Tamara Littleton 00:12
This is the Genuine Humans podcast brought to you by Social Element. I’m Tamara Littleton
Wendy Christie 00:18
and I’m Wendy Christie.
Tamara Littleton 00:22
In our podcast, we’ll discover the stories of the leaders behind the brands and the trailblazers who are making a real difference in our industry. We’ll delve into how they got to where they are today,
Wendy Christie 00:33
and we’ll hear about the genuine humans who supported and influenced them along the way.
Tamara Littleton 00:44
Welcome back to the Genuine Humans podcast. I’m here as ever with my fabulous co-host, Wendy. Christie, Wendy, how are you doing?
Wendy Christie 00:51
Hello. Thank you for that intro. I love it when you say I’m fabulous. Yeah, I’m really good. Thank you. How are you?
Tamara Littleton 00:57
I am really good. And also, we are joined today by another fabulous person, so I’m delighted to introduce a very special genuine human guest. So Mitch Oliver, who is known to many as Mitch, is joining us today, and Mitch is Global VP of Corporate Brand and Purpose and a board executive at Mars. Mitch has also held several non-exec roles across a range of organisations, from NGOs to social enterprises. And I am so delighted that I’ve persuaded you to come on the podcast. Mitch, welcome.
Mitch Oliver 01:29
Thank you, and it’s really great to be here. I also love being called fabulous. Thank you very much.
Tamara Littleton 01:34
Well, we’re going to have a fabulous conversation, and we’re going to kick start actually, with I want to know, Mitch, how did you get to where you are now, could you give us a bit of a flavour of whether you sort of fell into this career, or was there a plan? So maybe just give us all a little flavour of your early career?
Mitch Oliver 01:53
Yes, sure. There’s definitely never been a plan. I guess when I was growing up, I was just sort of instilled with a sense of hard work. I was pretty well-behaved. You know, do what you’re told to do, and work hard. And I loved learning. I’ve always loved learning. And then when I was at university, and the hard work was paying off, so I did quite well in my academic studies, and I was thinking about what I wanted to do. To be honest, one of my main motivators at that point in time was financial independence. I was desperate to just, I don’t know why, but I really just wanted to have my own income. I always have done. I’m very uncomfortable if I’m not independent in that sense and but I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. I sit in this sort of middle between being a scientist and a mathematician and a creative person. So all my A-levels were science and maths, and with my degree, I kind of started to move into what I did. It was a BSc but it was psychology and philosophy. So I did history and philosophy of science, and I did the more neuroscience bits I did the science end of that, I had no idea what I wanted to do.
Mitch Oliver 03:09
I actually found in the loft the other day a folder, back in the day, where we had folders of all my job applications. I was in my third year of university, and I applied to over 60 different jobs. I was definitely gonna make sure I got something. I basically applied to anything that was fairly generic in a kind of businessy sense. My dad was in, well, he was trained as a quantity surveyor, and he didn’t go to university, but he eventually was on the Board of his ace business in the south of England, a construction business, so I guess that’s what I knew.
And I thought at that point that I wanted to be a management consultant, because I thought that’s really vague, and I can, like, experience lots of different businesses. But then I heard that you had to work 12-hour days, and I thought, “Oh, I don’t want to do that”. So I tried management consultancy and grad schemes. Basically, Mars were very clever, because they made you get your application form in early for their grad scheme, and they told you before the Christmas of your third year whether you’d got it or not. So I got the Mars grad scheme. I also got what was Anderson Consulting, so a management consultant job. So I chose between the two of those, and I didn’t want the 12 hours a day so I chose Mars. And my plan, my master plan, was to do two years or three years at Mars, do the grads course, and then go into consulting. They miss out on those, you know, the bit at the beginning where they just kind of use you as glorified sort of spreadsheets as people in consulting. Anyway, it’s 30 years in September!
Tamara Littleton 04:50
Yeah, I was gonna say, How’s that going?
