Nathalie Agnew – Bringing the world’s brands to Scotland and taking Scotland’s brands to the world

On this episode of Better Business Outcomes, Sarah Waddington CBE from Wadds Inc. welcomes Nathalie Agnew, Managing Director of Muckle Media. 

They discuss:

- Scotland as a buzzing, competitive PR hub delivering outcomes for global brands

- Acquisitions and the need to consider cultural and values alignment, new capabilities, complementary offers and team footprint according to client need and the ambition for the business

- The challenges and benefits of introducing a four-day week, Muckle’s resulting working patterns and the role of tech

- Imperfection in the journey to growth

- Talent as the engine to a business and the importance of creating a culture of trust and empowerment, with strong communication at the core

- The IoD offering a network of like-minded business owners and as a source of professional development around company direction

Presented by Sarah Waddington and Stephen Waddington

For more information visit https://www.wadds.co.uk/
With thanks to our production partners at What Goes On Media

Transcript

Sarah Waddington
Hello and welcome to Better Business Outcomes. I'm Sarah Waddington and I'm delighted to be introducing our first guest of the series. So very much welcome to the show, Natalie Agnew, who's the managing director of Muckle Media.

Nathalie Agnew
Hi Sarah!

Sarah Waddington
It's great to have you on. Thanks for coming to chat to us. I'm keen to get going because you've got a really interesting career history and I think there's lots that our listeners can learn from. So let's start with your personal background. Can you tell us now a little bit about your career path?

Nathalie Agnew
Yeah, so I always wanted to do something in the media of some sort. When I was younger, I grew up in the Highlands and I got work experience at the local radio station, which is now part of Bauer, the local newspaper. And I found a little TV production company that was quite small and local, but doing some really good work. So that got my interest and I studied communications, moved to Edinburgh and I moved back to the Highlands looking for my first job in PR. But at the time there was probably three jobs that I could have had and they all had people in them - that were still in them now actually for most of them! So I sold used photocopiers over the phone for a year waiting for somebody to free up a PR job and then I decided I wasn't going to find one.

So I moved to London with a suitcase, stayed on my friend's sofa and got a job at Porter Novelli, which was my real first opportunity in PR.

Sarah Waddington
Wow, what a great break!

Nathalie Agnew
Yeah, definitely! So that was really good fun. I found it overwhelming the first week, the amount of photocopying I was having to do of the big coverage books and binding. And I was like, ‘I don't know if I can do PR. It's quite stressful’.

Sarah Waddington
You're showing your age a little bit now. We all use coveragebook these days.

Nathalie Agnew
Yeah! So stuck at it and I was in the technology team at Porter Novelli but I was always interested in not kind of being in a box and trying other things so I did a bit of tech and also made friends at every agency I was at in other teams and just found opportunities to you know expand my horizons into things like media training.

So spent a few years at PN and then also within Omnicom I went to Fleishman Hillard. So I was at Fleishman in London for a few years there as well.

Moved up to account director level and then I was kind of coming up for 30 and I was living in London and just rethinking my life choices really and not sure what to do next. And I thought I don't think I want to stay in London and work in a big global agency but I don't really know what I do want to do. So I was at a bit of a crossroads.

So I took a bit of a leap of faith, put three months notice in without a job and relocated back to the Highlands where there was still no PR jobs really. There probably were but there was nothing that really excited me because I was doing so many interesting things in London that I thought that I didn't want to really change my life in terms of the work that I would be able to do.

So I started out freelancing into London contacts from the Highlands, but they all kept flying me to London, which wasn't really the point of what I was doing. So at that stage, I decided that I needed to get enough revenue so that I could hire a colleague and have a business opportunity locally, which is what I did. So that was 12 years ago. And from there, we're now... We'll probably go into the story shortly, but yeah, now 35 people and about £3 million turnover a year!

Sarah Waddington
It's quite amazing. It's a brilliant story because obviously it can be really difficult to make that decision to move out of a big hub. And obviously London is seen as the big place to go where the streets are paved with gold when it comes to PR. And obviously I'm based in the Northeast and obviously split my time between there and London. But there are massive opportunities in the regions and nations and actually not everybody is brave enough to do what you did and create the opportunity and also build the business in the shape that you wanted.

