I have spent thirty years building a career in business. Recruitment for over 25 years. Funding Projects, Business Advisory, council-funded support programmes for business owners. A 1:1 coaching programme called Roadmap to Revenue. All of it built with care, and all of it useful in its own way.
But none of it was quite this.
At fifty-six, I am doing the most important work of my life. And to explain how I got here, I need to take you back to the beginning. Not to my first job, or my first client. Further back than that. To a housing estate in Grimsby, and a shop with a counter where people came not just to buy things, but to belong.
Growing Up on the Grange Estate
I was born in Cleethorpes and grew up on the Grange Estate in Grimsby. It is not somewhere people tend to romanticise. It is the kind of place that appears in headlines about deprivation, described in statistics that flatten whole communities into problems to be solved.
I lived there for sixteen years, and what I remember is something entirely different.
My mum and dad had a retail shop on the estate, that was an important part of the community. It was called Mumby’s. The strapline was "Mum buys at Mumby’s." They ran it for thirty years, and people from the Grange Estate have fond memories about Mumby’s. You mention it now and they smile. They remember it.
It was a proper old-fashioned shop with a counter. People would come in to do their shopping and then they would just stay. They would stand at that counter and talk.
To my mum and dad, to each other, to whoever happened to be in. My parents knew everybody's name. They stocked the things people on the estate actually needed and wanted. And in a place that did not always feel like it had a lot going for it, Mumby’s was a small but real point of pride and connection.
My parents did not stop there either. They gave their time to the Grange Community Centre. They helped run community bingos, provided the prizes, showed up. My mum was treasurer of the community centre for many years. They were woven into the fabric of that estate in the way that only happens when people genuinely choose to be part of something.
I was watching all of it. Absorbing it. Learning things, I would not have words for until decades later.
The Grange Estate was a community in the truest sense of that word. Everybody knew everybody. People knew each other's struggles and showed up for them anyway.
There was laughter and sadness and hardship and kindness, often all on the same street, sometimes all in the same day.
That quality of connection, the way people looked out for each other, the way the community came together when things went wrong, shaped me in ways I am still uncovering.
The Years Away
I left the estate at sixteen. Moved to Cleethorpes to live with my grandparents, then at eighteen I packed a bag and got on a train to Surrey were I worked as a nanny. I then moved to Berkshire, and worked in hospitality for many years. From hospitality I moved into recruitment which became my long-term career. Eventually I joined British Airways as cabin crew and spent years flying across Europe, seeing more of the world than that teenager from the Grange Estate could have imagined.
But I always missed home. Not in a vague, wistful way. In a specific, physical way. The seafront. The community. My family. The feeling of belonging.
Every time I came back to visit, I did the same thing. Before I even went to see my parents, I drove straight to Cleethorpes seafront, sat on the wall, and said hello, I'm back, I missed you.
I moved home for good at twenty-nine. It was not a triumphant return. Life had been hard and I needed something familiar underneath me. Grimsby and Cleethorpes was there, the same as it had always been, and that was exactly what I needed.
Building a Career in North East Lincolnshire
Once I was back, I threw myself into work. I spent sixteen years in recruitment at Manpower, getting to know the businesses, the people, and the networks of Grimsby, Cleethorpes and Immingham in the way that you can only do by showing up consistently over a long period of time.
After that came funding projects and business advisory roles, supporting business owners through council-funded programmes. Then going self-employed and building Roadmap to Revenue, a 1:1 coaching programme for business owners who needed structure, clarity, and a path forward. And running alongside that I offered a marketing service to various organisations.
Through all of it, I built knowledge of this area that runs deep. The businesses here. The challenges. The potential. The gap between what this place actually is and how it is perceived from the outside.
And through all of it, something kept pulling at me.
The Shift I Could Not Ignore
The pivot to storytelling did not happen overnight. It was not a decision I made at a desk one afternoon. It came from the work itself.
When I began working with The 2025 Group and Our Future North East Lincolnshire, something shifted. For the first time in my career I was sitting inside organisations that were entirely focused on place and community. Listening to the people running them. Trying to find the words for what they were doing and why it mattered. And I realised, gradually and then completely, that this was the work I had always been drawn to.
It was not about revenue structures or marketing funnels. It was about stories. About the people behind organisations. About place and identity and what it means to build something in a community that others have written off. Every time I helped someone find the words for their work, something in me recognised it. This is it. This is what I am here to do.
Working alongside those two organisations also showed me something I could not unsee. The same pattern, over and over, in the community organisations across North East Lincolnshire. They were doing extraordinary work. Quietly, determinedly, with very little resource and a great deal of heart. And almost none of them found it easy to talk about what they were doing.
The gap between the work they were doing and the story they were telling was real. And it was costing them. In funding. In visibility. In their ability to connect with the people and organisations who could support them.
That is the gap I knew I could help close. And that is where this pivot came from. Not from a strategy. From experience. From being in the room, listening, and recognising something I had been moving toward my whole life.
Why This Place, Why Now
There is a version of Grimsby and North East Lincolnshire that gets told over and over in the media. Deprived. Left behind. The butt of a joke in films that have always found it easier to mock than to look properly.
I have lived here long enough, and loved this place long enough, to know how incomplete that story is.
This is a town with a wind energy industry that is shaping the future. With companies like Ørsted choosing to be here. With community organisations doing vital work on the Grange Estate, in Nunsthorpe, in East Marsh and West Marsh, and across the whole region. With people who have stayed, or come back, and decided to build something here rather than somewhere easier.
The negative narrative is not just inaccurate. It is harmful. It discourages investment, dents the confidence of people who live here, and makes it harder for the organisations doing good work to be taken seriously.
Part of what I want to do through every piece of communication I help create is push back against that. To make sure that the full story of this place gets told. The complexity, the community, the pride, the possibility. And to make sure that people in these communities know what support exists for them, because so often they simply do not.
That is not a job description. It is a commitment.
The Full Circle
I am now fifty-six years old. I work as a place-based storytelling marketing partner for organisations, community groups, and place-based projects across North East Lincolnshire. I help them find the words for what they do and share those stories in a way that feels honest and true to who they are.
The sixteen-year-old who grew up in that shop, watching her parents stand behind the counter and really listen to people, could never have known that this is where she would end up. But looking back, it makes complete sense.
Everything I know about community, connection, and what it means to listen properly, I learned on that estate. The person I am at fifty-six, who believes in community, who wants to tell community and business stories, who feels a genuine pull toward the organisations and people that others overlook, she comes directly from those sixteen years on the Grange Estate.
I do not think that is a coincidence. I think it is the whole point.
Why I Am Sharing This
I want to be honest about something. I still have a mortgage to pay. I still have bills. The work needs to be sustainable and I know that.
But I am not doing this for those reasons. I am doing it because it is where everything in my life has been pointing. Because I believe the stories are here, waiting to be told. Because businesses and organisations doing good work in overlooked communities deserve to be heard.
And because it comes, completely and honestly, from my heart.
If you work with a community organisation, a place-based project, or a business in North East Lincolnshire and you are struggling to communicate what you do and why it matters, I would love to have a conversation. You can explore how we might work together at www.josedavies.com
*If you found this useful, I would love to stay connected.*
You can find me onLinkedIn and follow along as I share more about the work, the stories, and what it looks like to build something meaningful in North East Lincolnshire.