Mitch Oliver 04:55
It turns out the grad scheme was fabulous. I mean, for someone who didn’t know what they wanted to do. I spent a year in sales, which I hated, I’m rubbish at selling. Well, I’m actually quite good at selling.
Tamara Littleton 05:06
Yeah.
Mitch Oliver 05:07
I’m really bad at negotiating. So I spent a year in sales. I literally had to sell ice cream to ice cream vans in Scotland. So it’s not, not I wasn’t very successful at that and then when all my uni friends were training to be accountants in the city, and I was going into their canteens, trying to get the canteen to put Snickers outside the canteen so it, you know, it’s very grounding these experiences. But anyway, I knew always sales wasn’t my thing.
Mitch Oliver 05:35
I then did a year in the factory as a shift manager, which I absolutely loved, yeah, and it taught me that I like people and products. I like I love working with people. I find them fascinating, and I like a thing. So actually, the consultancy was starting to go out the window at this point, because I really like the thing. And then I did marketing, and I just fell in love with marketing, because back to that sort of sitting between the science and the creativity, the data and analysis, the math, mathematical side, but also with space to think about innovative ideas and create things. It was perfect and really haven’t looked back. So it started there. I guess I did have some ambition. At that point, I thought, “God, it would be so cool if I could be Marketing Director in the UK”.
Mitch Oliver 06:28
I went on. I worked in European roles and all the rest of it, but that was the job that I wanted, that was on the Board in the UK, and getting there took longer than I had hoped. And the other thing I really wanted, as I got a bit older, as I’m now in my 30s, was to be a mum, and that also took longer than I’d hoped, and the two things happened at exactly the same time.
Tamara Littleton 06:49
Oh, wow!
Wendy Christie 06:49
Of course, they did.
Tamara Littleton 06:50
what a great leader.
Mitch Oliver 06:50
So I got, I got the UK Marketing Director job in the January, and found out I was pregnant in the February, after after a long, a number of years of IVF. And so I did the job for nine months, and then I went off on matt leave. That was quite an important juncture, really, for me, because I knew I was only going to have one. I’ve got three step-children. I knew I didn’t want to go through all that again. So I was only going to have one. And so I felt like I needed to make the most of the fact I’ve been lucky enough to get pregnant, and I went and saw my boss to ask if I could I wanted to go three days a week. I said, I’ve lost my I’ve lost my ambition. Fiona, she said, “No, Mitch, you haven’t lost your ambition. You’re just reframing what your ambition is, and your ambition now is to be to have a great job and to be the kind of parent that you want to do be”. And I thought that was –
Mitch Oliver 06:53
Yeah. And actually, I just spoke to Fiona this morning. She continues to be a mentor and advisor and friend all rolled into one. So they let me Mars, let me work three days a week, not in that job, because it was too operational. Operationally intense, but I went into another job for three days a week. I did that for five years, and that buys a lot of loyalty. I got promoted. I was the most senior person in the whole global organisation that was working part-time, and I didn’t really look back from there.
Mitch Oliver 08:18
And then I went on to do I’ve done every, as you can imagine every marketing job going global, UK, Europe, strategy, innovation, big teams, small teams. And I think probably the second moment was when I was so I was vice-president of sort of marketing, insights, trade marketing, customer marketing, about seven years ago, and I a number of things sort of coincided, where I thought, “is this what I’m gonna have spent my life doing so over the course of a few years?”
Tamara Littleton 08:51
yeah,
Wendy Christie 08:51
yeah, yeah!
Mitch Oliver 08:51
So, the first thing that happened was – this is a story I’ve told before – but I overheard my son, my partner, was working at Oxfam at the time, and my son was about five, and someone said to him, “Oh, what’d your mom and dad do? Slightly random question to ask five-year-old. But anyway, and he said, “mummy makes choc, choc”, which I thought was quite cool.
And he said, But “daddy, daddy feeds the poor starving babies with a spoon.” Well, okay, so I was like, okay, that’s something to reflect on.
