One Year In: Natasha Doran on Building the East Surrey and West Sussex Region
A year ago this month, Natasha Doran launched as Get Ahead’s Regional Director for East Surrey and West Sussex. Twelve months on, she has built a genuine local network from scratch, taken on clients ranging from sole traders to scaling businesses, and become one of the region’s most visible faces at local networking events. To mark her first anniversary, she sat down with Get Ahead Founder Rebecca Newenham to talk through the year: what she expected, what surprised her, and where the region goes from here.
A change she couldn’t quite plan for
Natasha left her corporate career around eighteen months before joining Get Ahead, without a fixed plan for what came next. She knew she wanted something different and spent the first few months exploring contract roles that, on closer inspection, looked a lot like the job she had just left. She also completed a coaching qualification she had wanted to do for years, a qualification she still values, though it became clear it suited a role on the side rather than the whole of her working week.
Get Ahead, meanwhile, kept turning up. “You seem to pop up everywhere on my social media, my LinkedIn,” she told Rebecca, describing what felt at the time more like a coincidence than a plan. A first conversation turned into a series of them over several months. “Within about the first fifteen minutes of us chatting, I was thinking, oh my goodness, this could actually be exactly what I’m looking for.”
With three young children and a summer of family holidays ahead, Natasha took her time before committing, and joined as Regional Director in September 2025, a start date she had always liked the feel of. The lead-in mattered. Rather than a single handover, the relationship built gradually over several calls, so that by the time she formally started, little felt unfamiliar.
A mentor and a fast start
One early surprise was being paired with a mentor, fellow Regional Director Kristy Roff, for the first stretch of the role. “That was such a lovely surprise, having somebody that I can just text.” Natasha says. The support proved useful almost immediately: her first enquiry came in within the first week, through a friendly referral, with Kristy helping her put together her first client proposal from a standing start.
“I thought the first three months would just be planning and we’d get going in January. Actually, with the events we set up and the contacts I had, it was able to get going pretty quickly.”
That early momentum set the tone. Natasha was, by her own account, receptive to attending anything, travelling well beyond her immediate local area to build a presence rather than treating her region as a fixed patch. The approach paid off in a faster foothold in the local business community than a narrower strategy would have allowed.
Finding her own approach to networking
Early on, Natasha gravitated toward informal, conversational networking events over anything more structured, in part because standing up and pitching yourself to a room is, as she puts it, alien to most people, let alone someone starting out in a new venture. Over the first three months she worked out which events genuinely suited her and which didn’t, a process she now sees as just as valuable as the connections themselves.
She has since gone on to host her own events, including a regular gathering in Horsham, something she admits she once dreaded the idea of. “Even though that filled me with dread, it’s probably one of the things I’ve enjoyed the most.” Rebecca points to the deliberate care Natasha takes with every attendee, making sure each person is introduced and made welcome, as a large part of why the events work: some people who would never attend a typical networking event come along to hers.
Natasha also brings a degree of strategy to how she covers her region day to day, mentally dividing it into four areas and making sure she’s engaging with each, whether through events, LinkedIn activity, or simply staying visible to existing connections, rather than concentrating only on the geographically largest patch.
The clients: a warm introduction and a summer rescue
Several of Natasha’s early clients came through indirect routes rather than direct pitches. One came from a sales director who attended her regular networking meetings and later passed on a warm introduction when his own HR director needed sales support. Another arrived centrally through Get Ahead’s head office, a relationship that has since grown from initial VA support into marketing work as well.
The story Natasha returns to in most depth is a client whose business had scaled quickly after a business partner stepped away, leaving him managing far more than he had planned for. Get Ahead placed a VA with him, who has now been working with the client for around seven months, followed by a social media manager. When a separately recruited business development hire fell through just before a planned holiday, he came to Natasha in what she describes as “a bit of a frantic panic”.
“Being a parent and a wife myself, the one thing you can’t do is cancel that holiday. So being able to work with somebody from our team who was around for six weeks, full time, was just really lovely.”
It’s the kind of gap that would have been difficult to fill during peak summer holiday season without the wider Get Ahead network behind her, and Natasha points to it as one of the clearest examples of what the model offers clients that going it alone couldn’t.
What the wider network has meant
Asked what has made the biggest difference to her first year, Natasha comes back repeatedly to the depth of the wider Get Ahead team, somewhere between eighty five and ninety people working across the network. “I would never be able to put that together with just my own two or three people. Having true specialists, true experts, has been amazing.”
She also points to the practical, day to day support: a place to check quick questions the way she would with a colleague in an office, proposal templates that saved her weeks when she was starting out, and a genuinely collaborative culture among Regional Directors doing similar roles across different regions. “Everyone genuinely wants people to do the best they possibly can. Having the regions split out has really helped that.”
Looking ahead
A year on, Natasha sees the foundations of her region as largely in place: a settled calendar of events she attends and hosts, and a growing base of client relationships. She describes the next phase as a potential springboard, with particular interest from slightly larger businesses who aren’t yet ready to bring on a permanent member of staff, an opportunity she is now thinking about how to tailor for.
Asked what she would tell herself on day one, her answer is networking itself. “I thought that was something I was just going to have to smile and get on with. Never in a million years did I think I’d be actively putting myself forward to run events and think about where we can start new ones.”
Rebecca’s closing reflection: “Thank you for sharing your journey. I can’t wait to be doing this again in a year’s time and seeing where you’re at then.”
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You can read more about Natasha here. And to learn more about the Get Ahead franchise opportunity please click here.