So let's talk about that. First, talk about the Scotland scene. What was it like when you first set up and what's it like now?

Nathalie Agnew
Yeah, I think Scotland is probably misrepresented and other regions as well, because I think people think that maybe the Scotland PR industry might not be very competitive, might be a bit slow and not as creative as it really is. But actually, Scotland in particular, my perspective on it is it's really competitive. There's some really strong agencies up here, both independent agencies that have really grown their brands in Scotland and also some big global players.

Just in Edinburgh you've got Weber Shandwicks, Greylings and those sorts of big networked agencies that are really quite huge in terms of resources. So it's quite a busy space. There's a big fight for talent, much as there is in London. And there's some really good work going on. There's some really leading work from lots of agencies. It's a competitive space.

Sarah Waddington
always been really impressed - ever since I got to know a little bit more about the industry in Scotland when I was CIPR president I was just really impressed. It was all very strategic, really brilliant business outcomes. Really, really interesting on it being a hub of its own. And actually, I didn't know much about it, but you can lift the lid quite quickly and see some fantastic work going on.

So let's talk about that because your business does quite a bit of that. So tell people about Muckle Media because actually you've got a really integrated offer. You've got an array of services that people might be surprised to learn about.

Nathalie Agnew
Yeah, absolutely. So we talk about bringing the world's brands to Scotland and taking Scotland's brands to the world. But we do want to go beyond Scotland in terms of our client base and we have gone beyond it. So we are rethinking that slightly around how we would shape that. But we work with brands such as Popeyes, they've got three and a half thousand stores around the world and they've been launching a lot recently in Scotland. So we're their agency in Scotland - deliver all their on the ground work to launch new stores here. So that would be bringing the world's brands to Scotland and providing that on the ground local intelligence and local network to help brands launch into Scotland.

And then equally, I would say we are positioning ourselves at the sort of premium end of the market. So really working with bigger Scottish brands that are looking to break outside of Scotland, whether that's into the UK or whether it's globally. So to give you an example there, we deliver global PR for Isle of Harris Distillery, and that covers their whiskey and the iconic Harris gin and the beautiful bottle…

Sarah Waddington
Yeah, it's gorgeous that.

Nathalie Agnew
Absolutely! So that's really taking brands to the world.

At Muckle we've got three brands of our own and we'll maybe come on to Spey shortly I think but I'll just touch on it very briefly. So we have Spey which specialises in the drinks industry both B2B and B2C. We acquired Taste Communications which was Scotland's first specialist food, drink and hospitality industry agency. So we work with a number of hotels, restaurants, bars and food and drink brands through that. And then I would say Muckle Media kind of catches everything else. So be that being on the Scottish Government's framework, which is a really competitive framework of five agencies through to pet food, we do accounting. So yeah, really quite varied workload that we have across the B2B and the B2C space. So corporate PR, we do crisis, we do media training, and we have a growing studio and design and digital offering.

Sarah Waddington
Let's go into the acquisitions then because I'm interested in your ambitions for Muckle generally. I was working with Spey and obviously you've recently acquired Spey. Talk to us about what you're looking for from the way that you're building out the Muckle brand.

Nathalie Agnew
Yeah, so obviously the whisky sector is really key to Scotland's economy. It's one of our biggest exports and also a big part of the supply chain as well. So when I had the opportunity to speak to Jennifer about acquiring Spey, it was a really exciting opportunity. We already have some whisky experience, but Jennifer's team have got real specialised whisky skills, networks, contacts and industry expertise. So that was a really exciting opportunity. We also are quite focused in terms of our footprint in Scotland. So if we want to be bringing the world's brands to Scotland, it's really important that we've got boots on the ground, all across the kind of diverse land of Scotland. So we've got people in Aberdeen, Forrests, Inverness, Edinburgh, Glasgow and in between. We even have somebody in a farm in the middle of Perthshire. yeah, How do you go?

Sarah Waddington
Amazing!
That's a really interesting lesson for anybody who's looking to grow their agency or business by, whether it's a macro or a micro acquisition. What other advice would you have for founders or owners who might be thinking, I wonder if there's a business out there that we could either partner with or look to acquire in the future? What lessons did you learn?