Wendy Christie 09:28
Well, maybe he, I mean, he didn’t join the two and say, “Daddy feeds the choc, choc that mummy makes”
Mitch Oliver 09:33
No, but it just, it was just a moment of thinking about, what, what am I spending my time? You know what we have in this life is what we give our attention to. So what am I spending my time on? I got involved with the Marketing Society, which is how I met you, Tamara, yes as well, which was fabulous.
Mitch Oliver 09:52
And then five years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. So that’s another moment in time. You go, “Okay, time is a very precious commodity. What am I doing with mine?” And throughout that, I kind of, I had this most brilliant, fabulous career. But I started to think, I guess, about legacy. I mean, you know, I’m a, I’m a 51-year-old now, so starting to think about what the legacy is going to be and, and at the beginning I interestingly, I didn’t I looked at jobs outside Mars. I looked at leaving, I looked at some CEO roles of NGOs, and I spoke to people who worked in NGOs, and what they said to me is, you have such an opportunity to have an impact at Mars.
Mitch Oliver 10:37
You know, Mars is such a – I mean, people won’t realise 150,000 people around the world, 88 different countries, with the world’s biggest veterinary health business, as you will have seen in the news, we’ve just got even bigger with the acquisition of Kellanova. Got some of the billion-dollar brands, and they were saying, “if you can just shift that organisation half a degree in a positive way. The impact that that can have is enormous.” And, and effectively, that is what I started to do.
Mitch Oliver 11:05
And that’s when I got involved in inclusive marketing and representation. I also did some stuff outside work. So I went on the board of Stonewall and, and that’s just been an amazing experience. So I ended up in this job, which is, it’s just the most magical culmination of my marketing, comms strategy background, but also linking to purpose. So my role now it’s the end of the story. Well, not the end, but the end of this part of the story is I’m responsible for the corporate brand that is Mars, and differentiating it on our purpose, which is that the world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today, and that links into inclusivity, that links into what we do for climate and all those types of things. So it’s just, I’ve been doing this for six years, and it’s an absolute gift of a role.
Tamara Littleton 11:06
That is absolutely brilliant to be able to, sort of, like, make that change. And great to hear, you know, the people outside, you know, your friends sort of saying, Actually, there is a way to link your purpose and make changes from the inside. That’s really powerful.
Mitch Oliver 12:12
And I think that’s actually, you know, I guess the one thing that frustrates me is when people go, “Oh, I’m, you know, I want more meaning in what I do”, and I get that right, but you can do that. You can bring meaning to whatever you do. You can find a way to do it in a way that brings you more meaning. You don’t have to do a job that is, in and of itself, I don’t know, purposeful, whatever the right word is, any job, I think you can look for, how do you bring whatever you’re personally passionate about into that role. It can just be how you deal with the people around you. I mean, not even just that’s that’s huge, the way you connect and communicate with the people around you. Whatever job you’re doing, you could choose to do that in a certain way.
Tamara Littleton 12:54
And I think also, you know, focusing on legacy, it doesn’t get spoken about a lot, but there’s nothing wrong with planning ahead out of that’s going to sound very morbid now, but you know, we don’t have much time and so actually deciding what we do with our time is is so powerful, and it doesn’t get discussed.
Mitch Oliver 13:14
There is a moment when anyone who knows this, and if you or anyone who has been diagnosed with cancer, there’s the point where you get your diagnosis, and they just go, you’ve got cancer, and then they have to do all these tests, and normally it depends. Obviously, everyone’s different, but there’s often an operation involved, and it’s not until that point and the results from that that you know how bad it is. So there’s a period of what can be as short as two weeks. It can be months where you know you’ve got this thing that might be okay but might be really, really not okay, but you don’t know which way it’s gonna go. It’s an incredibly intense time. I mean, now I’m gonna sound like, really, woo, woo, but I literally think I experienced colours of the sky and trees differently in that time than I did outside of time.
