OUR MISSION? COMPLETED IT. SEVEN THINGS WE LEARNED ALONG THE WAY
By: John Doe Group
Tags: Female Entrepreneurs, Marketing, Advertising Agency, Female Founders, Pr

Ten years ago, Pam and I launched WIRE from a kitchen table (shared with Pam’s baby daughter) in the middle of a global recession. On day one, we wrote down our mission, and our commitment to it has been unwavering since.

Our plan was to: Turn WIRE into one of Scotland’s most successful creative agencies then scale across the UK.

By 2019, we were building multi-channel creative campaigns for some of Scotland’s top brands and had won every Best Agency Award in Scotland (as well as some in the UK.) Yesterday we announced – from a kitchen table shared with our home-schooled children in the middle of a global pandemic – that we’re merging with renowned culture agency, John Doe Communications. Our mission? Completed it, mate.

Together, we’re retiring both the WIRE and John Doe Communications brands to launch the John Doe group. Pam and I are equal shareholders of the group alongside industry powerhouse, Rachel Bell and Magin Trewhella (formerly the youngest Head of Marketing at Pernod Ricard.) We’ve expanded our footprint to add offices in London and Manchester, grown our team to 38 and increased our revenue to £3million. And although our names are changing, our collective ambition hasn’t. Together, we’ll continue to build brands that matter and work with people we admire.

The journey to this point has been a blast and a half. Difficult, joyful, exhilarating, and exhausting, all in equal measures. In the last ten years, we’ve learned enough to write a book. But given we share offices with our children, we’re also trying to keep up with two separate seasons of Drag Race and we’ve just completed a merger, I’ve actually only got the time to write a blog. So, here’s seven fundamental guiding principles that I think led us to this point.

1) Ambition comes from within

We started as a two-woman operation with no outside investment and no idea how to really run a business. Our experience up until that point had been delivering creative PR campaigns for the country’s most famous brands but the delivery focus had mainly been on traditional PR. So, it took quite a bit of ambition to write down that we planned to challenge the top ad and marketing agencies in Scotland and it took some gumption to believe that we’d convince people to give us those briefs. On top of that, we had the gall to add that we’d have offices in other parts of the UK within ten years.

And honestly, in the early days, people would scoff a bit when Pam was introduced as our CD, we were talked over and consistently dismissed as ‘PR girls’ and we were not invited to pitch for things or collaborate on projects that we knew we’d absolutely smash.

I only share this to say – so what? Really, what other people think doesn’t matter as long as you really believe in your own mission. We made our own projects, we found incredible clients who believed in and supported us, and we were loud and vocal about what we could do. With the support of our incredible families and our team, we pushed all the way in.

2) Don’t stand still

Although we started out as a PR agency (called Wire Media), we always wanted to build a no rules, media-neutral agency. One that could constantly reinvent itself to meet the changing needs of our clients and the audiences they wanted to talk to. We called it the Madonna model (With hindsight, the Prince model would have been a better reference for us, given we’re now the agency formerly known as WIRE)

Over the years, we stayed opportunistic, adding services and skills until we had a team that could conceptualise, build and activate integrated campaigns in-house.

This allowed us to achieve massive organic growth as we consistently pitched new services to existing clients growing our remit right across channels. Doing that work attracted brand new clients too.

Around 80% of our new business wins now are full creative briefs vs 30% just three years ago.

3) Make decisions

As founders you need to make decisions all the time. Small ones, irritating ones, boring ones, fun ones, risky ones, joyful ones and life-changing ones. We learned early on that making a bad decision is not actually the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is, in fact, to make no decision at all. That’s what will strangle your business.

The thing that always worked best for us was focusing on the bigger picture, rather than the short-term impacts.

For example, both Dave, our Creative Director and Tom, our Story Director sent us incredible CVs in the same week three years ago to say they were relocating to Scotland from South Africa and London. We could only afford one of them. But we hired them both.

Short term, that did not make for restful nights. But looking at the bigger picture, we knew that it was a calculated risk. Ultimately, they’d help us to produce better work, and grow the type of creative work we could offer at a quicker pace.

And we were right. Hiring both Tom and Dave in that year helped take our pitch conversion rate from 60% to 81%.

Sometimes, I imagine one of them working at a different agency just because we didn’t take that risk. And reader, I shudder.

