GOOD CEOs: Issue 4

 
“Moving it on, without moving it off.”

 
This little mantra is attributed to Sir Nigel Bogle, the account management mastermind who co-founded BBH (he was the second ‘B’ in the creative agency’s initialised name).

I love the simplicity of this phrase, and reckon it’s helpful for anyone in the business of building a brand, or growing a company.

Because everyone strives for growth, but there are dangers if you don’t include direction, consistency, and coherence into the mix. Progress is about momentum, but it’s also about striking a balance – between what you are now, and what you’ll be next.

 
Evolution (without mutation),
momentum (without drift)

Transitioning
while protecting the core
 

Why am I opening with this?

Because it was one of the key threads from our most recent IRL meeting of GOOD CEOs. A two-or-so hour discussion (read: therapy) session with some of our 65-member group of creative leaders. We get together each month and talk through the stuff that’s intriguing, frustrating or frightening us all. Beyond this, our team at UNKNOWN has over one thousand conversations over the same period with a wider group who make up the greatest minds in the game.

Since our last newsletter, three themes have been occupying the creative leaders in our network.

1. Transitioning your business
   How to move fast without breaking things – like your reputation, revenue or self-respect.

2. The feedback famine
   How we shy from truth telling – and what we risk to lose though mass sugar-coating.

3. The junior talent crisis
   How we’ve started viewing new entrants to the industry as a cost rather than an advantage.
    

In this issue, we’ll take a look at each one of these in turn. Then I’ll follow up with our fortnightly predictions - there’s two this week, and I’m calling them (i) Return of the Human, and (ii) 100 New Independent Agencies.

Let’s get into it.

Transitioning your Business

 
Everyone knows that brands die when they stand still. Leaders need a mandate to push their businesses constantly onwards and upwards.

But it’s easy to get lost.

Brands that depart from what they are – and what they mean – alienate people. So the greatest businesses have a sense of continuity, identity and authenticity. That’s consistency. For great brands, the ideas they’re founded on are so strong, that all that’s required is an updated articulation, a new twist.

An evolution. 🌱🐟🐒 🕺

Something that moves them on, but never off.

Subscribers to GOOD CEOs will know that UNKNOWN has been on this journey. Eighteen months ago we took the decision to evolve our brand from being understood as a recruitment company, to being known as a growth consultancy.

We ran head-long into the new UNKNOWN.

It involved a mass move-on. A new articulation of our design, language, positioning, assets and the way we market and present ourselves to the world.

These things are hard,
but fun.
 

What’s harder (and less fun) is all the restructuring and figuring out that happens behind the scenes. What is the structure of this new company? How does it create value? How do we change our behaviour, systems and attitudes in a way that doesn’t negate the great impact we’ve had before?

Growth is never painless.

And ours was accompanied by one curveball that’s worth a closer look.

After the buzz of our re-launch, something weird happened. Normally we have four or five briefs flying into our inboxes each week. But shortly after we’d unveiled the new UNKNOWN things were eerily quiet. I wondered whether we’d positioned ourselves out of the market. Perhaps we’d gone too hard on talking about the future and we’d forgotten our clients – in the current and in the past.

Then we thought of something basic: and Googled ourselves.

 
We'd fallen off
Google’s page one
 

Where we’d always been organically. Where a large proportion of our inbound recruitment and executive search business comes from. Fixing it was simple, but it was a scary moment when we realised that the evolution of our business had made us (temporarily) invisible to a tonne of potential clients.

We’d moved on. But also just a little bit off.

This brings us to another issue that creative entrepreneurs are going to have to get comfortable with in the coming months – the fact that SEO won’t matter in the same way as before. The leaders in our network are starting to familiarise themselves with Ask Engine Optimisation (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), because where you show up in the search results hierarchy won’t matter when people stop punching “creative recruitment company in London” into Google, and instead ask an LLM something more sophisticated, like: “based on what you know about my business, which is the best growth partner to help me build my team?”

Given that LLMs scour and prioritise reputable sources, traditional public relations (PR consultants selling stories to editors) is about to witness a renaissance.

