Breakfast With Dee Blick: What Happens When You Sit Down With Someone Who Changes the Way You Think
There are interviews. And then there are conversations that stay with you.
When Cat Robson-Scarborough, Co-Founder and Franchise & Operations Director of Your Man With A Van, was given the opportunity to interview multi-award winning author and marketing genius Dee Blick FCIM for the latest edition of Sussex Exclusive magazine, she didn’t hesitate. Because when someone like Dee Blick says yes to breakfast, you show up with an open heart, an open mind, and your best questions.
The result — a feature called Breakfast with Dee Blick — is one of the most honest, inspiring, and quietly extraordinary pieces of business journalism you’ll read this year. And it’s available to read right now at magazine.sussexexclusive.com.
Who Is Dee Blick?
If you haven’t yet discovered Dee Blick, let’s fix that immediately.
Dee is a multi-award winning author, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, and one of the most respected marketing minds in the UK. With 42 years of marketing experience behind her, she has spent her career doing something that is, frankly, rarer than it should be: sharing everything she knows, generously and without condition, with the small businesses who need it most.
Her book You’re the Best — a masterclass in building an authentic personal brand — has had a direct and lasting impact on Cat and Dan Robson-Scarborough as founders of YMWAV. It is the kind of book that doesn’t just give you a framework. It makes you look at yourself differently. It makes you braver about showing up as exactly who you are.
But Dee is far more than her bibliography. She is, as Cat discovered over breakfast, an exceptional human being with an extraordinary story to tell.
The Interview That Felt Like a Masterclass
Cat has interviewed business leaders before. She knows how to hold a room and ask the right questions. But sitting with Dee, she describes the experience as feeling like a sponge — absorbing wisdom, perspective, and warmth in equal measure. And laughing. Because Dee Blick does not do humourless. If you can’t have fun in business and in life, as Cat would say, what is the point?
What makes Dee so rare — and what the Sussex Exclusive interview captures beautifully — is the combination of exceptional professional expertise and a genuine, unguarded desire to help others. There is no agenda. No hidden curriculum. No sense that the knowledge is being rationed or that the generosity comes with strings attached.
In Cat’s experience, and in the experience of anyone who has spent time in Dee’s orbit, that kind of altruism at the highest professional level is genuinely uncommon. Dee gives without thought of herself. Forty-two years of experience, freely shared, because she believes that small businesses deserve access to the very best thinking — not just the businesses with the biggest budgets.
That, to Cat, is disruption in its truest form.
From Addict to Author — Dee’s TEDx Story
Behind the awards, the books, the decades of marketing brilliance, and the legendary Frenchie (yes, Dee and Cat share a mutual love of French Bulldogs — some connections are written in the stars), is a woman with a story that deserves to be heard far beyond the world of marketing.
Dee’s journey has included addiction. And it is that journey — the darkness, the recovery, the transformation — that forms the basis of her upcoming TEDx talk in Crawley this June. The talk is titled From Addict to Author, and if the title alone doesn’t make you want to be in the room, the woman behind it will.
Cat, who will be in the audience when Dee takes the TEDx Crawley stage on 24th June, cannot wait. Not just as an admirer, but as someone who has been personally supported and encouraged by Dee on her own entrepreneurial journey — and who knows first-hand what it means to be in the presence of someone who makes you feel braver about your own story.
Why This Interview Matters for Small Business Owners
The Breakfast with Dee Blick feature in Sussex Exclusive is more than a profile of a remarkable woman. It is a reminder that the most powerful thing any business owner can do is invest in the relationships and conversations that genuinely expand their thinking.
Cat built YMWAV’s franchise network on the belief that the right people, given the right support and the right opportunities, will always exceed expectations. Dee Blick has spent 42 years proving exactly the same thing — that small businesses, backed by brilliant marketing thinking and genuine human encouragement, can compete with anyone.
That is not a coincidence. It is a shared philosophy. And it is exactly why this breakfast conversation was always going to be worth having.
Read the Full Interview Now
The full Breakfast with Dee Blick feature is available to read in the current edition of Sussex Exclusive magazine at magazine.sussexexclusive.com — a 96-page publication reaching readers across Sussex, with a growing reputation for championing the entrepreneurs, leaders, and innovators shaping the region. It is well worth your time.
Read the interview. Then go and find Dee Blick online. Read You’re the Best. Follow her on LinkedIn. And if you are going to TEDx Crawley on 24th June — you’re in for a treat.
Some conversations change the way you think. Dee Blick is one of them.