Trust and Alignment During an Exit

That's really fascinating.

So, James, I would think that maintaining culture would be top of mind for many founders when they're close to making an exit.

How do you integrate the companies without losing culture? Or is that something you even focus on?

Yeah, it's a really good question.

I mean, we purposely don't integrate.

So all of the agencies have their own office locations.

They have their own company policies.

They have their own management teams.

And they're all quite different, to be honest, in terms of you walked into those offices, you wouldn't necessarily say they're all part of the same group because they are run differently and the different personalities.

And so we've purposely not impacted the culture, but we've tried to instill a shared set of beliefs.

You know, at the group level, we have to have certain beliefs.

policies and ways that we work and shared ethos.

But we don't want to get involved in the day-to-day decisions around these agencies.

So the culture is everything, especially in the marketing world, because as you know, agencies are built on people.

There's very limited IP.

There's not a huge amount of assets.

It's just teams of creative people that love doing their work.

And so if you start to interfere with that, the result is that the output of work will drop, motivations will be reduced.

And they're working for small independent agencies because they like that environment.

And so we purposely don't want to bring them into a big corporate environment where that may may not align with the employer's interests.

So yeah, it's a really difficult one to manage, and especially at our size, because agency headcount is anywhere between 15 and 50.

So these are small, independent.

They've not broken that 75-people barrier where things start to change and decisions start to evolve.

So they're happy to stay at that level, and that's what they enjoy.

So yeah, that's how we approach it.