Alex Myers is the Founder and CEO of Manifest Group, a leading B Corp-certified brand communications agency with studios in London, Manchester, New York, Los Angeles, Stockholm, and Melbourne.
As an agency, Manifest is a driving force for better diversity, equality, and inclusion in the creative industries. It is powered by an all-female managing partnership and creative director team globally. Alex is a vocal advocate for fusing creative disciplines to deliver fully ‘unified’ campaigns across paid, earned, social, and owned media.
Starting the business in 2009 from his living room, with no clients, colleagues, or connections, the agency has grown to become one of the most highly awarded creative independent networks worldwide, receiving hundreds of industry accolades. Here, he shares that experience and his insights and lessons.
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There’s never a more innovative period in economic growth than when everything’s shit.
Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, Founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
If you enjoy the Managing Marketing Podcast, please like, review, or share this episode to spread the words and wisdom of our guests each week.
While many will start their own agency with a vision of grandeur, my guest today, took a more humble approach. Starting the business in 2009 from his living room with no clients, colleagues, or connections, the agency’s grown to become one of the most highly awarded creative independent networks worldwide.
Receiving hundreds of industry accolades, including Campaign’s Global Consultancy of the Year in 2024, and having held the title of PRWeek’s International Agency of the Year for three out of the past four years, he was named Campaign CEO of the Year in 2022 and PRWeek’s Global International Communications Professional of the Year in 2020.
Now, considering the objective was to build the world’s first global small agency, you can argue he has exceeded all expectations. Please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, the Founder and CEO of Manifest Group, Alex Myers. Welcome, Alex.
Alex:
Thank you. Happy to be here. Thank you.
Darren:
Well, look and let’s first of all acknowledge the fact that you’ve just got off a long flight, so I’m waiting for the jet lag to kick in, but let’s persevere and see how we go. If you do suddenly nod off, I’ll won’t take it as a personal affront to the conversation.
Alex:
I mean, I’ll probably make as little sense as usual but this time have an excuse, so it’s fine.
Darren:
It’s a really great story about starting your business in your living room because that’s how I started my business 25 years ago, is suddenly, you’ve made this decision, you’ve seen an opportunity and you’re going to start a business, and then there’s just a blank piece of paper and a whole lot of dreams. What was it like for you and where was that living room?
Alex:
I think that’s a really good description, a blank sheet of paper and a whole lot of dreams, that sounds like the title of an autobiography. But yeah, it was in London, in North London, in a small area of London called Highgate if anyone knows London.
But yeah, it was a small garden flat, and I think the business started the same way as any business starts, a heady mix of naivety in bravado where I was just like, “Look, I could try and do this myself.” I think there was not the confidence that it would work, quite the opposite actually, but I think the confidence that if when it inevitably doesn’t work, I can find a job somewhere else.
So, I thought if I don’t give this a shot now, then when? And the truth is, it started because I couldn’t find an agency doing what I felt agencies should do. So, that wasn’t really a market opportunity, it wasn’t a business plan, it certainly wasn’t a business born off a spreadsheet, it was born off a blank sheet of paper and dreams.
Darren:
And I only recently read an article, a point of view where they said the biggest loss for the big holding companies is the number of times one of their staff have come to them with an idea for innovating the business model, and they’ve been told, “That’s not what we do here.”
And the person’s then gone off and started it based on this idea that they tried to hand to them, and it is true, isn’t it? For a creative industry, one of the things that the advertising industry seems to really resist is actually innovation and change.
Alex:
Yeah, definitely. I think that was absolutely one of the motivations for me to start Manifest, was I could see that agencies needed to be something different for changing kind of brand landscape, but also no agency was built around the work, it’s a counterintuitive industry.
Most of the big networks are built around a spreadsheet and how do we make maximum profit for shareholders, rather than how do we make work that generates maximum profit for shareholders? And most independents are set up for an exit, so they have a specialism that actually works against the benefit of the work.
Okay, well, let’s focus on a specific vertical market which means you just apply the same playbook to everything; or let’s focus on a channel, which means if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you’re a social media agency, then every problem can be fixed with social media.