4) Build around your people’s needs

Pam and I have always believed that an agency can only produce truly great work when the whole team has shared values, believes in the collective goal, has each other’s backs and properly reflects a diverse cross-section of society.

We invest a lot of time and energy in head-hunting and finding the very best talent across specialisms but importantly we invest more in building a culture that will allow them to thrive and progress and be happy.

Over the years we have learned that people do not care about football tables or arriving at their desks via slides or fireman poles. Or maybe they do care about that a little bit – but they definitely care more about having flexibility, a good parental package and no emails sent to them after 6.30pm. They also do quite like free pizza and having a cultural allowance to spend each month but they’d rather a good progression plan, investment in training and the opportunity to work on their own ventures.

If you can do fireman poles AND make sure your team have a good work/life balance, then all power to you. But only one of these things will stop them from looking for a new job.

5) Make your clients a promise.

We have been so lucky to work with almost all of Scotland’s most exciting, brilliant brands over the years. Winning clients like Tennent’s Lager, DF Concerts, BAFTA Scotland and Whyte & Mackay in the early days of the agency were absolutely transformative for us – and we’re still grateful to the in-house teams there (Jane Cannon, George Kyle, Rob Bruce, Geoff Ellis, Aarti Joshi, Jude MacLaverty, Alberto Laidlaw – all legends) for taking a chance on us.

Building strong, steady client relationships is fundamental to an agency’s growth and health. We’ve maintained a high client retention rate in part because we produce good work and in part because we are super easy to work with. We’ve always believed that it’s not a clients’ job to manage you. They’re busy doing their own job and it’s on the agency to create an easy and effective account management process.

One of the most important stages of our account management process is our ‘Client Promise’. Signed at contracting stage, it’s a mutual agreement that covers the way we will treat each other going forward. This helps both agency and client communicate with real transparency and to make important decisions together right from the start of the relationship. I thoroughly recommend taking the time to do this – and if anyone wants to see it, email me and I’d be happy to share.

6) Don’t make the obvious choice

Ultimately every agency really lives and dies by the work it produces. Over the last ten years we constantly pushed ourselves to develop strategy that goes beyond the obvious or easy, to produce relatable and effective creative campaigns grounded in people and truth.

Over the last couple of years alone, we’ve:

Created #CloseKnitFriends for The People’s Friend – a yarn-bombed bus that travelled the UK to spread cheer & connection for lonely people during the pandemic

Encouraged people to go off grid with Shackleton Whisky.

Launched Langs Jamaican rum with Scotland’s first pop-up rum shack

Made and sold a lockdown jigsaw for Glengoyne.

Helped the Sunday Post define & promote its quality journalism.

Turned socks into gift cards for DF Concerts.

Swapped Bloody Marys for period products to help change legislation.

7) Look for support when you need it.

Running an agency is pretty hard and there are times that the mission feels insurmountable. But the brilliant thing is that hundreds of other people have done this before you. And your problems are not unique. In fact, they’re common. Which might make us all feel less special, but facts are facts. So, ask for help sometimes. Call on other people you admire and just ask them questions.

This is how we began working with Rachel Bell. Pam and I were starting to think about expansion, and we needed a bit of advice. The next day I listened to a podcast interview with Rachel, loved the way she talked about building her agencies and her teams and I emailed her to ask if we could have a coffee. She said yes and things escalated quickly from there. Firstly, she became our chair and then she suggested we might want to meet Gin, the MD and joint shareholder of her agency, John Doe.

And so, one afternoon, we had 30 minutes to kill in between meetings in East London and we thought: “Why not? He’ll give us a free coffee. Maybe a bun.”

We instantly knew that we were meeting someone who shared our vision and passion for running agencies that properly represented the different, and often under-represented communities we want to talk to through our work.

So, by reaching out to a stranger that we admired for some advice, we actually found two new business partners to help us complete our mission and kickstart the new one.

There were many more coffees and over-priced buns consumed over many months to bring us to an actual merger, but even in that first meeting we could see that while both of our agencies were growing, winning and delivering significant work already, by joining forces, we could super-charge all of our plans to create something really special.

There’s an amazing energy in our agency that feels like part rebellion, part renewal. It doesn’t just come from the merger; it’s driven by the fact there’s never been a better time to build brands that genuinely matter. Our ambition for the John Doe group is massive, and it will be transformational for those we work with.

WIRE out. (mic drop)