Agency founders’ starter pack: who should you hire first?
Image Via Raj Rana / Unsplash
In The Drum’s mini-series within their weekly Agency Advice feature, they passed on advice from top agency leaders to people just starting out. To start: who should you hire first?
The marketing agency landscape is amid one of its greatest ever periods of change, resulting in several of its biggest employers pursuing thousands of job cuts as staffing levels at major employers drop drastically.
One upshot of all that movement is the release of a vast amount of talent – at all levels – into the market. Some of that talent will find homes at other agencies. Some will leave the industry altogether. And some will set up new agencies.
To welcome that new crop of agencies (call it the Class of 26), today we are beginning a mini-series within Agency Advice, passing on wisdom from agency leaders who’ve done it all before. First up: who did they hire first? And, more importantly, who would they hire first if they were starting it all again?
Louisa O’Connor, managing director, Seen Presents:
“My background is delivery – I worked my way through project management into client servicing. My mantra is: deliver flawlessly and you’ll get repeat work. With that ethos, my first hires were in project delivery. It was what I knew. I was focused on building a team that could execute exceptionally to build a reputation as a ‘safe pair of hands.’ But, although I had the Avengers ‘assembled,’ no one knew who my Avengers were. So, I later invested in a four-person marketing team with one goal: to make us famous. Let the industry know who we were, what we stood for and what we could do. In hindsight, I should have pulled that trigger earlier. If you’re a new business, there is no point being great if you’re not on people’s radar.”