This month, our Meet the Team spotlight shines on Leanne Patterson, our Head of Marketing here at CleanCloud. Not only does Leanne oversee all of our marketing activities, but she also balances family life raising her two young children. We caught up with Leanne to hear about her journey from studying history to starting her professional career in hospitality and tech, leading up to her current role at CleanCloud.
Learn about Leanne's life beyond the office, from her love of reading and her favourite books to how she spends weekends with her family.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about your background?
My name is Leanne and I’m the Head of Marketing at CleanCloud. Day to day I oversee all our marketing comms and activities, from PPC to emails operations and lead our team. Balancing this role while being a mum to two young boys, aged 5 and 3, keeps my days full and exciting!
I’ve been in marketing for almost 16 years now. I’d originally planned to go into Law but had a change of heart in the final year of my history degree. I was working for a restaurant group while I studied, taking reservations for the restaurants, booking events etc. and when I finished uni the head of marketing suggested I look into marketing. l wasn’t convinced but a year later she offered me a role and I quickly discovered that I loved marketing.
After a year or so in-house in restaurants I took a job at toptable, a UK tech start up which allowed diners to book restaurants online. That’s where my passion for tech started, it was amazing helping to digitize an experience that until then had been totally offline - most restaurants were still running on pen and paper. A year later they were acquired by OpenTable and from there the company just kept growing, eventually they were bought out by priceline.com which became booking holdings, a huge multi-national company.
I spent 12 years there during which OpenTable grew into the leading restaurant reservations provider, globally. After OpenTable I moved back into startups and spent a year and a half in a UK tech company which enabled hospitality businesses to run their own direct-to-consumer ordering. Again it was an area of tech that was really only just taking off but I felt like it was time for a change from hospitality. That was when I saw the opportunity at CleanCloud - It really piqued my interest, there was a lot that was similar to my early experiences at toptable in that it’s an industry that has a large proportion of family run businesses, isn’t fully digitized yet and is just starting to explore the impact that tech can have.
Q. How long have you been with CleanCloud and what do you enjoy most about your role?
I joined CleanCloud in January 2023. As part of my role I lead the team and set the marketing strategy, overseeing all of our channels including our paid campaigns like PPC and Facebook ads, our product launches, brand campaigns, content creation and customer comms.
I really love the mix of creating the strategy while also getting to roll my sleeves up and get stuck in, because we’re a small company everyone has to get involved, you can’t sit ‘planning’ all day and ask others to do the work so I’ll be there writing a blog, or coming up with ideas for our next campaigns.
I also love the people aspect - managing the team, helping people to develop new skills and learn new things. I also love getting the chance to talk to our customers. I’ve spoken to 4 or 5 customers in the past few weeks and everyone has such interesting backstories and perspectives - I learn something new every time!
Q. Why Marketing?
I think what I love most about marketing is that it’s so varied - there are so many different types of marketing. Search Marketing, Brand Marketing, Product Marketing, Events… and I’ve been really lucky throughout my career to be able to work across all of these different aspects. I like the fact that I get to be creative—creating interesting content and coming up with campaign ideas that will grab attention—whilst also getting to drive the strategy side. I have a real love of a good spreadsheet which I think my team are all too aware of now. And at the end of the day, marketing is about talking to people, and like I said before, I do love to talk to people.
Q. What do you love most about working for CleanCloud?
The pace. We’re a small team but we move quickly and we achieve a lot - from product updates to the sheer volume of content we create, there’s always something interesting to work on.
I also love that we work with other small businesses, that’s one of the things that kept me in hospitality for so long - the people, and this is a similar kind of industry. It’s great to speak with people who are super passionate and pour their hearts and souls into their businesses. We connect with them on a personal level and really care about making sure our system has everything that they need.
And speaking of people, the team at CleanCloud is great. We’ve built a really hard working but fun environment where everyone gets along.
Q. What is your go-to office lunch?
I LOVE Atis—they make the best salads! A salad is really easy to get wrong - they can be very boring, but Atis nails it every time. My favourite is the Green Goddess, with blackened chicken. It's packed with spinach, broccoli, edamame beans, and a bunch of other tasty ingredients. And it’s gluten free, which as a coeliac, is very important!
Q. What is your favourite book or film of all time?
I’m an avid reader so choosing just one favourite book is hard! It’s always changing but today’s top 5 is:
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (the entire series is fantastic)
- Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (which is also a really good mini-series)
- The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (a great piece of historical fiction, which I absolutely love)
But that could be different by next week - I’m always on the lookout for a new book to read.
Q. How do you like to spend your weekends and free time?
I love spending weekends with my family and we try as far as possible to make sure weekends are for the kids. I have two little boys aged 5 and 3 who keep me very busy! We have a blast running around with the kids at the park, setting up playdates, and visiting museums. I like to cook when I get the time, admittedly there’s not much of that with 2 small kids but it’s nice to get them to help out in the kitchen. I also love the theatre and of course, reading. An evening with a book and a glass of wine is heaven.
Q. Do you have any travels planned?
We do like to travel with the kids, I’d love for them to have lots of different experiences. We’re heading over to Massachusetts at the end of July to spend some time with friends. When we last visited our eldest was just a baby so we’re looking forward to doing a lot of outdoors activities with them now they’re both older. And next year we might make it back over to Australia to see our godchildren - just trying to figure out whether we meet in Australia or somewhere ‘inbetween’ like the Caribbean or Vietnam. Who knows!