Culture is what you build when you stop pretending strategy matters - Paul Hutton, FOUR Agency

Reactive isn't a weakness, it's a strategy - Pietro Ranieri, Ranieri Agency

Most agency founders tell you about the plan. The vision, the five-year strategy, the moment they knew. Pietro Ranieri doesn't have that story. "I'm not a business guy, I don't understand any of this stuff. It's just kind of trying to figure it out as you go." That sentence is doing more work than it sounds like. Because the business Pietro built by figuring it out as he went grew to 65 people across Europe. And the business he nearly lost, through no fault of his own work, taught him more about running a company than any plan ever could have. From Farming College to Fleet Street Pietro went to Harper Adams, an agricultural college near Telford. He wasn't from a farming family, his father was a barber, so farming itself was never really on the table. He was there for rugby as much as anything else. There was no plan to end up in PR. A girlfriend was contracting in marketing, and the world of daily rates got mentioned to him almost in passing. He landed a placement with an agency for what he assumed would be six months. He'd get paid more for less work than his account director salary. That was the whole rationale. "At the time, the only reason why I went that way is because I just thought, well, I am getting paid more money to do far less work." The six-month placement never really ended. It just kept extending into more clients, more retainers, more work he hadn't gone looking for. This is the pattern that defines Pietro's career: not chasing opportunity, but recognising it when it was already standing in front of him. About Supo: Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people. For more information about Supo: ⁠ [https://www.supo.co.uk/]www.supo.co.uk [http://www.supo.co.uk/] About Ranieri Agency: Founded by Pietro Ranieri, Ranieri Agency is a London-headquartered communications agency working across consumer, technology and gaming brands, with additional offices in Paris, Munich and Dusseldorf and partner agencies further afield. The agency covers the full spread of modern brand communications, from PR and influencer work through to social, content, digital marketing and paid media, and counts KEF, the hi-fi brand with over six decades of heritage in sound, among its current clients. Ranieri Agency has been named among PR Week's Top 150 agencies, and describes itself as boutique in ethos despite operating on a genuinely international scale, taking on both established giants and challenger brands with the same level of attention. For more information about Ranieri Agency: https://ranieri.agency/ [https://ranieri.agency/]

Culture is what you build when you stop pretending strategy matters - Paul Hutton, FOUR Agency

Most people who talk about culture in business are talking about strategy. Better collaboration. Stronger alignment. Improved retention. Increased productivity. These are the words you hear at conferences, in HR decks, in carefully worded mission statements that no one reads. Paul Hutton doesn't talk about culture that way. When Paul walked into FOUR Agency three weeks before his conversation with Jim, the place was a graveyard of silos. People worked in boxes. Accounts were managed in isolation. No one talked across departments. The whole operation was built like a fortress - every person for themselves, every discipline sealed off from the rest. But that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was what the client said. "We thought you just did the boring PR bit." That sentence contains everything. It's not a complaint. It's a diagnosis. The client didn't know what FOUR could do because FOUR didn't know what FOUR could do. The company had stopped seeing itself. The silos had calcified so deeply that no one could point at another department and say: "We could do something interesting together." That's when Paul understood: culture isn't something you strategize. It's something you feel when it's broken. And you know exactly how to fix it. -- About Supo: Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people. For more information about Supo: ⁠ [https://www.supo.co.uk/]www.supo.co.uk [http://www.supo.co.uk/] About FOUR Agency: FOUR is an award-winning creative marketing and PR agency based in Norwich and London. Established in 1963, FOUR has spent over 60 years shaping brands, crafting compelling stories, and delivering marketing communications that make an unmissable impact. Under the leadership of CEO Paul Hutton, FOUR has evolved from a traditional PR agency into an integrated powerhouse - bringing together brand strategy, PR, social media, and digital to help clients stand out, connect, and grow. The agency specializes in understanding people: what they want to see, what they engage with, and how to move them. FOUR operates with a culture built on breaking silos, playing out of position to support clients, and ensuring that every person who works there leaves better than they arrived. For more information about FOUR Agency: https://www.fouragency.co.uk/ [https://www.fouragency.co.uk/] Culture isn't a strategy. It's what you build when you stop pretending business mechanics matter more than human ones. When you break the silos. When you remember that they'll remember the sports day, not the late night. Ready to hear what happens when a leader chooses that - and what changes in a 63-year-old agency as a result? This episode is exactly that.