But of course, it’s also time where you have massive self-reflection. And I think, I mean, I think, I mean, don’t get me wrong, I would rather have not had cancer, and I’ve been very, very lucky that I caught mine early. But there is a gift within it. There’s a gift of focusing on and it didn’t make me resign. It didn’t make me want to just, you know, sit in the field and look at the sky. And some people may want to do that, and that’s fine. But for me, I actually think it just made me realise, you know, it made me realise that all that matters is people. All that matters. All that matters is to me, all that matters is the relationships I have and the interactions I have with people. And the second thing is, look, it doesn’t really matter what I choose to spend my time on, so I might as well try and do it. Spend my time on stuff that I think is important, and it makes me feel like I’m doing something positive in the world. You know? It’s very basic, really.
Tamara Littleton 15:02
Well, thank you. Thank you for being so open.
Wendy Christie 15:04
Yeah and how are you now, Mitch?
Mitch Oliver 15:05
Thank you for asking five years clear. So
Wendy Christie 15:09
Fantastic!
Mitch Oliver 15:10
Good. All good.
Wendy Christie 15:12
Good. You talked about your love of learning a bit earlier and how that was for your university. I mean, did that go way back to when you were a child? Were you? Were you a good student at school?
Mitch Oliver 15:25
Yes, I was a very good student and very boring. I wish I had some fabulous stories for you about how rebellious I was or something, but I really wasn’t. I just found school learning and school brilliant. I just thought this got all this stuff to learn. And apart from German, and it’s, it was so simple, you know, you, you kind of, you, you apply yourself. And some things were easy and some things were hard, and then you’d get a mark, and you get the mark, and you try and do better next time. So, I mean, I think, I like gold stars. I know this about myself, so I like gold stars. So if you’re lucky enough to be, you know, in an environment where you can, you know, you’re at a school and your parents are supporting you, then I if I’m really honest with myself, was it the love of learning, or was it the love of the gold stars? I think it might have been the gold stars. And I think that is pretty true still.
Wendy Christie 16:29
And when, when you were obviously, again, you’ve talked about not really knowing what you wanted to do when you grew up, but when you were really small, sort of primary school. Did you have any ideas, then, do you know, with astronauts –
Mitch Oliver 16:43
tightrope walker,
Wendy Christie 16:44
tightrope walker, brilliant,
Mitch Oliver 16:46
yeah, no idea why, but I wanted to be, I did gymnastics. Maybe that’s linked to it. Wanted to be a tightrope walker. And then as I got a little bit older, I actually sort of almost thought about this. I wanted to be a Chief Detective Inspector
Wendy Christie 17:02
So you had the rank picked out and everything.
Mitch Oliver 17:05
Juliet Bravo is for any one of the right generation. I basically wanted to be Juliet Bravo.
Wendy Christie 17:11
I think we all did, didn’t we? Did you have people that you looked up to as a child, whether in your family or outside your family?
Mitch Oliver 17:20
Yeah? I mean, I’m really lucky. I mean, my mum and dad were, are just great human beings. Dad worked really hard. Mum was also a very hard worker. But the kindest human, the kindest human I know, and I think my grandma was quite a big influence, so my mum’s French, and my grandma, my grandfather was Lebanese, so quite a mixed background. And my grandmama, whose real name was Raymond, which just makes me laugh, but obviously hated it. So she was called Mona, and she married this Lebanese man, and they had to leave the Lebanon because of the war, so they came to Paris. She was French. He was French, speaking Lebanese, and he couldn’t get any work. It was very difficult for non-French people to get work at that time, and he and so he was a concierge, so caretaker in this block of flats, and she was a midwife.
