast forward a couple of years – through resigning from my role, being quite lonely, a voluntary stint as Mamamia’s first moderator, Sophia getting stronger – and I started to re-engage with the world. And I found I was continually hitting a brick wall when it came to online intelligence about our city. Where were the kid-friendly places to eat? What great things were there to do this weekend? Where could I meet new people? All the kinds of questions that you have about the city you live in and usually rely on word of mouth to find out. I thought ‘maybe I should make something’.
So I had an idea. And after letting it sit inside my head for a few months, and turning it around, and waiting to see if it went away (because if I had a dollar for every idea I had, I would be retired on Lake Como right now), I let it out and wrote a pretty crappy business plan. Then I took my husband to dinner, presented him with this piece of paper, and he said, ‘I think it’s a great idea. You should do it.’ And so I did.
Fun fact: HerCanberra was nearly called ‘Eve’ (first woman and all that), but my husband – thinking of the adult shop – said, ‘nah, too Fyshwick’. So, in January 2011, I put HerCanberra out to the world. The rest, as they say, is history.
Recall a time when you wanted to chuck it all in; what did you tell yourself when it got too hard?
HerCanberra was not an immediate success. I knew nothing about running a business and I worked two jobs for nearly three years so that I could build the site up while still paying the bills. While raising two small girls and trying to be the best, most-present mum I could be. They were hard years.
I remember hearing gold medal-winning winter Olympian Alisa Camplin speak at a Business Chicks event, where she shared her extraordinary journey, and something she said really resonated with me. She talked about working three jobs and crying herself to sleep every night and, to paraphrase, said ‘it’s what you do during the quiet years…the years when no one is watching, and no one cares, that will define you as a business person.’ It gave me goosebumps, and I have repeated that sentiment to other young businesswomen many times since.
Because the truth is that building a business is really, really hard work. You work long hours; sometimes – like me – you work another job while building it up, and it can take a couple of years before the money starts to come in. Some days the last thing you want to do is work…but you do…because if you don’t, you’re only letting yourself down. But if you keep up the effort, keep plugging away every single day, and you maintain the passion that sparked the idea in the first place, one day you will get there. And it will be worth it.
Because this ‘thing’ that consumes your life is something that you made. You. And when you see it touching other people and making a difference – no matter how small – then that’s reward enough.
And so that was what sustained me. And, in time – supported by an amazing team of voluntary contributors – it all started to happen.
In September 2013, I went full time on the business, and things kinda exploded. We grew really fast over the next five years and probably over-extended in terms of staff at about the same time as the rise of programmatic advertising stripped away a significant portion of our revenue. Despite digital and social media’s glamorous image, it is incredibly hard to monetise – I had to strip back some of the things we did and let some people go, and I didn’t know if I wanted to do it anymore.
But, without a doubt, COVID was nearly the nail in the coffin. I won’t rehash it all here – you can read the story for the details – but it saw me leave the business for a year to save the business, and head up the ACT Government’s COVID web and social comms. It was…tough.
What I told myself during all the hard times – work and personal – was just to focus on getting through it. To put one foot in front of the other. And I’m still standing.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
“If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you”.
What is it about your industry that you love and what makes you want to pull your hair out?
Love: That it’s everchanging – I love that every day is different.
Makes me want to pull my hair out: That’s it’s everchanging 🤣.
The media landscape has transformed in the last 10-15 years and it can be exhausting staying up to date with the latest developments and the bloody algorithm. Content creators these days don’t just need to know how to write, they need to know how to photograph, create videos, write snappy social captions, design graphics, the list goes on.
There is a generation of media consumers coming up now who don’t read websites – they get all their information from social media – so we need to be constantly reinventing to make sure that we’re meeting the needs not only of our current readers, but our future audience. Standing still is not an option.
Tell us how you ‘stay in the know’, what media do you consume?
I read a variety of media websites – from The Canberra Times to The Guardian to Pedestrian – and am a voracious consumer of social media (just ask the HC team how many screenshots they get sent of things I see that look cool and I think we should chase up). I have also been a daily reader of Lainey Gossip since its inception about 20 years ago – if you like intelligent celebrity gossip, you should be too.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Still being Canberra’s biggest fan girl 😊. I am so incredibly proud of how this city has grown in the last decade and also incredibly proud of the role that I’ve been able to play in helping shape people’s perceptions of it. It’s immensely satisfying to see Canberra get the credit it deserves for being a vibrant, diverse, fun city with a cracking foodie scene.
Why should people follow in your footsteps?
Because life is too short to not bring that big idea to life. You never know where it may take you!
What advice would you give your past self?
I can be a bit anxious, and in the past I often erred on taking the safe route.
Sophia’s early birth was, without a doubt, the scariest thing that ever happened to me. I remember the day – about six weeks after she was born – when she just didn’t seem to be getting any better and I told my best friend that I wasn’t sure if she was going to come home alive.
It changed my perspective on things. I realised just how fleeting life could be and I that I didn’t want to get to the end of my life and regret the things I hadn’t done. Which is how I ended up starting Latin Dance at 39 (but that’s another story).
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
