A mum who was laughed at when she announced she was leaving her £50k a year job is now living her career dream.
Sammy Dean, who was a sales manager at a newbuild property developer for more than 20 years, decided to leave as the job didn’t offer enough annual leave to peruse her dreams. The 50-year-old was juggling her sales job with jetting off to Ibiza and playing at festivals, until it become too much.
The mum-of-two taught herself to DJ when she was a teenager and would play at small venues, but she stopped when she had her daughters Maddox, 21, and Rhea, 18. In lockdown she picked it back up, as she still had the vinyl decks in her house in Warrington.
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She loved getting back into DJing so much that she decided to leave her job because she didn’t have enough holidays to keep going to different festivals. She said: “I was going to different festivals and was using my holidays and then I would go to another and that was another week off work.
“I was like ‘I’ve not got enough annual leave to do this’ and if I’m going to do it, then I knew I would have to leave my job. I’m a bit impulsive and I was going to Ibiza and I was like ‘right I can’t do a job as well, I’m going to have to quit’ and everybody said I was mental.
“I wasn’t thinking ‘I’m going to be a superstar DJ’ – I just realised that my life can be cut short at any time.” And after performing at Glastonbury Festival in Pilton, Somerset, last year, she’s been invited back to play for the second time.
Mum-of-two Sammy said: “I played in one of the bars and I was really grateful to have that opportunity. When I started playing, there was only around 40 or 50 people but by the end of my two-hour set, it was absolutely rammed and you couldn’t get in.
“It proper went off – it was so good. I’ve managed to get myself another set and play again so I’m just working my way up. It’s so difficult to even play at a bar at Glastonbury because everyone wants to play, whether it’s in a bar or a stage.”
Sammy, who now also works a freelance estate agent, plans to release another track in this summer and also hopes to perform at more festivals this year. Sammy said: “When you get a really good crowd and you can see people dancing to the music your playing, then it’s a good job satisfaction.
“And you can see people vibing off you and that makes you vibe even more. Then people come up to me and say I was brilliant or people message me and say my set was one of the best from the weekend. It’s a really good feeling – there’s not many other jobs that give you that.”
Sammy has urged others to not worry about their age and if they want to do something, then they should do it anyway. But she also wants to remind people that she does most of her gigs for free and wouldn’t tell someone to quit their job, unless they had “money behind them to do it.”
Sammy said: “A lot of this is unpaid to start with – I don’t want to give the illusion that this is an easy ride and you will get loads of money. For the most part, most of the gigs you do are for free.
“But there’s no cheap way of doing this – music production is expensive and going to Ibiza is. When you start doing the gigs for free, you spend a lot of money so I wouldn’t advise anyone to give up their job unless they had money behind them to do it.
“It doesn’t matter how old you are, if there’s something that you want to do then do it because die with memories, not dreams.”
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