My grandma was just this force of nature. She was very tall, and she had this bright green 2CV that she would drive around Paris like I honestly didn’t care which side of the road she was on. She would drive onto the pavement and just leave the car there and walk out of it. They lived in this basement of this block of flats that my granddad was the caretaker of in a very posh part of Paris, so beautiful, premium flats, and they lived in this basement. They had one room, a huge dog in this tiny bit. And then grandma would pick people up off the streets, wafes and strays, and say, “Oh, this is this. Is this person. And they haven’t got anywhere to sleep tonight, so they’re staying” I used to sleep on the sofa when I went and visited, and then she’d be out and doing 12-hour shifts. And she, I mean, to me as a child, it was, it was just very magical. And there’s these flats you can imagine. So one was owned by an art dealer, and he had, like, all this modern art in it. And those like mission, impossible laser beams across it. Another one was owned by a dentist, and she had a wardrobe made especially for her fur coats and so anyway, so my grandma was. She only died a few years ago at the age of 95 and she had a hard life, but she was, she lived, she lived fully. And I think I found that very inspirational, both professionally and personally.
Wendy Christie 19:49
It sounds like there needs to be a TV series made about the inhabitants of that block of flats.
Mitch Oliver 19:53
It was amazing.
Wendy Christie 19:54
I’d watch it.
Mitch Oliver 19:55
It was amazing.
Wendy Christie 19:56
And how about as you’ve grown up, if you like. And gone throughout your career, you’ve already mentioned Fiona, I think sounds like she’s been influential for you. Is there anybody else throughout your career who’s really supported you or influenced you?
Mitch Oliver 20:12
I mean, many of you don’t get to have all careers and are involved. You’re just building on lots and lots of people who’ve supported you along the way, and so many, many, I mean, Fiona is the standout in that she has gone way over and beyond to take the time to have the chat. And what I really respect about Fiona as a mentor, and I am not sure I’m as good at this at all as she is, is she recognises that everyone – she doesn’t try and make you follow her path. Because I can be a bit like, oh, Fiona, “What did you do? Because I’ll just do what you do”. And she’s like, “No you got to do your own thing. You got to do it your own way.” So she’s very supportive, even if the choices that you make are completely the different kinds of choices that she would make, which I think is very unique in mentorship, actually.
Mitch Oliver 21:05
And then I did have a boss. I had a boss called Bob, Bob Morrison, who I’ve spoken about before, but sometimes someone says just the right thing at just the moment you’re ready to hear it. I think I was about 28 ish, and I’d got into the, you know, the rhythm of getting your appraisals every year, and you know, all the rest of it, and I mean, consistently on my development need was one of two things I would get, planning an organisation need to be better planning, all right, but we’re gonna need to be better organised. So I turned up to the meeting, but I might have left my pencil and pad somewhere, you know what I mean. And I got too emotional. That was my other one and he just went, “I wouldn’t worry about it.” He’s like, “we’ve been working, what, six years now, seven years. He said, forget about it. Said you are not going to have a great career by trying to get slightly better at your development areas.” He’s like, “what will make you have a great career?” “And frankly, enjoy it is to focus on the things that you are good at and become absolutely bloody brilliant at them.”
Wendy Christie 21:48
interesting.
Mitch Oliver 22:17
And that’s basically what I did from then on. And it was just like, I’d never heard anyone saying that we were all about, oh, I need a development plan, and what’s the book I can read, and who are the people I can role model? And he was like, “yeah, no, forget all of that.” “Who are the people you can role model, what you’re good at, who you think are great at it, what’s the book that you can read about, the stuff you were really fascinated in, so that you can become even more well informed about it”, or whatever, and it was, and I have to say, I’ve done that ever since, and it is a very successful strategy, but it’s also a really happy place to be, kind of liberating.
Mitch Oliver 22:55
You sort of stop beating yourself up about the things you wish you were better at and focus on the stuff that you’re good at. I mean, you can’t be completely naive. So planning an organisation, when you run a big team, it can have an an impact. And as my team told me on a few occasions, so I have learned to always have one or two people, maybe even three, who can, you know around me, how I can come, you know, use people around me to overcome the gap that that I have in my skill set a lot because I’m conscious it has an impact on other people, as for being too emotional. Well, that’s another conversation.
Tamara Littleton 23:36
There’s nothing wrong with that.