AI isn't the threat. Average is. - Anthony Kennedy

Most conversations about AI in marketing start with fear. Will it replace me? What happens to my team? How do I stay relevant? Anthony Kennedy doesn't start there. He starts with a different question: What work is actually worth doing? His career has been built inside global organisations. Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, where he fell into an in-house agency role and discovered how deeply you can understand a brand when you're inside it. KPMG, where he built their in-house capability from the ground up. ION, where he scaled an internal creative services function called Impact across 13 offices, 11 time zones, and 15 specialist teams. Then he stepped away. Earlier this year, Anthony made the choice to work independently - advising senior leaders on AI adoption, in-house team design, and the future of marketing roles. It's the kind of move that only makes sense if you've already figured out what you're actually good at. And he has. Deeply. What Anthony has learned through his career - and what he's now using to advise other organisations navigating AI - is that the threat isn't what everyone thinks it is. The threat isn't AI. The threat is average work. And AI has already replaced it. His reference point comes from David Droga, the legendary creative leader who recently gave an exit interview where he said something that landed hard: "AI has already replaced. It's better than average. Nobody should be trying to save the average." This isn't doom. It's clarity. If AI can do average work better than humans can, then the conversation shifts. The question stops being "how do we protect average work" and becomes "how do we do work that AI can't do." For Anthony, that's where the real leverage sits. Not in fighting technology. In understanding what technology can't touch - and building teams and organisations around that. The episode covers the practical reality of this shift. Anthony talks about building in-house teams at the scale he managed at ION - and why in-house agencies matter more now than ever. He talks about the difference between pressure and stress, and why most leaders confuse the two (spoiler: it's about whether you have your task list under control). He shares his hiring principle - "don't hire a**holes" - and why that rule has held across every organisation he's worked with. But the core of this conversation is about the tools themselves. Anthony uses AI deeply and daily. Six apps on his phone that he engages with every single day. ChatGPT with custom GPTs built around his Gallup Strengths Finder results, so every query comes back with advice tailored to his strengths and guidance on what to delegate. Claude for specific types of creative work. Mistral to create prompts for other AI platforms. Gemini. ProtonLumo with integrated file storage so he can capture ideas on the move and have his AI projects reference them next time he returns. This isn't theoretical. This is someone who's thought about how to work in this era and is now building the infrastructure to do it well. The uncomfortable truth he keeps coming back to: 94% of companies are adopting AI into their workflows. Only 6% of people have been formally trained on it. That gap is where the real problem sits. Not the technology. The preparation. The training. The clarity about what you're actually trying to do with these tools. This episode is for leaders who feel the shift happening and aren't sure where to stand. It's for marketers who know average work is disappearing and wondering what that means for their career. It's for anyone trying to figure out whether they're under pressure (which is manageable) or stress (which breaks you), and whether they've actually got the fundamentals right - clean data, good systems, people who know what they're doing. Anthony doesn't have all the answers. But he's asking better questions than most. And his experience building inside complex organisations has taught him what actually matters when the work changes.

Saying no to millions. Building something real instead - Alex Holliman, Climbing Trees & Oliver Zenglein, The Boutique Agency