Nathalie Agnew
Yeah, so a big one to me is obviously the values that the company operates under. At Muckle our values are to be kind, to get results and to leave the world in a better place. So that's all quite aligned to our B-Corp status. So I would really think about the people if you're acquiring another business, you may not even get to go and meet those people before the deal is done. Certainly in the case of the the Spey acquisition. It was quite a private negotiation and then the teams found out and we all got to meet each other properly then at that stage. So I would really think about values and think about fit and think about how you're going to integrate team and colleagues further down the line and work together.

I would also think about the sort of market fit. So for us, whiskey and drinks - B2B and B2C are really good opportunities and we see a really strong market there and it's complementing what we've already got. I would say Spey also brought us some additional digital skills to really enhance the offering that we're giving to clients and potentially do more of a full service offering for clients that we might be partnering or outsourcing on at the moment.

Sarah Waddington
Yeah, that's really valuable, isn't it? Looking at cultural fit, alignment, additional capabilities and what resourcing you've got. And as you said before, what kind of footprints there is based on the kind of business that you're keen to secure and service.

You also do some brilliant work in terms of your quite forward thinking, the way that you run the business, which I think takes quite a lot of bravery. So obviously there's a bravery in even when you're confident in a values alignment - not meeting a new team until the deal is done. And I know that's often the way it works, but there's bravery in that from a founder perspective. But also you introduced quite early on a four-day week. That has worked out really well for you. I've spoken to members of the team. They've really embraced that. And there has been no dip in productivity from what I understand. Talk to me about that. How did that come about and how has that worked and what did you learn from that process too?

Nathalie Agnew
Yeah, so if you asked me five years ago, people had told me about a four-day week and I said regularly that would just not work in PR. We need a seven-day week really! we're always on and you know, we're either being reactive to crises or proactive around jumping on things in the news agenda. So we absolutely need to be alert. We need to be always operational. And we know that if our clients get in touch with us when they need us urgently, they can't wait two or three days for a response. We need to be on the front foot. So I did previously struggle to understand how a four-day week could work in our industry. But we gave it a go initially as a four and a half day as a trial just to test it out. And then we believed in it and took it forward as a form. And we've not looked back.

It's definitely got challenges, which I can come on to. But the way that we've worked it is we have two four-day week patterns. So half of the team work Monday to Thursday, half the team work Tuesday to Friday. And we sort of pair people up in terms of their client mix, their experience, their level, their skill set, so that any client that's got somebody off on a Friday always has a quick response and somebody looking out for their opportunities on Fridays and fully briefed and ready to go.

I think the challenges come with things like holidays. So we have to be really careful in mapping holidays, unexpected illness, even just, you know, a big conference that lots of people go to. Then we have to we have to think about those things quite carefully. But I would say they still apply on a five-day week. So actually, if anything, this four day week has made us be a lot more rigorous in terms of our communications and our planning and our workload management.

Sarah Waddington
It's forced the planning, right?

Nathalie Agnew
Yes, yeah, absolutely. So, you could always have three people off sick, unfortunately, when you didn't expect it, or four people at a conference or, you know, five people out launching something for a client and I think because we're now used to having the four day week where we know we don't always have all of the team every day it's made us be really rigorous in knowing who's around and who's covering and also for the team to really step in further and help each other and look out for things that could be dropped and kind of catch them quickly.

Sarah Waddington
I appreciate the honesty and I know that you use best in tech as well to make sure that you've got shared systems and platforms so that the team are kind of like well appraised at all times so that they've got that reassurance that they can access the information they need on behalf of clients. While I'm saying everything's still fully protected, which is really great.

I know that being a good employer means a lot to you. You've got B-Corp status. You listen very carefully to the team. Why was that important to build that kind of culture with the people first at the heart of the business?

Nathalie Agnew
Yeah, so I said I'm sort of 12 years in and I think it probably took me about six years to really understand that as a services business,  So that's where the four-day week comes in. Very much our values, which are aligned to the three P's. So to be kind is about people and to get results is about profit and to leave the world in a better place. That's both environmentally and lots of other ways as well. So we often talk about launching a new whiskey and bringing that to the world is actually making the world a better place for whiskey lovers. There's different ways that you can cut these things. But to me, just having a team that feel that they are empowered to make decisions that they you know and that they care about what we're trying to do makes a huge difference and we've got in the moment it's about a 95% retention rate in terms of team so that's huge and really bucks the trend in terms of agencies.