Or a geographic location or whether the London Agency, and when an inevitably a big U.S. network wants a London presence, then they’ll buy us. None of that’s built around, let’s just have our dream job for the next 30 years, and that’s really where Manifest comes from.
Darren:
Well, that’s really interesting. So, you’ve basically built a business that gave you and therefore, other people like you the opportunity of having a place to be.
Alex:
Yeah, I mean, that’s a really interesting way to put it. I would say that everyone at Manifest has in some way, struggled to fit in somewhere else. We’re definitely a collection of misfits that have found a home, and I think there is that kind of kindred spirit, but also that diversity of spirit that comes from people who are just here for the work, and there’s not that many of us anymore.
I think a lot of people are here for different motivations and different career challenges. But I think people who enjoy or respect the idea of having to come up with ideas for a living and think that’s the kind of job that when you were a kid, you never dreamed could exist.
There’s that kind of heady optimism in everyone that joins Manifest, whether they’re in the finance team or whether they’re in the creative team, and I think that’s wonderful about running an independent agency, but I think that’s also something that happens organically too.
Darren:
Because it’s that sense of never being satisfied with the status quo that actually drives innovation, isn’t it? It’s that constant questioning which is the very thing that you’d be wanting to attract to your business.
Alex:
Yeah. I think David Ogilvy called it divine discontent, and it’s that idea that you can never be happy with the work that’s gone. And I think it’s certainly a founder mentality. If we win a pitch, I’m always like, “What’s next?” If we lose a pitch, I’m always, “What’s next?” There’s just consistently what’s next.
In the Manifest branding, there’s an underscore after Manifest, and that just means that we’re still typing. And that excitement with what’s coming next and what’s on the horizon is the bit that gets me out of bed in the morning, really.
Darren:
The other thing I found really interesting was the timing of it. Because 2009, for people with short memories, is like when the global recession that we had really started to bite, I think, in everything, not just in the advertising and media industries, but business generally.
And so, I like this idea that it was created out of hardship. And while you haven’t expressed that, it is in the context of London in 2009, as was New York and even Sydney, were places where there was quite a bit of economic pain.
Alex:
Yeah, definitely. It was a shit show economically, but I think for a startup agency, if you can start in that kind of environment, then it sets you in good stead. But also, there are opportunities that exist in that kind of market for an independent that don’t exist when everything’s going swimmingly.
Certainly, those early clients took a punt on a one-man agency when they might not have done, had their budgets not been cut, or had they not needed to deliver better ROI or had they not needed to be innovative themselves. And necessity’s a mother of invention, I think there’s never a more innovative period in economic growth than when everything’s shit.
That’s when you start to see new agencies, it’s when you start to see new ideas, new marketing, new brands, and that’s kind of exciting. But yeah, it was a bit of a crucible, but I didn’t know what I was doing anyway, so it’s just a good example. Just another good example that I didn’t know what I was doing. I would set it up in the middle of a global economic crisis.
Darren:
And out of that, as you say, opportunities present themselves, particularly if you’re not overburdened by the challenges, you’re then looking for the opportunities.
Alex:
And that’s what a creative does. It’s looking for real solutions to real problems. If we kind of look at what the consistent definition of creativity is, you’re building things. So, if a real problem is that there’s less money in people’s pockets or budgets have been slashed, or there’s a cost of living crisis, those are all things that creatives will fix, and that’s the creative mindset I think, it’s really interesting.
Darren:
So, in those early days, this idea of the world’s first global small agency, was that something you had as a vision upfront, or did that evolve over time? Because when you’re a single person, you’re a very small agency.
Alex:
Yeah. And I think there’s that interesting point where you use the proverbial “we” when you’re in pitches and things, and it’s like there will be a we if we win this. But yeah, it was definitely in the original business plan, was to become the world’s first global small agency. And what I meant by that wasn’t necessarily about scale as much as it sounds. It was about trying to-
Darren:
Attitude?
Alex:
Yeah, it was about attitude for sure, maintaining a small and agile mindset, but also, I knew that big agencies lose their culture, big teams lose their culture. When there’s 300, 3,000 people in one office, you can’t all know each other. So, I thought if we could get to a maximum of 50 people in each studio, I’m then putting a glass ceiling on people’s ambitions, but what if I don’t put a ceiling on how many studios there are?
