Mark Sinclair co-founded yourBusinessChannel in 2005 and is now its business development dynamo and key editorial executive. Talking with him it becomes clear that some of his outstanding qualities come in complementary pairs: pragmatic business sense and philosophical curiosity: an ability to observe from the side and a capacity to get stuck in: open-mindedness and decisiveness: seriousness and humour: appreciation of what is and appetite for what’s next.
Mark comes from New Zealand, where he studied law, German literature and philosophy before starting his career with a big law firm. His love of communication and advocacy took him into some of the country’s hottest PR firms with high-profile clients, but he soon felt the urge to strike out on his own.
He quickly built up a thriving marketing and PR consultancy, doing things in a non-traditional way and helping clients to achieve greater profile. In a few years he had married his teenage sweetheart Rachel and was living the dream with great friends, great family relationships, a thriving business and a great first house, when everything changed.
We went to Aitutaki which is in the Cook Islands – idyllic. Beautiful, white sands, shallow waters lapping away. We were lying on the beach reading mountaineering books …. I was mid-paragraph and I hate being disturbed mid-paragraph … and Rachel rolled over to me on the beach and said “Let’s sell the house and move to the UK.” We had talked about it in the past. And I went “Alright” and carried on reading and that was it. And I meant it.
The decision had nothing to do with sunstroke or cocktails. They had both travelled a lot and longed for the sense of connectedness that they felt in Europe. So with fateful timing they sold up everything, travelled for 9 months, and moved to a flat in Highgate, north London, moving into their new flat just a week after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Despite arriving in the UK at a time of high anxiety, with no job to come to, he’s been flat-out busy ever since.
The idea behind yBC is to make expertise available to the people who need it, in video form, with great production values. We involve experts who can help solve business problems, and we get them together and create a micro-TV channel …. it’s truly socially-networked business television.
At the heart of Mark’s work at yBC is interviewing many of the experts who are featured. This gives him plenty of opportunities to meet a lot of different people and have great conversations.
I often privately lament that I’ll never be able to know everything or read every book …. I see conversations as a very convenient and interesting and engaging way of being able to find out stuff that I would never find out.
In keeping with his “both sides now” personality, future plans embrace here and there. The future I see is one where we’re living in two places interchangeably … I’d be quite interested in living back in New Zealand for a period of time but I’d miss Radio 4 so we’d need to be here.
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Extracted from a conversation we had in Bristol, UK on September 13th 2010, recorded and photographed with Mark’s consent for the purposes of this piece.
