Earlier this year Farmerswife, a provider of project management and scheduling solutions for the media industry, announced a new leadership team. What was striking about the announcement was that three of the four positions went to women.

This included Jodi Clifford, who was promoted to chief executive officer, following her tenure as managing director, USA. While such female-dominate leadership teams may not be common elsewhere across the industry, for Clifford it was all part of a natural evolution at a company that has long supported its female employees.

“It was quite organic,” she says. “All of us were already on the leadership team. Michelle [Griffin, COO] was our CTO, she was the head of development, Jen [Way, chief revenue officer] was running the UK office, and I’d been running the US office. All of us worked together well and so when this opportunity came up, it was fairly organic.”

Clifford herself has been with Farmerswife for 13 years, joining as a project manager and working her way up to running the US group before becoming CEO. She cites the flexibility offered by the company as a key reason both she and other female staff members not only stayed with Farmerswife but were able to develop and thrive.

“The company has always done a really good job of being a flexible work environment. One of the things that I’ve always appreciated, and I can say for probably all of us that as women, sometimes you need a little bit of flexibility, and if you don’t have that, it tends to affect your career. I’ve always taken the tactic, why would you let the best people go because they need a little flexibility. Keep the best talent, and we’ll work around it. We all work really hard, it just might not be in the traditional way people used to do it.

“Women tend to get underemployed sometimes because they have to find something that works for both their home and their work life. I feel really lucky that Farmerswife has allowed me to do both.”

That ability to keep hold of talent, both male and female, is also credited with the longevity of Farmerswife, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.

“Our 25-year anniversary is a big one for us. I think one of the reasons it’s important is that we’re in a niche space and almost every other competitor has just slowly gone away, so we feel really proud that we’re still here, that we still have original ownership, that we are standing strong, and looking forward to continuing.”

“Women tend to get underemployed sometimes because they have to find something that works for both their home and their work life. I feel really lucky that Farmerswife has allowed me to do both”

The company will be celebrating this milestone at IBC2025, while also showing updates to Farmerswife and project collaboration platform Cirkus. For Cirkus the big news is the addition of new Quoting features. This allows teams to create and manage project quotes directly alongside task planning, timelines and communication, putting everything in one centralised workflow.

“Quoting is a big move for Cirkus,” says Clifford. “It’ll be really exciting to show that to some customers. I think they’ll be excited about it. And then there’s lots of things from a Farmerswife perspective, we have a lot of new features that we think will appeal to the broadcast segment.”

This includes enhancements around shifts, so not just scheduling the projects that people are working on, but improvements around who’s working when, who can work the next shift and so on.

Clifford also expects AI to be a topic of conversation on the RAI show floor, and it’s something the team has been exploring internally.

“AI is the buzzword, but we are also quite practical and we’re wondering what people want in AI,” she says. “We’re a company who’s always tried not to assume we know what’s best. We talk to our customers and we don’t like to develop in a vacuum. We like to develop with what’s realistic, and we try to work with our clients. So we’re still trying to understand what it is that would be helpful.

“But on the same note, we are really good at figuring stuff out and we’re looking at how we’re using it daily and we’re finding cool things from the tools we already have. So, you can spit a CSV out of Cirkus and feed that into AI, and it does amazing things and that’s an everyday thing that all of our customers can take advantage of. Maybe they just haven’t thought about it because they don’t have the space for it. But we’re playing around with some of those things, what’s already out there that you could just do today. That’s the creative part of our team that we love, figuring out a solution that’s already there that you don’t have to pay for custom development, and I’m sure our clients are out there playing around, but we think that’s an exciting thing just to do today.”