Suddenly, we can actually connect one global culture, but every managing partner in every studio still knows the name of everyone in their team, still knows the name of everyone’s partners, and still knows their commute into the office and the names of their dog, that’s important to a culture.
And I’m dropping cliches left, right, and center, but culture eats strategy for breakfast. I think if there’s one secret ingredient, it is that culture of a small agency we’ve maintained as we’ve grown, but that international outlook, that global citizenship, that’s something that really is reflected in all of our work. And everyone feels like they’re part of a small team, but a global unit and that’s really interesting.
Darren:
It’s interesting you pick 50 because I think anthropologically-
Alex:
I’ll probably change it to 60, but I think it is anthropologically true.
Darren:
No, no, no it’s actually about 100.
Alex:
You can only have 50 connections.
Darren:
It’s about 100. You can function as a connected human being inside a group of a hundred, but that includes extended connections. I like the idea that it’s more intimate at 50, but also, at building additional offices. My question would be because culture is important, how do you replicate culture into new offices? Because culture is driven by people.
Alex:
It is, yeah and I think it’s having a central ambition rather than having central character set. So, at Manifest, we’ve always been passionate about diversity, equity, and inclusion not because it’s a checkbox, but because the quality of our creative output is directly correlated to the breadth of the input, and that’s the same for culture.
So, everyone is hired on a cultural ad. So, everyone’s got their own role in that group of 50. Like you mentioned, from an anthropological standpoint, everyone naturally starts to fuse their own role and the leaders in the business are what carry the culture forward.
So, identifying those people with leadership qualities, and that not being potentially something that a network agency would identify as leadership qualities because it’s about cultural leadership, that’s really important. The people are the ones that are going to deliver the culture and every studio has its own little microculture, of course it does.
But they’re all there for one central reason, to build brands that change the world. They’re all there to see work as something we produce together, not a place we go to produce it, or the effort we put in to produce it, work is a body of work for us.
And there’s kind of two levels, I guess. Tere’s a minimum, which is work I want to tell my mates about in the pub, that’s your base level, and then there’s work you want to tell your grandchildren you did when they say, “What did you do?” And not every-
Darren:
A legacy.
Alex:
Yeah, exactly. It’s a collective legacy and that’s where culture comes from, I think. If it’s not born out in the work, you start to see the culture wane, and that’s the challenge really. I would say that culture comes from what you say no to, and principles – and not principles that costs you money.
Darren:
So, have you found that you’ve been inclined to develop those leaders, those cultural leaders, and then import them into a new office? Or do you recruit cultural leaders in that market when you sort … because you’re in quite a few markets, aren’t you? You’re in from the top of mind-
Alex:
Yeah, we have London and Manchester in the UK, we have Stockholm in Sweden, we have New York and LA in the States, and then we have Melbourne here in Australia.
Darren:
I mean, that’s quite diverse cultures as well.
Alex:
Yeah, I mean, it’s funny what you learn from all those different cultures, but absolutely every single leader in those different studios has arrived in a different way, but all of them have had a connection with the broader culture at some point.
So, our example is in Australia here, we have Isabel Thompson-Officer who’s our managing partner, and she was working in our New York team, but is from Melbourne originally, and actually got stuck here during COVID, and expedited plans to move back.
And she actually handed her notice in, and I was like, “No, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, we’d always talked about setting up a Melbourne office.” And I think from her point of view, I think to kind of summarize her point of view, she was like, “I’m not ready.”
And my response was “exactly” because unless you learn as a founder and grow something from nothing, you don’t have that commitment. Quite often people will say to me, “Okay, what is it that that means when you’re able to talk about that so passionately or you’re able to deliver that message to the client without being nervous about it?” And the secret ingredient is desperation.
Anyone who’s been a founder, I’m sure you know, you don’t have a choice. It’s this other street, so you’ve got to do it. And I think there is a beautiful honesty to that desperation that I think exists in all of our leaders in one way or another for one reason or another. And I love that we’ve grown organically like a family does, but that commitment is not something I would ever take for granted either.
