After seven years of study and work in the United Kingdom, a Little Rock girl raised with a sense of wanderlust decided it was time to come home.
Her timing couldn’t have been better. Or worse, Jane Madden said, depending on how you look at it.
A Little Rock Central High graduate, Madden is the daughter of Joe Madden and Ellison Poe of Poe Travel, and the 25-year-old marketing pro chose mid-March to end her expatriate sojourn.
That was just as the coronavirus began disrupting life across the globe.
“I decided to come back to Little Rock, then COVID happened,” Madden told Arkansas Business last week. “So in a day and a half I just kind of packed up my life, but I wasn’t able to have the closure of saying goodbye to anyone because we weren’t allowed to leave our houses.”
Flights were still active from Europe to the U.S., so Madden landed back in Little Rock, spent 14 days in quarantine in her mother’s house, and almost immediately hired on with Ghidotti, the Little Rock PR and content marketing firm.
“I reached out to Natalie [Ghidotti, the agency’s principal] and told her that I was home, and she was like, ‘This is perfect timing.’” Well, almost.
When Madden took the job as account executive (Ghidotti had promoted Bethany Siems to account supervisor), the staff was working from home, so onboarding broke the norm.
“To be candid, this is my first week being in here every day,” she said on Tuesday from Ghidotti’s 29th-floor suite in the Regions Tower. “The team is just so kind and welcoming, but it’s weird to be a new member introduced to everyone on Zoom calls.”
But she felt truly lucky, just three weeks back home, to land a job and “not just be sitting in my childhood bedroom.”
However, after four years at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and three at the Illustrated London News, once a venerable newspaper now reshaped as a content marketing firm, Madden was out of practice as an Arkie.
“My friends are making fun of me because I don’t have a car,” she said, laughing. “I’m so nervous to drive. I definitely need a car now, because I’m back in Arkansas. But over the weekend, I drove from Hillcrest to the Heights, and I was so proud of myself! My friends were like, uh, congratulations.”
As pleased as she is to be home, as an 18-year-old she was just as eager to leave.
“I wanted to get out of Arkansas and out of the South in general,” she said. “You can’t go much farther than the North Sea.”
The lure was St. Andrews, on the coast northeast of Edinburgh, a region best known here for its golf links. But Madden was under the spell of the University of St. Andrews, founded by the pope in 1413, eight decades before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Not a bad place to study art history, or English for that matter, Madden’s majors.
From the oldest center of higher learning in Scotland, Madden graduated to the oldest illustrated newspaper in Britain, though by the time she got there it was producing magazines and coffee table books for luxury brands like Godiva chocolates and Aston Martin automobiles.
The job was fulfilling, but she felt a strong tug.
“Then the more I thought about it, I remembered that I have so many friends here; my family’s here, and I just really missed being home,” said Madden, whose uncle Tony Poe owns the Atlas Bar, a travel-themed spot on South Main. “I got what I needed from being in London, and I loved that experience, but I was ready to come home.” She said many of her high school friends remain in Little Rock, and that she had managed to keep in touch with all of her “besties” through the years abroad.
Ghidotti said London’s loss was Little Rock’s gain.
“She was ready to get back to Arkansas, and a mutual friend told her she should talk to me, as what she was doing in the UK was very similar to what we are building here at Ghidotti,” Natalie Ghidotti said. “She was with a dedicated content marketing firm in the UK and really understands the strategies we’re putting in place for clients. We’re very excited to have Jane.”
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