Waypointers – Details, episodes & analysis

If you ask most agency leaders, very few will claim to enjoy negotiating. Sure, it’s a necessary part of business, but secretly most of them will be wondering how they could do things better. Could they have got negotiated better payment terms; could they have secured a larger remit with a client; could they have hired that senior person for less?

Plus, negotiating can be filled with emotion, and dealing with emotion in the workplace can be deeply uncomfortable.

This lively and at times, humorous episode of Waypointers features not one, but two experts discussing ways of improving negotiation skills, with scenarios lifted from their working lives. They clearly lived to tell the tale, but there were some potentially career ending moments along the way!

In the negotiation hotseat are Waypoint’s Jim Houghton, the author of a recent book, The Work Smarter Guide to Negotiation, co-written with Kirk Kinnell, a hostage negotiator and counter-terrorism expert, and chief negotiation officer Sam Macbeth, with many years’ experience helping business leaders and agency heads smarten up their negotiation tactics.  Picking their brains and asking the difficult questions is Waypoint partner, Phil Gripton.

Leading agency VCCP created headlines earlier in the year when it launched AI agency, Faith, with Sage as a founding client. 

In this episode of Waypointers, Faith’s innovation director Peter Gasston explains why VCCP took the decision to make this major investment in technology and what the journey has been like so far.  

Interestingly Peter explains that the impetus was largely led by the creative department within VCCP who were increasingly experimenting with generative AI tools of their own accord. Rather than seeing these tools as a threat, they saw that they could deliver efficiencies, doing some of the work that no one really wants to do, so that people can focus on creative activities that need a human at the heart. 

One of Peter’s key learnings is that unless you’re there in the thick of it, trying things out in real life, you’re never going to understand the full capabilities of the tools that are currently available. Peter brings this to life with some great examples – did you know that AI image generator Midjourney cannot come up with an image of two middle-aged European men kissing each other on the cheek – a very standard greeting? Nor did Peter and his team until they tried.  

And it’s not just about efficiencies, Peter also explains how AI can stimulate creative thinking, driving creative people to be even more creative. 

In a world that’s moving as fast as generative AI, nothing is set in stone and planning cycles are 90 days at most. Something that’s true today might be redundant in a month’s time. That’s why this conversation is so deeply engaging – the journey Peter and his team have embarked on is like nothing they’ve ever experience before in their careers. 

Click on the link below to listen to this fascinating conversation between Peter and Waypoint’s tech lead and partner, Martin Ward.

Peter Reid, the CEO of MSQ Partners is the next guest in our Challenger agency series.

A former McKinsey consultant, Peter has taken MSQ on quite a journey. He joined in 2007 to turn around a business that at the time was known as Media Square and that came with significant financial challenges. 

After several years of streamlining, in 2010 Peter became CEO and in 2011 took the business private which he describes as a key way to establish a sustainable financial structure and to drive a transformational agenda. 

Today MSQ is a highly profitable operation with 1250 people across 13 offices, recently becoming a B Corp and the first international group in the sector to achieve carbon negative status.  Peter’s top priority is scale in the US – 10-fold in the next few years - and to triple size of the business over the same period via a mix of M&A and organic growth.

Waypoint partner Jim Houghton talks to Peter about many things, including:

• How his McKinsey background equipped him to deal with the issues he faced when he joined Media Square – looking at the agency model through a different lens
• How the MSQ business model now works 
• MSQ’s tech offer and how it gives the group a competitive advantage
• His growth ambitions

Robin Skidmore, CEO of Journey Further, is a serial entrepreneur. He built his first agency Epiphany and sold it into listed business, Jaywing in 2014. In this episode he explains what drove him to set up his second agency, performance marketing specialist Journey Further, and how the lessons he learnt from his first outing in the sector have allowed him to turbocharge growth.

Robin talks about the importance of goal-setting and how he and his business partner take time to align on personal and business goals. If you’d like an insight into Robin’s goal-setting process you can download a template here.  

The US is now a key focus for Robin’s energies. Having had some early experience, he believes the only route to success is to be physically there. He explains how he learnt this the hard way and how any preconceptions that the UK and US markets are similar disappear once you get face to face with the reality of doing business in the US. Robin’s just moved his family out to NYC for the next 12 months so he’s taking his own medicine!

Join us on our latest Waypointers episode where journalist, CEO, and renowned communications & brand strategist, Gay Flashman, is our special guest.

Gay details her fascinating career in international journalism, the move to brand management and her motivation to found Formative, an agency supporting global B2B clients with multiformat storytelling. The episode is essential listening for any business leader who wants to build an engaging brand and seize advancing opportunities like AI. 

Listen to gain insights into the invaluable lessons and support she's received to keep the agency one step ahead with emerging technology.

SaaS businesses get a good deal of attention in the merger and acquisition (M&A) world. But many businesses that co-exist in the same markets - the technology services businesses which offer application consult, design, build and implementation services – tend to get overlooked. 

This episode of Waypointers aims to set the record straight and demonstrate the enormous M&A potential that resides in this space. 

Richard Shaw, partner at Growth Capital Partners (GCP) discusses with Waypoint’s tech partner, Martin Ward what GCP has learnt through investing in successful technology services businesses for almost fifteen years and helping them build value.

Tom Walters, one of the three founders of Billion Dollar Boy, a trailblazing influencer agency, discusses the journey he and his fellow founders have been on over the last ten years – some of the wins and some of the challenges - and why they made a point of investing in building their own technology from day one. Tom explains that this deep exposure to tech to support the growth of the business means it’s well placed to harness the power of AI and continue on its winning path.

What kind of agency is best equipped to handle the modern marketing brief? Can a challenger agency compete with the holdcos for some of the industry’s biggest media accounts? The answer is most definitely yes.
 
These are among the topics that James Townsend, Global CEO Stagwell Brand X Performance Network and Global CEO at Assembly discusses with Waypoint’s Matt Lacey in the latest episode of Waypointers’ Challengers series.
 
James explains how he has worked to bring together creative, media and commerce to deliver a business outcome and how the group’s talent base, combining data and tech literacy, gives it a disproportionate advantage.
 
Listen in for a fascinating insight into how James built Stagwell’s media offer and how this leading challenger sees the future of the industry. 

Is the conventional agency model fit for purpose in today’s ever-evolving business climate?

Steve Johnstone founded Alliance Creative to address the supply and demand needs businesses are looking for in a way that the traditional model often cannot. Alliance Creative is a carefully selected team of freelance professionals that adapts its resources and service-offering based on projects instead of retainers. 

In this Waypointers episode, Steve explains what motivated him to found Alliance Creative, its unique operating model and why he believes its alternative approach delivers the best results for clients. 

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