Darren:
There’s something in the language there about the difference between leaders and managers, and there was that terrific book, The E-Myth by Gerber. He said, any business needs three types of people. It needs technicians that do the work, it needs managers to manage the business and then it needs entrepreneurs or leaders that actually drive the vision and drive the business.
Alex:
We’ve actually got a different codification for that actually. So, we have a similar structure in how we think about teams, but the three personality types are leaders talent and warriors. And I think sometimes we’re over-indexing one or the other, but talent are annoyingly mercurial and unfortunately, they’re the ones who score the wonder goal, and I didn’t put their shift in, but they’re the ones who scored the goal in 90th minute.
You have the leaders who are the ones who set the plan, set the agenda, but aren’t necessarily ones who enjoy seeing a project through to the finish. And the warriors deliver the mission and they get shit done.
And I think you need a blend of those different characteristics for sure, and I think it’s interesting in a founder, you kind of find yourself needing to have all three at different points in time. Sometimes you’re-
Darren:
Or at least the appreciation of what it takes. They need to value all of those things.
Alex:
Definitely.
Darren:
Because otherwise, it becomes too one dimensional.
Alex:
A hundred percent.
Darren:
But then that’s one of the problems with scale. The traditional model of scale means that your groups get bigger and bigger and bigger, and so, you’ll be inclined to err on managers rather than leadership.
You’ll have a lot more managers, and then the managers start to overwhelm any sort of entrepreneurial leadership, because their job as a manager is to maintain the status quo, to keep the ship sailing forward, to deliver the quarterly profit results so the shareholders are happy.
Alex:
I think that’s interesting as well, how you can help drive that as a leader yourself. So, we have a quadruple bottom line. So, our leaders in each studio aren’t just based/they’re not just focused on performance . That is obviously there, the traditional financial metrics.
But they’re also set specific measurable KPIs around product, quality of the work, and is it doing what we set out to do – people, are people happy and being developed? How long are they in the business for? What’s the EMPS? And also, purpose, are we living the brief?
So, not just building brands that change the world, but being one ourselves. That includes communicating our ethnicity and gender pay gaps to the wider team. It includes establishing a scoring system for all of our work to ensure that there’s a central change within each piece of work. We call it a virtue metric that sits under the value metrics and the vanity metrics. And beyond that, we have structures and systems that ensure people embed into the culture quicker.
So, again, there was a behavioral study on why people stay in jobs that they hate, and it was because there’s a financial incentive to stay in the job that you hate. So, we created a financial incentive to leave the job.
So, in your first three months at Manifest in Aussie dollars, I think it’s about $2,000, we’ll pay you to leave at any point in your first three months. And if you don’t leave, after the end of that three months, you have to choose someone who gets the $2,000 who made you feel most welcome. So, we call it “the fuck off grant.” It didn’t ever get a real name, it was like a working title and then it just stuck.
But so far touch wood, no one’s fucked off, but we do have a meritocracy around being nice. Something that no one has in any business that I’m aware of. There’s no incentive for being that person in the office who knows where the good coffee comes from or who’s going to help you out with the password system on whatever.
Darren:
So, I just want to stop there because I’m ex-copywriter, I have a real fascination with words, and “nice” is one of those words that I often see used as almost a mediocre insult. Like if you present some work to a client and they go, “That’s nice,” they’re sort of saying, “Yeah, it’s okay.” So, what about when it comes to people, what do you actually mean by nice?
Alex:
I think that’s a really good question. I think one of the reasons why nice is in my vocabulary so much as well, is when I started the business, there’s a lot of people who said that I couldn’t do it, there’s a lot of people who said don’t do it, and when I told them how I was going to do it, there’s lot of people who had never set with business themselves who were willing to tell you why it wasn’t going to work.
And one of the biggest things, but the most common piece of advice was, “You won’t get anywhere being nice in business,” and I was like, “You watch me.” Like you can’t lose your humanity. My mom would kill me if I wasn’t nice.
