The story behind Tartan.

Tartan exists because most marketing advice comes from people who have only ever been on one side of the business. We've been on both.

Our founder has worked as a COO, running the operational side of a tourism business - managing teams, budgets, systems, and the day-to-day complexity that rarely makes it into a marketing brief - and as Head of Global Marketing across multiple tourism and hospitality brands, shaping how those businesses told their story to guests, trade partners, and media worldwide.

That lived experience on both sides of the table is what makes Tartan different. When we build a marketing strategy or facilitate a workshop, we already understand what it's like to sit in your chair.

The hardest part of marketing isn't creating content or running ads. It's the translation problem: turning what a business actually does - in all its operational, human complexity - into something that lands clearly with the right audience.

Most businesses are too close to their own work to do this well. Most external marketers don't understand the business deeply enough to do it faithfully. Tartan sits in the middle: close enough to understand the reality, skilled enough to communicate it clearly.

Before founding Tartan, we established Mackenzie Consulting in 2016, delivering facilitated workshops in brand strategy, leadership, and customer engagement - building the facilitation and structured-workshop skills that now underpin Tartan's training offering.

Tartan was founded as a single unified brand to bring together the consultancy and training work we had been developing across both employed and self-employed work.

For 18 years, we coached competitive sport. That's not a throwaway line - it's a genuine lens through which we approach teaching and capability-building.

Coaching a technical sport teaches you to break complex skills into manageable progressions, and that the best coaching is the kind that makes itself unnecessary - where the learner eventually doesn't need you in the room.