Wendy Christie 23:38
I know, right? Is there such a thing –
Tamara Littleton 23:39
passion
Tamara Littleton 23:41
Yeah. It’s something that I think we’ve always been focused on. It plays to people’s strengths, and it also it drives – you know, people are more motivated if they are doing things that they love. I think that’s great advice. I’m just going to pick up on something that you were talking about earlier. Mitch, about inclusive marketing and your sort of focus there now, something that I think we’ve spoken before about is that the very concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion has been under attack recently. And, you know, I didn’t think we’d get to a stage where people would actually be sort of, you know, trolled online for working in that industry and it’s so important as an industry that we do continue to sort of drive forward. And in DEI, are you seeing that backlash? Is that something that you’re aware of is that, have you got any thoughts about how as an industry we can combat this?
Mitch Oliver 24:33
I have seen it. It saddens me. I think it shows those organisations. Sam Phillips called them diversity tourists, which I thought was quite an interesting term. So I think what you’re seeing is for those people who were leaning into inclusion and diversity, for probably, not the wrong motivation, but because it was the thing to do at the moment. And you know, it’s now coming unravelled, you know, because you put a bit of pressure on the system and suddenly it’s like, “yeah, okay, let’s move away from it.” But to me, that just highlights that what there wasn’t rooted. It wasn’t rooted in the organisation. From the beginning, the need for a strategic understanding of the benefit of this to their business hasn’t really been understood. I’m not an activist. You need activists in the world. Absolutely, that’s not my style. I believe, therefore, that what we need to do is keep doing the work. So whilst the world is arguing whilst there’s a lot of noise, I would just say, “keep your head down and keep doing the work”. Because I think you know, the world isn’t Twitter. Thank goodness.
The world is what we do to help. You know, every time a policy evolves to be more inclusive on I don’t know, something like parental leave or anything like that. You know that is a step forward to creating more diverse, more and therefore more successful workplaces. So my response to it is almost to double down on the action but, frankly, not to lean into the argument. I don’t find it helpful, from my perspective. And Mars is doing that. And I think many big organisations are continuing to do the work because it makes sense. It makes sense for multiple levels, and they know that. So if you know that, why do you step away from it?
Tamara Littleton 26:36
And I know, obviously, you’re making changes by, you know, the different board positions that you’ve got, so you’re Vice Chair of on Stereotype Alliance, for people who don’t know, that’s the initiative of UN Women that aims to eliminate harmful gender stereotypes in advertising, you’re also, you mentioned earlier, you’re also on the board of Stonewall, and you’re a real champion for LGBTQ rights. Why those board roles, and is, how’s that impacting on your what you do at Mars as well.
Mitch Oliver 27:06
I’ve also just been made Chair of UN Women UK.
Tamara Littleton 27:09
Oh, amazing.
Wendy Christie 27:10
Oh, wow, brilliant.
Mitch Oliver 27:12
It’s just fantastic. So I guess go back to the midlife crisis of what I’m spending my time on and the thought of, you know, maybe stepping away from the commercial sector into the NGO sector. And I didn’t do that, but what I did start to do is think, how could I, how can I use my skills in the way that I can be most effective? I was a Samaritan for a number of years. I found it really hard. It’s not really my core skill set, whereas actually sitting around a boardroom and strategic discussions are and I had a bit of a it was a bit of a brainwave when I realised I don’t have to volunteer by, you know, reading at the local school, or, you know, setting up a fate or whatever, I can volunteer using the skills I’ve built over the last 30 years. So, and then Stonewall was an interesting one for me.