And I think niceness is one of those things that comes possibly from … I’m from a working-class northern background in the UK, I’m not from your traditional public school background, as we call it in the UK private school here, and being nice is how you get along. If you are not nice, you don’t get along with anyone.
It’s funny how many people buy from nice people. Everyone knows the challenges they have with people who aren’t nice. And I think, yes, you can codify it, you can decide to try and break it down, but really niceness is about authenticity as well. You can’t pretend to be nice, and we’ve got two rules at Manifest.
Darren:
Well, then you’re just sort of sleazy and inauthentic.
Alex:
And it’s see through, and I think we had a rule straight away in recruitment, “no brilliant dickheads” and that that still exists. We used to actually say it on the job ads: “No, dickheads,” you can’t really get away with that anymore. But-
Darren:
But everyone knows what you mean.
Alex:
Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, I think from-
Darren:
So, it’s someone that has empathy for others, goes out of their way to make people feel welcome, really would treat others as they’d like to be treated themselves.
Alex:
Yeah. It’s someone who feels they’re part of an ecosystem, they’re not just acting in a silo on their own, I think that’s what niceness is for me. We have two rules at Manifest, work hard and be nice to people, everything else is up for challenge.
Darren:
I think our mothers probably went to the same school because my mother’s favorite saying was, “It’s nice to be important, but it’s important to be nice.” And in fact, I have that set in beautiful type by I think it was Colenso did it for me because it came up in a conversation on my wall in the office to remind me that that’s ultimately, the thing that will get you in the world, get you forward in the world.
Alex:
This is a really interesting tangent, I hope. But we’ve got on our walls in every studio, we have a neon sign that says, “Welcome Home Sexy.” And the reason it-
Darren:
No, I saw that on your website.
Alex:
Yeah, it also says it when you load up the website and it’s on our handbook when you join, it’s kind of taken on a life of its own. But Welcome Home Sexy came from the fact when we moved to a studio big enough to have a neon sign on the wall, myself and our Chief Design Officer, Martin Farrar-Smith, who’s my best mate from school as well.
We were talking about what you get the neon to say because we didn’t want to have just Manifest, it would look like a cult, and then we also, it’s like getting a tattoo, you don’t want to get sick of it after a while.
And I can’t remember which one of us said it, but when you pull into Bradford Interchange, the northern city I’m from, when you pull into the train station, there’s some really badly dobbed graffiti on the bridge that says, “Welcome home sexy.” And one of us said, “It needs to be like that where everyone looks at it and smiles.”
And so, we went, “Why don’t we just do that?” We didn’t tell anyone that that’s what it was going to say and the guys came in and while they’re putting it on the wall, everyone’s like, “What’s going on?” And it says, “Welcome home sexy,” and I had no idea it would take on a life of its own but that’s almost the niceness, it’s an attitudinal thing too.
Everyone who walks in, client who thinks their brief is boring – it’s not, it’s sexy to us. A person who thinks that their job’s not important, they look up. I think that’s one of the things that frustrates me about marketers. When you ask them what they do for a living, they look at their shoes and shuffle.
You should be able to look up straight and be proud of the work that you’re doing, and I think this should feel like a home, not just work. Everyone should feel welcome wherever they come from, and everyone, yeah, should feel sexy. Not in a sexualized way, in the way you would call a car sexy.
Darren:
And look, I think what it says to me is the very thing I think the industry suffered from, is over the years there’s been a loss of swagger. And I use that word not to mean arrogance, but that confidence that someone has when they walk into a room and don’t feel obliged to explain why they’re there, that just they’re meant to be there. To me, that’s what swagger is. Is the ability to just be and everyone accept that that’s who you are.
Alex:
And if you look into celebrities and artists that everyone loves, they’re all challenging characters, but what they always have is that swagger. There’s a great lyric from a band called Elbow, which talks about oasis, which is a huge ‘90s cultural phenomenon in the UK.
But “I never perfected that simian stroll” was the line, and that’s exactly what that swagger was in the ‘90s. It was that Liam Gallagher shake and that’s what you get from seeing Welcome Home Sexy.
And it became the backdrop to so many Instagram pictures of after work, pitch win parties. It was always, when it’s in New York and it’s in Stockholm and it’s just from this badly dobbed graffiti in Bradford. Do you know what I mean?
