How do you maintain an entrepreneurial spirit in a global marketing agency?

Ian Millner is Co-Founder & Global Chair at Iris, a business he started 25 years ago and which he’s helped grow to 1000 people across 17 countries.

In this episode, Ian shares how he:

• Achieved the right balance between enjoying the journey and heading towards a shared destination
• Brought together the right team with the right chemistry at the very start - which naturally attracted clients
• Created a shared ownership structure to drive motivation and loyalty within the team (peaking at 50 shareholders)
• Allowed people to follow their passions and dreams by backing their ideas for new ventures and opening in new locations
• Created a sense of excitement and being together on a big caper within the business
• Navigated taking outside investment and the impact this had on culture

Ian humbly talks about his incredible journey, how it unfolded, and what he did to get his team to be high-performing.

How do you create and maintain a culture to enable happy and high-performing teams?

Jane Slimming is Founder and CEO of Zeal. She’s been running the agency for 14 years.

In this episode, Jane shares how she:

• Defined their values on day #1 and consistently embeds these into everything they do
• Allows people to progress their careers based on their unique factors of success
• Is very transparent about business performance, no matter how badly they’re doing
• Gets people to disagree with her and then actively praises them when correct to do so
• Launched the Zeal Bucket List to push people out of their comfort (and make their personal dreams come true)
• Spearheaded Zeal to win the award for Best Agency Culture

Jane was a great podcast guest with a lot of ‘zeal’. Her quote about what’s worse than having a hole in the team is truly memorable!

How do you maintain a high-performing team when growing from zero to 100 people

Danny Bluestone is Founder and CEO of Cyber-Duck. He started the agency in 2005 and grew it to 100 people. Last year they were acquired by CACI.

In this episode, Danny shares how he:

- Balanced the competing needs of financial performance and the all-important people aspects

- Built a culture around adaptability, accountability, selflessness and having an entrepreneurial spirit

- Embedded the right type of behaviours both when the business was small and then when it became larger

- Implemented a recruitment process as rigorous as Google’s, based on their three pillars of exceptional talent

- Created a mission for each individual in the team aligned to their business plan

- Recruited the wrong people in the early days and had to deal with a large-scale team rebellion

Danny talks candidly about what worked well and what didn’t, during his almost 20-year agency journey.