The executive with a knack for travelling

PATRICIA MBATIA–MACHARIA, Country Manager, EXP

AGE: 40

EDUCATION: Moi University, Eldoret – BA Education

CAREER

Silver Bullet- PR and Communications

MultiChoice – Head, PR and Communication

EXP Momentum- Country Manager

There is no single picture of Patricia Mbatia online where she isn’t smiling. Not one. Go ahead, Google her.

“I like happiness,” she explains with a blinding smile when I meet her in her colourful office in Lavington, Nairobi.

Before Patricia was who you have known her to be – a PR and events player - she was a teacher. For three years, she, together with a friend, opened an art school in Westlands and –in her words – “had the time of our lives.”

But when Silver Bullet put up their shingle, and Chris Harrison (chairman, Ayton Young and Rubicam) offered her a job, she took it up.

However it is the seven years at MultiChoice – as their head of PR and Communications that truly made the Patricia that is known to many Kenyans today.

Patricia now heads EXP Momentum, Kenya’s pioneer experiential marketing agency, where all the signs show she is at home.

Later, as her picture is being taken after this interview, our photographer tells me, “Look at her eyes, they sexify her pictures!”

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You strike me as one of those people who wouldn’t walk past a flower without stopping to pluck and smell it. With eyes closed.

(Laughs hard) Oh goodness, that’s a bit dramatic. But yes, I like happiness. I’m an optimist. I hate misery; it just doesn’t work for me. I’m the kind of person who likes happy endings; I’d rather watch a movie like “The Proposal” than “He’s just not into you.”

In that case you are a romantic.

(Laughs) Yes, I’m always trying to match-make my friends. I believe in love and flowers and happiness. I got married on Valentine’s Day, for crying out loud, and that’s something I always wanted to do.

So what is the most romantic thing you have done for Mash (the husband)?

(Laughs and thinks hard)

Careful what you pick because he will probably read it and think to himself ‘Er, that wasn’t even that romantic!”