And that for me, feels like it keeps our feet on the ground and our head in the clouds, and that’s where exactly where we should be. But it casts a shadow on everyone that makes them feel taller, and that’s what culture does. And if we can do that everywhere, then-
Darren:
Alex, I’d love to track down that graffiti artist and find the story as to why that’s what they put on that-
Alex:
Honestly, I wrote an article on it, this is years ago when people had started asking me, “Why we’ve got Welcome Home Sexy on the wall.” I wrote an article about it and I don’t know anything about it, I would love to see them. And I don’t even want to ask them that question, I just want to give them a hug and a bigger brush because it’s a bit of a mess.
Darren:
The canvas, perhaps.
Alex:
Absolutely. It’s still there though. Said friend, Martin Farrar-Smith took a picture of it just recently when he went on the train back home, so-
Darren:
Fantastic. All the other graffiti artists now understand how important it is not to-
Alex:
Yeah. Bank it in-
Darren:
Not to tag it, don’t tag it.
Alex:
It’s funny, it’s not been touched. I must have been … show my age now, but it’s at least 25-years-old.
Darren:
Standing the test of time.
Alex:
More than 30-years-old.
Darren:
You are a B Corp or Manifest Group is a B Corp, but you spoke about very early on understanding the need for diversity and inclusion to build culture, that was obviously the basis. And then you went through the process, which is not easy of being certified for B Corp. What was the thinking there?
Alex:
It’s interesting because it was easy. We didn’t need to change anything aside from I think some of the company’s house details that need changing for B Corp status, but we just passed the certification.
We had to do a lot of filing of work but we didn’t have to change anything we do, which it comes from making up an agency as you go along because doing the right thing is pretty easy when you don’t know what the right thing to do is.
So, I didn’t have any boardroom experience, so I wasn’t following any status quo that was unethical, I was just building a business as I thought it should be built, and so were my colleagues. So, yeah, the diversity side, the reason I’ve always been passionate about it, and just to be frank, I’m a white male in the creative industry and there’s not a shortage of us.
But certainly, from my point of view, there’s a real challenge. I don’t know the statistics in Australia, but in the UK for instance, I think it’s similar in the U.S., 96% of the creative industries are white, and you’re producing 66% of the content everyone consumes on a daily basis, you don’t have to be racist to imbue that with your unconscious bias.
So, there’s not any industry, I think maybe except for the law and legal industries that have a bigger legacy of that inequality and lack of diversity. So, it’s our responsibility to be able to address that, not just from an ethical standpoint, but from a creative one.
You can’t represent the cultures that you’re selling to if you don’t represent them in the office yourself. So, that’s why we were passionate about it to enhance our creative output and run a business as we thought it should be run.
And that goes for our sustainability policies and our company benefits and parental leave. It’s all been invented or learned from the different studios we opened in. Sweden has much better parental policies than anywhere else in the world. There’s also a gender pay gap, it’s not a coincidence.
So, we have equal parental leave. Oddly, in order to get women back into the boardroom, you have to get men back into the home. So, we offer equal parental leave, no one else does that but you could switch off the gender pay gap pretty quickly by doing that, Sweden proved it.
Darren:
Now, Australia released, we do annual gender pay gaps for companies over a certain size and the advertising industry, it was out in early March, just before international Women’s Day. It’s lined up with that. There’s still around a 20% gap between men and women in media and advertising in Australia and it’s not moving, it’s not moving-
Alex:
Well, people don’t try and learn about it. I think this is the challenge, learn about the real under the hood issues as if it would be a creative brief. So, the challenge isn’t … I mean, there is systemic sexism – of course, there is, but people don’t inherently pay men more than women. I mean, it’s not also about that, there is a median gender pay gap, I don’t know how it’s measured in Australia, but usually it’s a median.
So, in that sense, it’s much more about representation at senior level in the business. But at a certain point in everyone’s careers, it’s much more equal. Where it gets unequal is the point of starting a family really. Because women are really good negotiators. The bit that I hate about the gender pay gap discussion is when people start saying, “Oh, we’re going to run a negotiation course for female employees.”
