Intelligent Marketing - Page 2

Although the plan was to go after blue-chip clients, other startups in Intelligent Marketing’s office provided them with some invaluable early work, helping them to grow and putting them in touch with larger potential clients.

Both are experienced in the fiercely competitive marketing industry, but Tricia and Katharine knew it would be challenging to lure big name clients from more established agencies to their startup firm.

“It’s a very competitive area, it was very daunting,” says Katharine. “And because it’s a creative industry, a lot of our competition is quite subjective – you are often only as good as your last piece of work and actually maintaining that creative standard was something we needed to do as well as the evaluation of things.

“Even with experience, there’s huge risk to a big business moving to a startup, irrespective of 10 years in the industry and proving yourself as an MD elsewhere. That counts for nothing when you’re talking to the marketing director at Woolworth’s”

The duo managed to persuade Rohan Designs to move agencies with them, giving the business a great initial platform by putting four catalogues a year their way. But other clients needed some persuading that they weren’t taking a reckless risk by moving to a new agency.

“They had rosters which we weren’t on,” explains Katharine. “So it wasn’t a simple case of saying ‘We worked with Diaego two years ago so we’ll work with you’ - it doesn’t work like that. You have to go through the entire pitch process and use your contacts with brands. It takes six to nine months.”

“It was a lot of hard work,” says Tricia. “Relationships are critical, and from early on we brought clients into our business and we showed them that we had the systems and offices in place. There were many issues they needed reassurance on if we were going to get the bigger business we were targeting.

“We decided to go after big, blue chip clients, as it allowed us to grow the business at the rate we have.

“If we’d continued fiddling around with tiny businesses, it takes just as much time to manage them to earn peanuts.”

Tricia and Katharine’s rigorous and assertive approach has paid off in terms of pitching for business – the agency wins around 80% of its pitches and has yet to lose a client.

Growth plans are as ambitious as the company’s rise has been impressive – 50 per cent over the next year and a five-year plan that sees turnover spiralling to £20 million. Indeed, the co-founders admit that the biggest challenge they now face is convincing clients they are not growing too quickly.

The “ridiculous” hours, hard work and stress in making Intelligent Marketing such a quick-fire success are understandably severe, especially for Tricia, who has children. But the passionate, driven attitude of the duo is striking as we sit in their newly opened Camden office.

“I couldn’t see myself doing anything else,” says Tricia. “Ultimately, if there’s a financial return, great, but we are still earning less than our previous jobs.

“You have to love what you do, you need to show that in every idea and piece of work and wow clients with the strategy you put in front of them.”

“That passion translates through to the clients too,” Katharine says. “No client wants to sit in a meeting with a fed up agency.

“We are both highly organised, we have very high expectations, ridiculously high expectations, and we are not satisfied with anything less than perfect.”

You get the impression if Intelligent Marketing don’t reach their ambitious goals over the next few years, it won’t be through the lack of trying.

www.intelligent-marketing.com