When it comes to transitioning while protecting the core, there are two key learnings
 

☝️

Keep an eye on the basics

In the drama and excitement of a rapid forward leap it’s WAY too easy to accidentally de-prioritise the stuff that got you there in the first place
 

✌️

Keep an eye on the team

A sharp new set of brand assets doesn’t re-make your culture. Unveiling the transition is just the start – you have to instigate behaviour change every day
 

The Feedback Famine

 
In the last decade, it became fashionable to talk up the virtues of failure. Start up CEOs would brag about how many companies they’d crashed in quick succession. You’re not cocking things up – you’re piloting concepts, beta testing, then stacking learnings.

It’s totally true that failure is part of growth. But more recently – according to our community – we got pretty bad at giving and receiving feedback. We got squeamish about flagging areas for team members to develop, and less open to being accountable for gaps in our knowledge or craft.

That’s about to be a problem.

 
If people can’t grow.
Neither can businesses
 

Covid is partly to blame. In the pre-pandemic era, high-performance cultures insisted on a feedback continuum – 360 reviews, performance evaluations, mentorship and management where it mattered. More than anything, juniors picked up good habits through osmosis. They saw their bosses in studios or HQs exhibiting the craft, and wanted to emulate them.

Post-pandemic, it’s a different set of dynamics. Anyone who is less than six years into their career is used to a hybrid situation where offices are sparsely attended and work lives are more staid, more formulaic, more transactional. Less organic, less spontaneous, less human.

“Can I grab you for a sec?” has disappeared. Hybrid means it’s harder to build the relational bedrock that’s needed to offer feedback, safe in the knowledge that it will be taken for something constructive - rather than some sort of attack.

Sam Pearce* is an executive coach for the creative industries. His company Train of Thought supports the greatest creative organisations in the world. He’s also a co-founder and the Non-CEO of our IRL GOOD CEOs group. During our session, he communicated a typically smart way around the feedback famine.

 
Think of it as a gift
🎁

 
Every leader has been there. Ahead of handing down feedback, you steel yourself for a difficult conversation. Your anxiety rises, because you’re setting the expectation of a tricky exchange. You go in tense, which puts everyone around you on edge.

Sam’s philosophy is to frame it positively – and think of feedback as a gift. Because, when you think about it, that’s exactly what feedback is.

 
You’re offering your expertise
You’re offering your time
You’re offering empathy
 

You’re giving a granule of knowledge designed to serve them. It just might deliver value to their lives and career in the years to come.

But here’s the real kicker.

If they don’t see it like that? It’s not your problem.

In an ideal world, everyone would react positively. But any awkward moments are simply a tax both parties have to pay. If you’re receiving, you’re paying it to get better. If you’re offering, you’re paying it to allow more trust to your team, and to grow as an organisation.

So that’s the best way to fight the feedback recession.

 
Build trust first.
Approach feedback positively.
Accept that how someone
receives it isn’t your problem.
 

The goal is to create a culture where giving feedback is normal, constructive, and slightly uncomfortable. Growth never comes from the comfort zone.
 

The Junior Talent Crisis

 
We’re seeing this everywhere – and all over LinkedIn especially. It’s being positioned that AI agents offer creatives an instant promotion. A copywriter with a trained LLM is akin to a head of copy. A designer with one is an art director. A journalist with one is more like a managing editor.

That’s great. But while we assign all low-level creative tasks to AI our junior talent is disappearing. Agencies now have more senior staff, fewer mid-weights, and almost no entry-level positions. Programs like Mother’s Runner – once the gold standard for developing juniors – are rarer than ever.

The problem is perception. In the mass fear of getting left behind, we’ve stopped seeing junior talent as the future of our companies or industries, and started viewing them as an annoying cost centre. This is a shame, but the trend looks hard to reverse.

But our group of GOOD CEOs had an idea: re-think junior talent as a revenue-generating opportunity from day one. One approach was to assemble creative trios.

 
One junior.
One senior.
One AI agent
 

They tackle creative problems or briefs as a nimble, fast-moving team. Juniors bring energy and (potentially) tech fluency, seniors offer taste, judgement and experience. AI does its speed and efficiency thing.