Women know better than men instinctively, I think how to negotiate, but they feel societally implored to negotiate for different things. So, they’re negotiating for flexibility, they’re negotiating for time, and at the same time, there’s a societal pressure on men to become the sole breadwinner. Suddenly, they’re asking for more hours, suddenly they’re asking for less flexibility, but they’re asking for a salary in return.
Like I said, if you can address both sides of the room, then you can fix the problem. But if you’re looking for someone to blame, you can’t. And sometimes, I find these polarized discussions really challenging and creatives as an industry, we’ve got a job to do to communicate what the real problem is.
Darren:
As a founder, you have that opportunity, don’t you? To be able to bring the value set to the business and actually create the environment from that. Does that mean you attract like people or just people that find it attractive?
I mean, do you think that you’re going to be attracting the same sort of people that perhaps see more of a corporate ladder approach in bigger agencies? Or is it more that they come with a value set that’s about to your point, the work and the purpose and the-
Alex:
Yeah, I mean, I think partly an interview process for us is selling what you get at Manifest. It’s we do things the hard way a lot of the time. Not the long way around necessarily, but there’s a reason why you do things that are hard, and I think we don’t make it easy to manage the P&L when you have the benefit structures that we have.
We did make it easier for … we made unlimited vacation a benefit about 12 years ago, and that made it much simpler. Actually, that was one of those policies that it’s just much easier to manage. But the reason we do those things is what we hire for, are you interested in what we’re interested in? I think is the thing people forget about in recruitment.
Like I said, no brilliant dickheads, it doesn’t matter how good you are at your job, and we’ve built a system that we call the Elemental System, where it’s where your skills and your talents combine as your element, and that’s what you work in at Manifest.
And you can have multiple elements, but not all at once because otherwise, you just then cast as a generalist and everything’s on your shoulders, as we all know in an agency that’s just built on hierarchy.
But the Element System is really important because you might enjoy one thing, but it doesn’t mean you’re good at it. I think John Hegarty said, “We all enjoy singing, but we’re not all asked to play Glastonbury.” And at the same time, you can be really good at something you really fucking hate doing.
So, finding your element is really important and I think that’s what we offer people at Manifest, is this opportunity to shine and not just focus on your challenges and what’s holding you back and try and bring you up to speed.
Instead, we just balance you out with someone else who’s got the elements that you don’t have, and allow you to shine brighter rather than bringing up the rue of what you don’t enjoy or you’re bad at. Instead, we just make what you’re spiking on really spiky and focus on what you love doing.
And sometimes, generalists are that, and sometimes people are … the term account manager really frustrates me. Like what kind of spectrum of people do you have at that level? Account managers can be relationships people, creative people, planners, all different psychographics, and I think we need to grow up as an industry and build it around the people instead of asking them to build themselves into a really-
Darren:
To title.
Alex:
Yeah, to a job title.
Darren:
Well, I always find it interesting when I visit agencies and they all want to do the walk through the office, which I think sort of weird because they all pretty much look the same, though no one has Welcome Home Sexy in a neon that I’ve seen. And the way they talk, “Well, that’s the creative area” and point to a group of desks, and, “Yeah over there …”
Alex:
This is where the magic happens.
Darren:
Yeah, and that’s account service, and I always worry account service, or they’ll say account management.
Alex:
Never the two shall meet.
Darren:
And account management, and it’s like that everyone’s automatically compartmentalized, which is very much that traditional structure.
Alex:
And again, culture and structure I think are really important. When Anna Colson, who’s now Anna Anderson, she just got married who runs our Stockholm office, she came to visit the UK the first time when we’d set it up, and everyone got out of their chairs and went and gave her a hug. They were so excited to see her.
And we went into the boardroom to chat, and she goes, “It’s so nice, you asked everyone to give me a hug.” I’m like, “No, I didn’t. That’s just what everyone does when they’ve got a new colleague.” And I hadn’t realized that wasn’t normal, I didn’t realize that people don’t do that, and that was wonderful for me, I think.
But also that demonstrates that connection that you don’t get if you hire in a different way, or that you’re not providing a home for people, you’re just providing a workplace. You’re not providing a legacy, you’re just providing some tasks.
