Encouraging everyone to think and act differently - with Mike Craddock

How do you transition from a full-time YouTuber to running a 100-person agency?

Mike Craddock is Co-Founder & CEO of the social creative agency NewGen. He’s been running the business for 10 years and leads a team of 100 people across the UK, New York, and Paris.

In this episode, Mike shares how he:

• Instils the mantra “Slow down to speed up”, after growing the agency too quickly at the expense of quality in the early days
• Has a ‘F**K It Bucket,’ a monthly pot of money the team can spend however they want to support current or new clients
• Pushes responsibility down by creating multi-disciplinary teams to solve business problems and drive initiatives
• Challenges account teams to take a new initiative to a client at least once every 3 months, and share what they’ve done differently every 2 weeks
• Ensures senior people have 10–20% free capacity to think and bring proactive ideas to clients
• Runs a GG NewGen Slack channel where people praise each other and react using custom emojis representing their values

More recently, Mike has made a number of senior hires to take the business to the next level, engaging the wider team throughout the hiring process so everyone understands the new roles.