Meanwhile, there’s more everyone can do to elevate the current generation of juniors – who have it harder than any other cohort in history. Mentoring one individual, sharing advice, or making a helpful connection can have a transformative impact on that young person’s career or life. If you’re reading this and thinking ‘damn, I should do more…’ just start with one meaningful action.

Predictions and depictions

 
From our conversations with creative leaders this month, there are two big trends taking shape.

1. Return of the Human, and

2. 100 New Independent Agencies

Here’s a quick primer on what these shifts means for creative leadership.

(i) Return of the Human

Have you noticed how our urge to optimise everything is hurting our ability to connect with each other? The machine is starting to take over – we’re asking AI for relationship advice, cooking tips and validation on our biggest life decisions. We’ve gotten used to getting the instant, unequivocal, zero-judgement answers:
 

 
Our biggest tool is also becoming the confidante that our friends and family used to be. So I’m calling that relationships will start to be a huge re-focus. That means an investment from agencies and brands in how people and teams function together. I think people are going to invest in courses, in public speaking, in networking. Even in manners and social etiquette.

Because while we’re getting things done faster, we are feeling less. And that’s a problem for team morale. How do get your employees to enjoy working with you? It's not knowing more, it's feeling more. And the best way to feel more is by connecting more. And the best way to connect more is to ensure that the people around you feel seen, heard, and loved.
 

 
(ii) 100 New Independent Agencies

 
“F*ck that massive place.
I’m starting my own thing…”
 

How many times have we heard this phrase – or something like it – in the last year? The answer is LOADS. It’s not just to do with insecurity in some of the big networks – there has never been a lower cost to entry for a founder or few to launch an agency and start delivering work for a select few lucrative clients.

The systems are accessible. And the things that would have bewildered a founder six or seven years ago are amazingly simple. SquareSpace can build you a site. AI can do your accounting and legal stuff. The culture is one of glorification, too. Media phenomena like Diary of a CEO have convinced millions of listeners that they could – and totally should - become founders themselves.

Everywhere, agencies are branching off from holding companies, creating agile, niche businesses that can out-execute larger, slower competitors.

Like 10 Days – rapid strategic and creative execution in just 10 days.

Or Block Report – blending data insights with creative activation in a subscription model.

Then there’s OBB Media – which merges entertainment, influencer culture, and advertising with smart, sharp data.

We’re entering a golden era of small scale, big impact creativity. Will hundreds – maybe thousands – of Davids overwhelm a dwindling number of Goliaths? We’ll see.

Q&A Highlight –
Replacing Yourself as CEO

 
We got loads of thought-provoking questions from people who tuned in to our last podcast episode. But one query stood out.

 
“Hi, Ollie, my co-founder and I are stepping back, and appointing a group CEO to run the business. We want to stay operationally involved, and want to sell the business in the next three years. How would you approach this hire? Do we go for a visionary or an operational leader?”
 

My advice:

If you're replacing yourself with a group CEO, you're doing really well. And there's two of you already doing that role. I imagine you're at a good place. You're making lots of money. You're making great work. Acquirers want to see as little founder dependency as possible. They're going to want to see that your systems are codified, that the machine doesn't break if you guys aren't there. 

 
So a group CEO
is a great move
 

The first exercise would be to audit your own roles. Write down a list of all the stuff you love – what would you struggle to let go of? Do you love building the brand? Doing the client work? Enjoying close ties with the leadership team? Then do the same with the things that you hate. Use those two lists to build your future job spec.

Then based on the gaps, clarify what the new CEO will own, and how their success will be measured over time. There's a great rule of implementation that runs something like this…

“I tell you what to do in the first month. We tell each other what you're going to do the second month. And then the third month is you tell me what you're going to do.”

Most importantly: accept that a CEO will have a vision and want autonomy – guide them initially, then step back. Most founders underestimate autonomy. The ideal scenario? Within a year, the CEO should be able to operate independently, letting you focus on the areas you love.

 Some parting thoughts

 
Transformation is messy. Feedback is hard. Junior talent is scarce. Yet these challenges carry opportunity. Protect your core, invest in people, and embrace the independence of your business.