Ruth Smith Email & Phone Number

Peterborough, England, United Kingdom

I’m proud to lead Veterinary Business Development, the publisher of Vet Times, as CEO. I'm passionate about empowering global veterinary communities through data-driven solutions and digital transformation.

United Kingdom

I set up a new digital marketing department at VBD to build global veterinary communities and support revenue growth through product innovation.

United Kingdom

Responsible for digital transformation at Vet Times, my product innovation supported more than 50% growth in Vet Times Jobs' pioneering clinician-led recruitment services.

Uk

I founded the Sustainable Results Lab to support businesses at the forefront of building a zero carbon economy to grow customer numbers.I developed product and marketing strategies to grow businesses in the sustainable construction and electric vehicle charging sectors. I also pioneered work on how to reduce digital carbon footprints.

I worked with marketing agencies, job boards and publishers to grow revenue. Example projects included understanding customer needs, development of business strategy, pricing, proposition and product development workshops.

Sutton, United Kingdom

I held multi-million pound P&L responsibility for RBI's social care group known as Community Care. This included two data subscription products, a news service, a jobs board, advertising revenue, conferences and exhibitions. The role involved leading a team of 30 across sales, marketing, content, product and technology.Our focus was supporting social workers in child protection, adult social care, mental health, disability, domestic abuse and homelessness. I was also part of the M&A team that prepared the business for sale, making recommendations to the RBI board and leading management presentations to prospective buyers.In this leadership role I developed a growth strategy to meet fast-changing market dynamics and customer needs. This included major pricing, product and people reviews. Results included: - Reversing a decline in recruitment revenue through introducing a new value proposition. This involved moving clients from transactional spending to annual contracts, quadrupling average customer spend. - Introducing new pricing models on the data subscription business, linked to enhanced product value. This doubled average order values. - Developing a resource to enable social workers to better tackle child sexual exploitation, which became a model for a new, interactive micro-learning service. - Launching a cutting edge micro-learning service with a £0.5m customer pipeline. It was described as “exceptional” by the two local authority clients who tested the innovative product.During my time at Community Care we regularly received record customer feedback scores, with net promoter scores consistently in the high 60s, double the industry average. We also won numerous industry awards for innovation and best practice.

Sutton, United Kingdom

Things I'm super proud of in this role:-Being interviewed on the BBC about our major investigation into the state of child protection services. In depth research with more than 1,000 social workers showed budget cuts were leaving children at risk of serious harm. - One of my team winning Mind mental health journalist of the year for joint investigations with The BBC. Freedom of Information Requests to all hospital trusts in the UK showed a shortage of acute beds was causing major problems for people experiencing a mental health crisis. I was responsible for the content team of journalists as well as the conferences sales teams. I also worked closely with the recruitment and subsciption sales teams to develop products and improve marketing. Achievements included:- Leading a multi-media transformation of digital products to reduce reliance on advertising and grow subscription revenue. - Redesigning websites to improve user experiences and content innovation to meet a wider range of learning styles. - Launching a new data subscription product for the adult social care market, which secured more customers than a long-established competitor in under a year.- I achieved this success through a complex change management project that merged the news desk with the subscription product content team. - I also overhauled the conference and events proposition, which reversed revenue decline and increased delegate numbers by 33%. This involved using research to better understand customer needs, and then using this data to improve marketing.

Sutton, United Kingdom

I won PPA Editor of the Year for leading Community Care's transition from a print magazine to an online digital service for social care professionals. The transformation programme moved revenues from loss to profit, a turnaround of more than £1m. Achievements included:- Building a new team following large-scale redundancies and the closure of a much-loved print magazine. We won the Association of Online Publishing team of the year in recognition of how successful the transformation was. - Rethinking all processes from how budget managed to how content produced- Developing a new content strategy for the digital-only era that offered value to readers and supported revenue growth - Pioneering new ways to use data and metrics to judge the success of content. This increased the value of our proposition to readers and customersIn this role I also served on the PPA committee that accredits university journalism courses. This was a brilliant way of learning about training and development.

London, United Kingdom

• Responsible for market-leading website and print magazine for social care professionals. Led team of 15, implementing multi-media strategy and content innovation to drive up audience engagement.

London, United Kingdom

Responsible for all news on Children and Young People Now, a B2B weekly magazine and online daily news services for health, social care, education and youth work professionals.

Hammersmith

Responsible for features in Children and Young People Now magazine, as well as content projects for commercial customers.

London, United Kingdom

Reporter covering children's social care and education in the UK.

Bachelor Of Arts (Ba), Social Anthropology, 2:1

Post Graduate Diploma In Journalism