Sara Watts entered her executive assistant, Jane Snee, for The Times Crème Hays Secretarial PA of the Year competition with a mixture of pride and trepidation.

“I really wanted her to have the recognition she deserves, but I’m nervous someone might steal her. My workload has more than halved since she arrived. She is a wonderfully kind, honest and enthusiastic person who takes on challenges with a smile.”

Sara is a director at Data Media and Research, a company providing direct marketing and market research, which operates nationally and is based in Sheffield. She was only the third person to join the company when she started there ten years ago, at the age of 22, as marketing manager.

“It was the first online car portal in those days,” she explains. “From that, we’ve developed other products, such as insurance, and also the data side of the business. In total, there are 2.8 million names on our database, who receive targeted offers and advertising that’s in line with their interests.” These include up to 80,000 people on the database who read their online horoscopes each day, on fastrology.co.uk.

The company employs 60 people and is now 60 per cent owned by the Daily Mail group, which is planning to acquire the remaining 40 per cent over the next couple of years: “Despite the change to corporate ownership, we are still a highly entrepreneurial organisation that thrives on creativity. We have a lot more ideas than we can ever use, but what Jane has enabled me to do is develop more of them,” Sara says.

“When she came for her job interview, she was the most prepared candidate I’ve ever interviewed. She came over as well-organised and very structured, but it was also obvious that she had an ability to take on new ideas.”

Jane landed her job after hearing of the vacancy while working for the company next door. She was interested because it involved marketing — an area she knew nothing about but she thought would offer her career progression.

“I rang up someone I’d seen around who worked at the company and asked him to lunch, which gave me the opportunity to ask about the organisation and what it did,” she says. “I then spent a weekend researching, and put together a presentation to take to the interview.”

One year on, Jane divides her time between a PA role and researching new business: she is currently looking at 15 possible new projects which the company might consider taking up. However, alongside these two tasks she also has many other responsibilities: setting up and maintaining the company’s website, interviewing and recruiting new members of staff, holding weekly team meetings and handling the financial side of commission claims and targets.

“Sara is in London one or two days a week, and I do have to make decisions on her behalf when she is away. We have agreed that she will always back me up, even if we do have to discuss the decision later,” says Jane. “I absolutely love my job and get a lot of satisfaction from it.”

She also enjoys working in an organisation with a flat structure, no job titles and loose job descriptions.

Sara explains: “We give people an area of job responsibilities but the direction they take them in is proactively up to them, as Jane herself has proved. Jane stood out at interview and her dedication has been unwavering ever since. She ensures that visitors, clients and staff are looked after, and that admin work is handled professionally. Before Jane, my inbox was always full and the filing was not in order. Now, we’re well organised. But she has also turned her hand to many areas where she previously had no experience, and she will put in many extra hours to ensure a project is running smoothly.”

Both women are the same age, 32, but say they are very different in character: “We have complementary skills,” says Sara, who has a two-year-old son. “I’m creative and quite outspoken, with a strong belief in fairness and giving credit where it is due. Jane has made a huge difference to how I operate.”

Jane says the secret of her success is simple: “I look upon every day at work as though it is a job interview.”

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