About Jo

At the end of 1990, Jo was sent to the then Czechoslovakia by her London law firm, initially on a three-week contract and later for six months. Just as her contract was (thankfully, as she thought) coming to an end, she met and made one good friend and decided to stay. Another six months later the idea of setting up a ‘sports marketing agency’ came to fruition.

Initially, JWA Prague was just Jo and her very young assistant, working out of one room in a two-roomed flat. And whilst the initial idea of sports marketing soon changed into ‘business marketing’ (not least because of the ‘sports mafia’ that was operating in the country at that time), business soon started booming.

At its peak, JWA employed more than 20 people, and over the years it built up a range of specialities, developing as the country itself developed; first real estate, then hotels, then crisis management and financial PR. The agency's clients included many of the Czech Republic’s earliest international investors, as well as local companies such as the biggest real estate developer at that time, ECM.

Coincidentally, ECM became the main sponsor of the main tennis tournaments in the country, the ECM Prague Tennis Open, and that, combined with starting work for the Prague International Marathon, reminded Jo of her original plan to specialise in sports marketing, with the end result of her setting up a sister agency to JWA, Czech Sports and Marketing Agency.

From the mid-90s right up to 2020, JWA and CSMA continued to grow and develop, and Jo, as one of the ‘elder statesmen’ of the Czech international business community, became a well-known and very positively-regarded public persona. During that time, Jo became a board member and then Chairman of the British Chamber of Commerce in the Czech Republic, growing its membership under her stewardship from less than 100 companies to more than 500, and spearheading the first ever ‘Women in Business’ group in the country, as well as the first proper mentoring association.

She then went on to become a founder member and then Chairman of the International Business Forum, an international business networking association that continues to be active and highly regarded today. In the mid-90s, Jo was offered the franchise of Superbrands in the Czech Republic, setting up Superbrands in Slovakia a couple of years later. While both companies did reasonably well, her feeling was that it was too early in both countries' lives for such a project, but a few years later Superbrands in the Czech Republic was launched again under new ownership and Jo became a member of the brands judging panel.

Jo has won many awards for her work, including for the marketing strategy and launch campaign of the Tesco shopping mall at Obchodni Centrum Letnany, and the PR campaign for Prague International Marathon. She was also a judge for the Club magazine ‘women of the year’ awards for three years, and was also nominated in the ‘business’ section, and was listed as one of the ‘Top 20 women in business in the Czech Republic’ on three separate occasions.

Jo is a regular public speaker in both the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom, and she is happy to talk about a range of subjects from marketing and communications to business in the Czech Republic, to being a woman in business. She is also a regular blogger, the author of three published books, and an active competitor in sports.