Amy McManus had a lot to smile about as she cut the lime-green birthday cake of the company she started to “pay the odd bill and for holidays”.

Today AM Marketing has more than 40 clients on its books, many of whom joined her and husband-turned-business-partner Brad for a party last month to celebrate the third anniversary of the agency she set up on the advice of a firm which rejected her.

She had been happily working as a freelance marketing consultant for 18 months before an unsuccessful pitch led her to launch a formal company.

“A prospective client which rejected my bid said they would rather work with a company than a freelancer,” said Mrs McManus.

“So I thought maybe I needed some business cards.”

She called her friend Mark Ansell, from SPC Design and Print, in Sandwich. Half an hour later, he sent her back her company logo and AM Marketing was born.

The company, based in Chatham, near Canterbury, works primarily with small and medium-sized businesses, doing website design, search marketing, graphic design and YouTube marketing.

The firm has become a Google partner and was named marketing and PR business of the year at the Kent Independent Trader Awards last year.

Mrs McManus has become a sought-after speaker on the conference circuit.

She will give presentations at Digital in Kent at the Great Danes Hotel in Maidstone on Thursday, October 20, and at Grow Kent at Ashford International Hotel on Wednesday, November 30.

"We work in an industry where sometimes you can suffer with the curse of knowledge..." - Amy McManus, AM Marketing

She said: “I love doing conferences because it keeps us grounded. We work in an industry where sometimes you can suffer with the curse of knowledge.

“We are in digital every day and are so used to the jargon and concepts that sometimes it is hard to relate that back to the customer.

“When I do the presentations I get people asking questions and get a sense of what is useful. It keeps you grounded and stops you running away with yourself.”

Her husband Brad joined the business in February. He quit his job in London – where he had managed digital marketing accounts for Disney, Citroen, Very and Eurotunnel – after the company won a pitch for a national marketing campaign with Ultroid, a piles treatment business with clinics in Canterbury and Whitstable.

Mrs McManus said: “I never thought I would get it in a million years and when I won it I said to Brad ‘you have got to quit your job’. We were always thinking about it and this new client allowed him to join full time.”

What is it like working with her husband?

“It is actually amazing,” she said with a laugh. “We enjoy doing separate things. I really love networking and working on artistic stuff like design, creative and websites. Brad likes structure and numbers and loves account management. There is not much crossover which we can argue about.”

The next step for the business is hiring people, with Mrs McManus hoping to take on her first employee in January, although it already works with a network of freelancers.

Success, she said, is down to the simple rule of being honest.

“You must never promise anything you can’t do,” she said.

“Also, it sounds cliche, but just do your job well. A huge amount of work we get comes from referrals. Some clients have been with us months, if not years. Some have been with us since the beginning.”