Mr B & Friends

Wed 17 Nov 2021 11:00 am UK Time
(Note: this session is 90 minutes)

Mr B & Friends is a £2.4m, 28 head-cound brand strategy and design agency
• In this Open Source session, we’re looking at how founder Simon Barbato went from being a one-man band to working with huge household names.
• There are significant lessons in trusting your gut instincts, preparing your agency for substantial growth, and the psychology of breaking the £1m barrier

Mr B & Friends founder Simon Barbato will put his own agency’s journey under the microscope – expect plenty of lessons from his twists and turns

Two years after launching, Mr B & Friends had grown to ten people, and things started to feel like they were heading in the right direction.

But the pace was too slow for Simon. “It was quite a gradual process in those first couple of years, and I remember feeling slightly frustrated by the lack of pace,” says Simon. 

In fact, it took the team five years to reach the elusive £1m mark, in 2011. But once they broke that sound barrier, all bets were off.

“Once we got over that first £1m, there seemed to be this rapid acceleration to the next million, and we won a number of big household brands. It was almost as if the breaking of the £1m mark was a psychological barrier, because once we cracked it, things started to snowball really quickly,” he says.

“2016 was a really seminal year for us,” says Simon. “We were just turning 10 and we won some major, major accounts which we still have today.”

However, while on the surface things were going well, all was not what it seemed.

  • In this Open Source session we take a deep-dive into Simon’s business – and hold each lesson up for inspection.
  • There are significant lessons in trusting your gut instincts… preparing your agency for substantial growth… the psychological impact of trying to make it past the £1m mark… and making sure you have the right people in the right seats.
  • Don’t miss this candid and transparent session.