After entering the career as a media coordinator, Bianca Falloon climbed her way up the media ranks and is now general manager at Ryvalmedia. It was not, however, always plain-sailing. With refreshing honesty, she talks about her journey from banking, to media agency boss.
You might not know it now, but Falloon actually started out her career as a stockbroker, working at one of the world’s biggest investment banks. Whilst the job was prestigious on paper, Falloon said it really opened her eyes to the male-dominated nature of banking at the time.
“I just felt, I’m never going to get anywhere,” she said, adding that her experience at the time “it was a very toxic male dominated workplace”
She decided to leave banking and, after being awarded a bonus for setting up a new trading system, left to go traveling for a year.
Upon returning, and reassessing her career, she decided to take up a position as a media coordinator.
Whilst the choice was clearly the right one, Falloon said a number of things – such as the drop in pay – made her question her decision at first..
“It took me nearly four years in the media industry to earn what I was earning as a grad in banking,” she says.
“I was second guessing myself because I was working so hard. And the hours were quite long, and I was getting paid peanuts. And I was like have I made the right choice? Should I go back to finance?”
Despite the hard situation, Falloon said she didn’t want to have a career where she was “chopping and changing” all the time.
“At that time it was all about getting tenure on your CV,” she said.
“I was always having this internal dialogue in my head of whether I should change, but then I thought ‘no, I really enjoy what I’m doing. I think I’m where I’m meant to be’. Then I just decided, I’ve made a decision. I’m going to see this through and let’s see where we can get to”.
Despite her change of direction early in her career, when Falloon joined the media industry, she knew early on that she wanted to be leading an agency.
“Early on, I knew that I wanted to run an agency so I just tried to keep gradually progressing, getting to the next level, saying yes to different opportunities, learning different skill sets’.
One thing Falloon clearly has a knack for, is pitching to and managing relationships with household-name clients such as Woollies, BWS and Click Frenzy.
Honesty, she says, is the key to winning big clients and keeping the relationship.
“If they’ve got targets that aren’t feasible with the budgets they have you need to be transparent with your clients and provide solutions including how close you can get to target, Or how much budget would you need to be able to make this work? Try to be transparent and fair in your approach back to them. They really appreciate honesty”.
Falloon achieved her goal and has now been calling the shots as GM of Ryvalmedia Sydney for a year.
“After spending years at a multi-national it was time to start something fresh. Ryvalmedia had already launched successfully in Melbourne and Brisbane, so Sydney was a great opportunity for me to lead the business backed by RyanCap and the great national leadership team at Ryvalmedia”.
When it came to advice for other women in the industry, Falloon said letting go of perfectionism is key.
Perfectionism really held me back when I was younger, because I didn’t want to take on anything new unless I could do it 100 per cent to perfection, which as I’ve gotten older I’ve kind of gotten over that”.
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