What we offer
Agency Board
Want a safe space to talk with your peers? 🤘
Agency Board is a quarterly board meeting for agency leaders who want to accelerate their growth, challenge their thinking, and gain insights from like-minded peers.
Each meeting is held face-to-face and chaired by an experienced agency leader.
They are a structured, high-value experience designed to help you navigate the challenges of scaling an agency.
Even better, participation is included as part of your Agency Hackers membership.
The details
How does it work?
- When you join Agency Board, we’ll put you in a group with 10-12 other agency leaders.
- You’ll meet up four times a year (when you join, we’ll check the dates work for you).
- Two weeks before the session one of our team will phone you to capture what challenges, issues and questions you’re bringing to the table.
- One week before the meeting you’ll receive a board pack, which you’ll be expected to read in advance.
- During the board meeting, the chair facilitates according to a set structure that gives everyone some time in the spotlight.
Members of each board are expected to show up, participate, and maintain confidentiality.
Joining a board
Why should you join?
- Being part of Agency Board will help you challenge your thinking, and help unpick tricky issues and questions with perspectives from experienced peers.
- By bringing your experiences to the table, it will help you tackle roadblocks to your agency’s success in a structured, solution-focused setting.
- Plus, you can take advantage of the Agency Board being led by expert chairs who have built, scaled and exited their own successful agencies.
If this sounds like something you could benefit from, please apply to become an Agency Hackers member. (Already a member? Get in touch with Anne Harlow.)
Board chairs
Our chairs
Julian Reiter was Chief Exec at Positive London and has 30 years’ experience as business leader, consultant and CEO. Julian has led work for FTSE-250 and Fortune-500 clients (PwC, Aviva, BP, Vodafone) and helps agencies sharpen their leadership, strategy and commercial performance.
Lisa Paasche is the founder of EKTE Vision and former CEO of Verve Search, the award-winning SEO and Digital PR agency she built from startup before selling it to Omnicom Media Group. She works with founders, agency leaders and leadership teams to help them create businesses that are both commercially successful and personally sustainable.
Simon Bollon is the founder and director of Boutique, a multi-award winning channel agency based in Leeds.
Tom Wilson spent two decades building a Marketing Services Group from a small team to over 200 people, through acquisitions, an MBO, rapid growth, significant downsizing, and the burnout-driven breakdown that eventually came with. Tom now works with founders of agencies between 5 and 50 people who are ready to stop being the answer to every problem in the business.
Simon is a career digital entrepreneur having built and sold a group of content affiliate sites in the mid 2000s before then setting up an agency group that was acquired by IPG PLC in 2016. He now works with growth companies and scale ups across not just agency but also software and tech-enabled service businesses as well as within private equity.
Claire Hutchings helps agency and consultancy owners build businesses that work for them. She founded Chime Agency, a marketing agency for agencies, in 2022, supporting over 30 agencies with their marketing strategy, proposition and positioning. She now acts as an accountability partner, motivator, advisor and coach to agency owners.
Karl Heasman is a non-exec, business coach and mentor specialising in digital, marketing and communications agencies typically between £500k and £5m. Over 25 years he built businesses within marketing across the UK, US and Singapore, successfully exited his own agency and mentored over 50 others — helping independent agency owners get more from their businesses and enjoy the journey.
Jeremy Williams is The Agency Coach. After building a multi-million-pound agency and selling it to a global communications Plc, he now helps agency owners build businesses that are profitable, scalable and sustainable. He is an exited agency owner, experienced NED and certified Master Coach.
Chris Bantock is the founder of The Agency Adventure. After 15 years going from freelancer to running a full-service marketing agency, which he successfully sold in 2018, he now dedicates his time to guiding agency owners — providing the advice, support and accountability to build better, more sustainable businesses and become better leaders.
David Wain-Heapy co-founded Best Response Media with Bachir Smahi, building the digital agency before selling it to Brave Bison Plc. The pair now co-run Prodigi, building globally distributed teams of digital professionals and giving businesses access to top-calibre talent from a global pool spanning more than 25 countries. David also sits on the BIMA awards council.
Anne is Community Director at Agency Hackers, and therefore the main port of call for our community. She helps grow the community, co-leads the agency leadership programme, and runs our Agency Boards. She also spreads the word about Agency Hackers by attending industry events.
Simon Wright has spent 25 years building, scaling and selling businesses — and helping others do the same. Having founded, led and sold multiple consultancies, he now works with founders, boards and investors through The Growth Advisor and his trademarked PREXIT™ framework, helping businesses prepare for exit. He chairs and advises several high-growth creative companies.
Andy Brown coaches agency founders whose business is working but who are starting not to. His coaching is built around The Emotional Overdraft, his Amazon number-one bestselling book on founder performance and wellbeing. He brings 30 years of agency experience — running and advising agencies, and serving as an award-winning Non-Executive Director — having guided founders through growth, leadership transitions and exits.
Ian Harris is the founder and director of Agency Hackers, the largest agency community in the UK. Ian has his fingers in most pies at Agency Hackers, but especially ‘the business stuff’ – like finance, recruitment and strategy. A former journalist, he founded Agency Hackers as a humble email newsletter and has grown it into the community it is today.
Andrew Southcott has been CEO of Captivate Group since 2020 — a multi-award-winning group of independent agencies that helps leading brands captivate audiences across the digital and physical customer journey. Captivate is the home of Stir (PR), Seen Studios (Retail), Seen Connects (Influencer and social) and Seen Presents (Experiential).