Mitch Oliver 28:01
So, I identify as bisexual. I’ve had a relationship with a woman my life partner is a man. He and I have been together for 20 years, and I, I think it without me quite realising it at the time, it also had a personal there was a personal element to reconnect with that part of my identity that had kind of got hidden as and buried away as life had moved on. I describe it a bit like being half French and half English. I’m half French and half English, but I’ve lived all my life in England. Yeah, I still feel incredibly comfortable when I go to France. And if I don’t go to France for a long time, it’s like I miss it, because it’s a part of who I am. And I think interestingly, that Stonewall, I think met a very personal need, and then, from a work point of view, oh, my goodness, I have never talked about learning. I learned more through being on the Stonewall board than in anything I’ve done in the last 10 years in my commercial role. I mean, it is fascinating. It is complicated. It is emotional. It’s a group of people trying to change the world, dealing with personal and professional attacks constantly, and you need to have money at the same time. Otherwise, it doesn’t exist. So somehow, I mean, it’s just as a Board member. It was just an absolute privilege, an incredibly powerful, impactful and motivating organisation to be a part of. And I think it’s an incredible organisation. So Stonewall, I think, came from that, and I realised I like being around the Board table. I’m good at it.
Tamara Littleton 29:37
Yeah.
Mitch Oliver 29:37
Sometimes, you know, you can tell when you’re good at something, can’t you? And I thought “I’m good at this”. And then, so the UN stereotype alliance is part of my job at Mars. So because we were one of the founders of the UN Stereotype Alliance, along with Unilever and UN Women. And then just recently, the opportunity for this UN Women UK Chair came up. And I thought, Well, I actually thought, “oh my God, that would be so cool.”
Tamara Littleton 30:03
And it sounds so cool.
Mitch Oliver 30:07
So I am I applied, and there were, like, 180 applicants and this is where a lot of the people around me have just been amazing. I had lots of people encouraging me and supporting me and giving me the confidence to go for it. Some might a lot of my Stonewall contacts have been amazing. Jan Gooding was amazing in supporting me on that, for example. And yeah, the first board meeting is in September. As chair.
Tamara Littleton 30:33
Fantastic
Tamara Littleton 30:34
Jan Gooding is a real, real hero of mine. Actually, she’s wonderful. That is such good news. And I know you sort of said you’re not an activist, but quietly changing the world around the board table is I’ll take that activism any day. So thank you.
Wendy Christie 30:52
So we’re going to move on to the end bit of the podcast now, where we get a little bit more personal with some quick-fire questions. So let’s start with what’s your idea of a perfect weekend?
Mitch Oliver 31:03
Slow run on Saturday morning, out for dinner. Saturday evening, probably just Paul and I. It’s a bit boring, I know, but I’m quite good food, good wine, maybe a little bit too much wine. And then a family day on the Sunday gardening. Good god, I’ve got old, haven’t I? When did that happen? I feel like I should say something much – but honestly, at the moment, that’s my idea of a perfect weekend.
Wendy Christie 31:35
Well, it sounds lovely. And any particular favourite restaurants for your meal?
Mitch Oliver 31:39
Out? Oh, no, anything I love. I don’t like posh restaurants. I find them a bit intimidating, and I like a restaurant that I get a good dinner in. Sounds good to me.
Wendy Christie 31:52
So did you watch much TV as a child? And if so, did you have a favourite show?
Mitch Oliver 31:57
Juliet Bravo.
Tamara Littleton 32:00
Okay, this is a bit left-field. But if you were walking on stage, and there’s an intro track playing while you get up on the stage, what’s that intro track?
Mitch Oliver 32:08
Well, I have had to do this and it was you would make Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves.
Wendy Christie 32:14
Nice.
Tamara Littleton 32:15
Very good choice. Another, even more left-field. One, how would you fare in a zombie apocalypse?
Mitch Oliver 32:24
I think I’d be all right because I have a food-hoarding habit. I mean, not like I’ve got a shed with tins in or anything like that. I like buying food. I like food, basically, so I like buying food. So my fridge is always full of food. So I think, if nothing else, I could hunker down and I would be the person with the food, which I think would bring some power in that situation, I’d hide with food, basically.
Tamara Littleton 32:53
That’s a good tactic. I like that.
Wendy Christie 32:54
That could also be the perfect weekend.
Mitch Oliver 32:56
I was just thinking the same thing!
