GOOD CEOs

Lisa De Bonis has worked at Mother, co-founded Work Club, led Huge and is now at Brandtech Group. She explains why PE and creativity run on different clocks, what productising an agency really costs, and why the sea of sameness is about to get worse before brand and craft win back their value.

What makes an agency attractive to a buyer and what makes them walk away?In this episode of GOOD CEOs, Ollie looks at the things that can make a business harder to sell: over-reliance on one client, too much dependence on the founder, processes that don’t scale, and a proposition that’s become harder to explain as the company has grown.But beyond the obvious commercial questions, there’s a bigger one:What are you known for?

Ryan Honey spent 22 years building BUCK into one of the industry's most respected creative studios, then turned down a holding company buyout to build something different: Residence, a global network of creative companies that keep their own names and independence. Ollie sits down with Ryan to unpack why he said no to the big check, how he decides who gets to join the network and and where he thinks AI helps versus where it's noise.

Ollie flies solo this week to reflect on what six years of building UNKNOWN - and the thousands of conversations a month with agency leaders - have taught him about scaling well. He unpacks Rob Pierre's idea of growing your company in Vector rather than JPEG, the Four Agreements that actually hold a culture together, why you should treat your clients like prospects and your prospects like clients, his CIAO framework (Clarity, Incentivisation, Autonomy, Objectives) for why good intentions still lead to bad outcomes, and the shift he's seeing across the industry from bloated departments to small "Navy SEALs" teams of senior practitioners backed by a flexible bench of specialists.

Natalie Graeme co-founded Uncommon less than a decade ago and it's now arguably the best creative studio in the world, working with the likes of British Airways and The Ordinary. In this episode, she tells Ollie why a studio that swore it would never take outside money ended up partnering with Havas to fund its US expansion, how they protected Uncommon's culture inside that deal, and why turning down a huge early payday nearly broke the studio before it made them.