We Lost £250,000 on One Senior Hire - Here’s What We Learned About Growing an Agency on Happy Teams

When Sam and Alana founded digital agency Thought Quarter in 2014, they started with "one major client that paid most of our bills, paid on time, and we had a small team of freelancers." By 2017, they knew this business model wasn't sustainable and decided to grow, but lacking agency management experience, they looked to bring in established talent.

 

"We thought what we really needed was a big shot from a big agency to come in and take care of us," Sam explains. "So we went to market, we found a couple of candidates, but there was this one candidate who was relocating from a really large, well known London agency." The senior hire turned disastrous, ultimately costing them over £250,000 in salary, lost business opportunities and projects.

 

The agency growth experience taught them that "there's no substitute for a founder's leadership and clear vision," Sam reflects. "The mistake we made was to try and bring somebody in to do it for us. If you're going to grow a business, you need to do it. You need to drive it." This mindset shift extended to how they view success and failure, Sam references SpaceX celebrating a rocket not exploding as an example of how failure can be an essential part of the improvement process.

 

This business transformation came just as Covid hit in 2021, when their agency revenue dropped below their first month as a company. Rather than give up, they used it as an opportunity to rebuild: "What we had in front of us was a perfect opportunity to just reevaluate what we were doing, why we were doing it and how we were doing it."

 

Today, Thought Quarter has refined its business model to focus on the energy transition sector, working on decarbonisation and renewable energy projects. As Sam puts it: "We're constantly refining the services that we offer so that we're doing higher value services that solve more complex problems for a smaller number of clients. And that's what really excites me about the direction that we're going in at the moment."

 

Listen to more agency leadership insights on the Happy Teams Podcast.