After more than a decade in marketing, Simon Dell has picked up a trick or two, and he’s sharing that knowledge in his new role as a mentor with the Brisbane Business Hub.
Simon is the co-founder and CEO of Cemoh (pronounced ‘See-moh’, derived from the ‘CMO’ acronym for ‘Chief Marketing Officer’), a hybrid marketing agency and recruitment company. The innovative Brisbane-based business recruits, trains and monitors marketing strategists, consultations and implementation experts, and supplies them to businesses who need marketing staff – either to support existing teams, or to drive implementation on their own.
“I never thought I’d be running a labour hire agency,” Simon laughs. “It’s not something that was at the top of my list. I planned to be an air traffic controller when I was a kid. I don’t know why I planned to do that, but I did. Then I planned to be a lawyer, until I got to university and realised how hard Law actually was. Then I planned to run nightclubs, which I did, for a while. I did sales for a long time, and then I transitioned into marketing – honestly, I just sort of fell into it.
“I’ve been running marketing agencies in one form or another for about 12 years. But this business model… I arrived at it fortuitously. I was running a marketing agency, and one of our clients got in touch with us because their marketing manager had left them high and dry. They basically borrowed one of our staffers for a while. That set off a lightbulb moment as we realised this was actually something a lot of small businesses needed, and we built the model out from there.”
Simon took the long way round to his current role as the CEO of Cemoh and the host of the popular Cemoh Marketing Podcast. In his time running marketing agencies TwoCents and Paper Planes, he touched on virtually every marketing discipline while building brands, running social campaigns, directing videos and even creating a TV show.