Sarah Waddington
Yeah, just on that, I'm quite fascinated because it's clear that you do afford your teams and talent a fair amount of independence. You trust them, you delegate a lot to them. You know, they're empowered to do what's needed. And that's really interesting, particularly when you've got remote working staff. How do you create that trust? Because obviously from your perspective, the business is growing. What do you need in place to feel secure that this is all going to work in the businesses in your favour?

Nathalie Agnew
Yeah, so I would definitely say we're not perfect. And I think anyone that comes on a podcast and says they've cracked it is probably lying somewhere! So I think that's always important to say, because you listen to these things and people are talking about how amazing everything is. So there's always going to be things that you're learning or things that you're improving. I would say you've mentioned it already, about giving people trust, but also giving them space and room and an opportunity to to check in and to not be afraid to ask questions.

We're hybrid and effectively digital first, so the team can work where they want to work. They choose that each day and decide if they want to be in the office. We have some people who are pretty much work from home most of the time due to their location and that's allowed us to recruit people that maybe we wouldn't have had access to previously. So we are really good on communications, I would say. So we use Slack. We've got online culture where we have fun via Slack, via email, via... We do a weekly internal comms update sharing progress on things, but colleague Bobby also writes a sort of fun introduction to that that's usually quite funny, that's just to encourage people to read it really. So yeah, I would say good communications and open, honest, transparent behaviour.

Sarah Waddington
And no-blame culture is some of the stuff that I've kind of heard in terms of you are open to, you know, it's two-way dialogue, what's happened here and learning from it. So it's kind of like feedback rather than failure. So it's continual iteration. And I think that's really lovely in terms of what I get from hearing about your journey and talking to different members of the team is that it very much is a journey that everybody's on together. And so there's a kind of shared vision which you don't always hear about. And I love the fact that you talk about being imperfect. So often you hear, ‘oh yes, this is how we do it. Isn't it fantastic’? Well, it can be fantastic, but equally can also be a bumpy ride, particularly as you grow the team.

You also, like I do, volunteer with the IOD. So talk to us about that role and how it fits with Muckle.

Nathalie Agnew
Yeah, so a couple of things really. First of all, when I came back from London and started an agency, I kind of overnight became head of HR, head of legal, head of finance, head of everything really.

Sarah Waddington
Chief bottle washer?!

Nathalie Agnew
Yeah, absolutely! And I didn't have that experience and knowledge. So I thought it was really important to continue to develop my communications practice, but also to think about my business skills. So I found Institute of Directors a really strong opportunity to meet other people running businesses that weren't so much in my space but that I could learn from. So the Institute of Directors has been really fantastic for that. I'm currently going through my certificate in company direction so I've passed my finance exam luckily, finance for non-finance directors. That was the scary one of the four.

Sarah Waddington
Yay! That's not for the faint-hearted, by the way. Even if you're used to doing all the finance, I had to grit my teeth to get through that. And I enjoyed it at the end. I tell myself I enjoyed it in the end.

Nathalie Agnew
Yeah, so yeah, but it's been a great way to open up my network to get to meet new people. And it's a really, really friendly bunch. And I now chair the Edinburgh and Lothians branch.

Sarah Waddington
Fantastic. And I can't echo more in terms of how useful the IOD can be in terms of building networks, finding like-minded people who are not in the sector and having those peers in the sector is great. But actually looking outside for diverse perspectives can be really helpful because actually business problems, there tend to be many commonalities, no matter the industry. So actually finding someone you can talk to or perhaps can act as a mentor can be really valuable.

And certainly it's been a turning point for me as a non-exec director going through the certificate, doing the diploma and then becoming a chartered director. It has been a hugely useful learning journey for me and set me up for my current career.

It's been lovely chatting to you. So thanks very much for sharing your story and some of the secrets to Muckle’s success. I hope other people have found that useful because there's been some very generosity in terms of sharing what you've learned as you've been on that journey.

And all that's left for me to say really is that Steve and I will be back in the next couple of weeks talking about all things comms, leadership, management and tech. And we look forward to catching up with everybody then. Thank you very much.

Nathalie Agnew
Thanks Sarah.