Most agency founders never talk about the clients they turned down. The money they left on the table. The moment they realised that winning the pitch and living with the decision were two completely different things. Alex Holliman and Oliver Zenglein talk about it constantly. They met through agency networks - the kind of spaces where people go when they need to process things they can't say in normal business settings. They're both in performance marketing. They're both in different countries. And they're both building agencies that look radically different from what the industry expects. Alex spent his entire career in agencies. Three of the top five media agencies in London. A startup that grew to £25 million before he left. At 35, he thought: if I don't do this now, I work for someone else forever. So he started Climbing Trees 15 years ago. Performance marketing. SEO. Paid media. Ethical from the beginning, but it took him years to realise that ethics wasn't a marketing angle - it was the actual strategy. Oliver took a different route to the same place. He was a touring musician in a ska-reggae band for years. Then he joined windeln.de as CMO from the very start - watched it scale, watched it prepare for IPO, felt Goldman Sachs money change the pressure in the room. When he realised the IPO timeline wasn't compatible with having a family and staying sane, he left. Founded The Boutique Agency in Munich in 2015. Performance marketing. SEA. The same discipline, different country. What they discovered - independently, then together - is that turning away business is harder than taking it. Alex has turned down approximately £1 million worth of pitches over three years. Gambling clients. Fast fashion. Fossil fuel companies. Industries they didn't want to amplify. Oliver has a code of ethics that excludes entire sectors, regardless of financial pressure. About Supo: Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people. For more information about Supo: ⁠ [https://www.supo.co.uk/]www.supo.co.uk [http://www.supo.co.uk/] About Climbing Trees: Climbing Trees is a performance ads and SEO agency based in Colchester, Essex, driven to ethically deliver results for companies that will shape the future world. Founded by Alex Holliman in 2010, Climbing Trees specialises in data-driven growth for B2B organisations, e-commerce brands, and purpose-led organisations including Greenpeace and Olympus Cameras. As a B Corp certified agency with the King's Award for Sustainable Business, Climbing Trees integrates sustainability into every decision - from who they work with to how they measure impact. Their methodology seamlessly combines performance discipline with ethical practice, proving that growth and good can coexist. For more information about Climbing Trees: www.climbingtrees.com [http://www.climbingtrees.com/] About The Boutique Agency: The Boutique Agency is an award-winning performance marketing agency based in Munich, founded by Oliver Zenglein in 2015. Specialising in SEA, SEO, and paid social, The Boutique Agency helps B2B, e-commerce, travel, and purpose-driven organisations achieve profitable and sustainable growth. With a team of over 40 specialists, The Boutique Agency is B Corp certified and operates with core values of passion, transparency, appreciation, and responsibility. They've established a code of ethics that guides which clients and industries they'll work with, demonstrating that performance marketing and purpose-driven business aren't mutually exclusive. For more information about The Boutique Agency: www.the-boutique-agency.de [http://www.the-boutique-agency.de/]

You either make money or make a difference. The lie everyone believes. - Clare Sweeney, Keepace Consulting

There's a lie we've all been told. You either make money or make a difference. Pick one. Clare Sweeney spent years living that false choice until she couldn't anymore. For years, Clare worked in commercial - CRM, FMCG, brand development. Senior Client Services Director. She was good at it. But in 2012, a friend's son was given a life-limiting diagnosis. Medical companies weren't interested. The disease didn't fit the commercial model. So Clare volunteered for a year to help set up a charity. That year changed everything. When she returned to agency, she couldn't feel the same way. She didn't care whether FMCG organizations were selling more products at inflated prices. She wanted impact. And she realised: the lie wasn't true. Profit and purpose aren't enemies. They multiply. Clare founded Keepace Consulting - a crossover practice connecting commercial skills with charity sector impact. She's proof the boundaries are artificial. That commercial marketing transforms how charities raise income. That partnerships between sectors don't compete - they compound. But here's what made the real difference: at age ten, Clare had a moment of clarity. She suddenly realised adults weren't operating from some higher plane of certainty. They were just big kids - still making it up and winging it every single day. No magic age where you suddenly know your stuff. Just people, improvising, doing their best. That insight removed the fear of not being qualified enough. It gave her permission to build something that didn't fit into either category neatly. This episode tackles the false choice keeping both sectors separated and struggling. It's about why commercial skills look different in a charity boardroom, not worse. Why efficiency isn't a dirty word in the not-for-profit space. Why connection, not loyalty, drives giving. About Supo: Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people. For more information about Supo: ⁠ [https://www.supo.co.uk/]www.supo.co.uk [http://www.supo.co.uk/] About Keepace Consulting: Keepace Consulting is a cross-sector fundraising consultancy founded by Clare Sweeney. Specialising in connecting commercial expertise with charity and heritage sectors, Keepace works with organisations across culture, heritage, music and social impact to build sustainable income models that honour mission whilst respecting commercial discipline. With 25+ years spanning both worlds, Clare brings proven strategies in legacy fundraising and corporate partnerships. She lightens the load and adds passion and creativity to fundraising - her infectious energy and nurturing approach help fundraisers maximise their potential. Keepace exists to prove that profit and purpose multiply. For more information about Keepace Consulting: https://www.keepaceconsults.com/ [https://www.keepaceconsults.com/] Ready to discover why the choice between profit and purpose is a lie - and what happens when you stop believing it? This episode is about why the best work happens when sectors stop pretending they're enemies.