Wendy Christie 33:00
How would your friends describe you?
Mitch Oliver 33:03
Sometimes they describe me as looking like a regional news reader, which always makes me laugh, but they’re like, What haircut have you got this time? Mitch, I think they’d say, I’m brave. I think they’d say that I work hard. I think they’d say, I’m fun.
Wendy Christie 33:18
Did you ask anyone when you saw this question coming up?
Mitch Oliver 33:21
No, but I remember asking once, and I was it made me think about being with them, and I think I am a bit despite sounding really dull, there was a phase in my life when I was like, I was married, then I was divorced, then, oh no, I’m with a woman. Oh no. Now I’m with this man, and they’ve got kids. Oh gosh, where they were like, okay, Mitch, what’s next? I think there was definitely an element where that’s where the bravery and the sort of sense of adventurous mate, I don’t know what the right word is. I should ask them.
Wendy Christie 33:54
Keep them on their toes
Mitch Oliver 33:55
Exactly. Keep like, keep life interesting.
Wendy Christie 33:58
What would be your sliding doors alternative career? Do you think? Juliet Bravo?
Mitch Oliver 34:05
Well, it’s close, actually, because I then, I then actually matured from Juliet Bravo to Cracker.
Wendy Christie 34:11
Robbie Coltrane.
Mitch Oliver 34:12
And I actually applied alongside applying for jobs. I applied to do a Masters in Forensic Psychology, but I wanted to earn some money, so I didn’t go for that route. So I reckon maybe the sliding doors moment would have been if I’d done that, maybe I would have been a forensic psychologist.
Tamara Littleton 34:12
Yes.
Tamara Littleton 34:31
Fantastic. I did psychology at university, but I didn’t do well enough to actually do it professionally. But it’s always yeah, it’s always in the background.
Mitch Oliver 34:40
Yeah, I think if you’re interested in people, it’s a great foundation, isn’t it?
Tamara Littleton 34:45
Yeah, perfect for advertising and marketing as well.
Mitch Oliver 34:48
Exactly,
Tamara Littleton 34:49
Karaoke, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Do you like karaoke? Do you have a go-to song?
Mitch Oliver 34:54
So I have never done karaoke. It is on my bucket.
Tamara Littleton 35:00
Okay, we’re gonna make that happen.
Mitch Oliver 35:03
I am tone-deaf. I have no musical ability whatsoever. So I had two thoughts about songs. So one is a song that’s just a happy song that so people won’t notice the singing so much. So I was thinking like a wham, like, Wake Me Up Before You Go, go something that’s just the kind of
Tamara Littleton 35:20
Wham rap. Maybe?
Mitch Oliver 35:25
I am just dreadful at singing. It’s awful. Or one of my heroes is a singer-songwriter, Grace Petri,
Tamara Littleton
oh yeah, she’s amazing,
Mitch Oliver
and I’ve seen her live a number of times, and she has a song called Black Tie the lyrics, which I absolutely love, so I wouldn’t do it. She’s also got an incredible voice. I wouldn’t do it any justice. So, but as a song, I like to sing along to when no one’s listening. That’s high on the list.
Tamara Littleton 35:55
Great shout. Absolutely brilliant song.
Thank you, Mitch, for coming on to the podcast. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you. Is there anything that we forgot to ask you? Or do you have any closing thoughts? I’m going to hand the platform to you.
Mitch Oliver 36:07
I’ve loved it. I mean, it’s always lovely to talk about yourself, isn’t it? I guess my my closing thoughts would be that the area that we touched on about, if there’s something that you’re passionate about if there’s an area that you’re really passionate about. You don’t necessarily have to throw everything up in the air to follow that passion, to bring that passion into your job. Maybe you can find ways to bring it into the work that you’re doing today, or the life that you’re living today, because it’s if there’s probably the one thing I wish I’d done sooner in my life, it would be it would be that. So I’d love for people to just maybe think about that.
Wendy Christie 36:50
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