Episode Eight: Rachael Smith – Chief Commercial Officer of Travel, 777 Partners Private Equity Firm

I met Rachael @fuse_agency when I started in 2018. Rachael was always really enthusiastic and energetic, ran a brilliant team of wonderful minds and I always learned something from working with her. I was interested to hear her journey to where she was at the time when I met her in 2018 and I have been blown away with what she has achieved in the 3 years since she and I last worked together so was obviously keen to hear more.

 Rachael has always worked and possibly assumed that that was what she would do after finishing school, she also really enjoyed learning and that is what spurred her on to consider studying at university. She cited this as also a way to delay making adult life choices (AKA a career path). I agree with Rachael here and is possibly one of the reasons I chose university as well.

Rachael decided that if she were to go to university, she would go to the best. She wanted to go to either Oxford or Cambridge. Her teachers tried to deter her citing that she wouldn’t get in, especially as she had got a ‘C’ in her maths GCSE. One teacher had faith and helped her apply and she was successful and also was successfully funded through the Access program. Rachael learned a lot about herself here and found that she really did need to work hard if she were to succeed after having found school relatively easier in comparison.

After graduating, Rachael went to work for a think tank on helping government and businesses work with younger people. This led to working for a consultancy business that helped businesses who focused on sustainability, equality and diversity. Working on a project with them here, she was introduced to partnerships agency Fuse which is where we met. She enjoyed being a consultant and working with lots of different brands with different business needs and finding solutions for these objectives through partnerships. Her last project with the was for EasyJet to help them to commercialise more of their real estate assets. Whilst working on this project, Rachael’s client proposed she go and work for them. 5 months later the pandemic hit but Rachael navigated her way round the redundancies and got promoted into an even bigger role. This has served her well going into her new role where she gets to use her entrepreneurial and commercial acumen to work as CCO at PE firm 777 Partners. We get to hear about what she is working on at the moment and what’s next for her in this episode.