About me
At a very early point in my working life (goodness me it seems like only yesterday!) I had the very
good fortune to discover that I loved the agency world of creative brand communications and that at
heart I was a Strategic Planner.
Enjoying the challenges of distilling and articulating brand positionings and propositions, conceiving
powerful creative Brand platforms, building international channel strategies to engage and change
the behaviour of audiences at pace, delivering meaningful commercial growth and value, have
remained a happy constant throughout my career.
But, perhaps of greater importance in those early years was my own recognition of the driving desire
I had to be an employer rather than an employee. Entrepreneurial spirit and mindset were hard
coded into me and it would be pointless resisting it!
As a result, after shamelessly extracting as much experience as I could from some of the best
teachers and talents in the agency world at the time, I founded my own communications agency.
WARL.
Madness of course!
Across the best part of 30 years, with the unstinting support and energy of untold numbers of hugely
talented, ambitious colleagues, we managed to grow from an initial group of 15 to a successful 130+
people business. WARL, was a London based, international, full service, fully integrated, strategic,
and creative, Retail and Shopper marketing agency. Publishing work in over 25 languages with
clients located in over 12 countries; Tesco, Diageo, Arcadia, Coca Cola, Albert Hein, P&G, McArthur
Glen, O2, Bensons, Muji, Moss to name a few. An interesting cross section of institutional and
challenger minded businesses (often PE driven) with different cultures, ambitions, constraints, and
opportunities.
Critically, we built WARL as a place people wanted to be, with a fierce collective ambition,
developing great strategic thinking, executing some great commercial creativity with some
wonderfully supportive clients. All of which meant, for me, going to work was never hard even when
the commercial landscape was.
The result was ultimately an agency worth selling but perhaps more importantly an agency worth
buying. So, of course we sold…..you think you’re ready but you’re not really!......to a lovely bunch of
people at VCCP, a fast growing, private equity owned (US based Provident), communications group..
So what next?
To my own surprise, (but apparently not my wife's!) the thrill of helping to build new successful
businesses, that I’d love to work at, remained too attractive to ignore!
So, happily, that is exactly what I find myself doing with a small but exciting, number of businesses.
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