Darren:
Alex, what about your personal evolution, I guess? Because from the day that you started the business and then grew your business, your agency in London, and then when you first expanded into another market and now you’ve got quite a few of these offices — you must have changed as well.
Alex:
Yeah, definitely. I think it’s funny, everyone says, “How can you stay in a job for 15 years?” And I’ve had a different job every three months in that 15 years. I’m constantly an intern. I mean, the unofficial strap line for Manifest should be making shit this up since 2009. Literally, that’s why I find myself doing on a daily basis.
So, I enjoy that, and I think the thing that I’ve become comfortable in is my lack of confidence and that imposter syndrome becoming a motivator and not something that holds me back necessarily. I think something that weighs heavier is duty.
So, you become more comfortable, I think, for instance, having challenging conversations or you become more comfortable that you’ve got more variables than other people have as the business grows, and that they can have a different point of view and you can compassionate to that, but it used to be very easy for everyone to agree on stuff, and it becomes less so.
But as long as everyone trusts you’re making the decision with the same information they would want in your role, and with the same values that they would apply to it, it’s fine if I would make a different call. Same as it’s fine if my managing partners make a different call in their market to what I would do, because I know and trust they’re making it for the same reasons I would.
So, I think for me, my job’s always a learning job and I think if anything, I’m just a nerd. I just enjoy learning and I’m very curious about things, and I’ve made more mistakes than anyone else in the last 15 years that I’m aware of and I’m sure other people will try and take that title and probably rightly so.
But honestly, I think as a leader, you’re shaped by your mistakes and your failures, and creating a freedom to fail within the business is a natural result of that too. I think founder-led businesses hit different because of that.
Darren:
Well, from a personal experience, people would say to me, “Oh, the thing about having your own business is that you can never turn off.” And I go, well, I think of it like this; I’ve got this project … I don’t know if you grew up — Meccano used to be a building toy as a kid.
And I go, “My business is like a huge Meccano set, and it exists in a room over there. And every morning I go in there and I tinker and build and try things. And then when I walk out of there, sure, I may not turn off, I may still be thinking, but I’m thinking about what did I do today and what better can I do tomorrow?”
Alex:
Again, it’s that polarizing debate again, as if work and life are somehow inherently mutually exclusive. Rather than talking about work-life balance, why don’t people talk about work life blend? How can you bring your life into work and your work into life?
I feel like my work enriches my life, sometimes it gets too much just like everyone. But certainly, people used to get fed up of me talking about trying to work with Ezra Collective. Anyone from Manifest is laughing right now because I’m a big Ezra Collective fan.
And I used to pitch them for every single campaign. I’m like, “We should be working with Ezra Collective on this.” But that was because I loved them and as a creative person, I can see their connection culturally to the work that we’re doing. I expect everyone in the business to do the same.
That’s something that if anything, I would want people in Manifest to feel that their work isn’t somehow detrimental to their life. It shouldn’t feel like it’s a payoff for one to the other. And yeah, you shouldn’t be checking a Slack messages at midnight, but if you want to, you should also have the freedom to.
Darren:
And not feel bad about it.
Alex:
Yeah, exactly.
Darren:
Because I think that’s the worst part, is all the expectations that people put on themselves about what it should be. It can be whatever you want it to be.
I mean, I think ultimately, for all of the insecurity around how we’re going to survive and thrive in the next two weeks or six months, the thing that having your own business as a founder gives you the freedom to basically define it the way you want it to, taking into consideration all of the people that are depending on you.
Alex:
Yeah, absolutely, and I think that way of people depending on you is a challenge for any founder, and I think it’s something that you can’t ever describe. I think every leader in every studio feels the same thing as well. And I think that weight of responsibility is something that you maybe don’t sign up for, but it’s rewarding at the same time.
Darren:
Well, particularly if you build a culture where the group, the team actually respond to, “Hey, we’re having a hard time, let’s actually solve this collectively.”
Alex:
I think it’s definitely in any work culture, it’s the hard times that really define whether it’s working or not. One of the biggest challenges I think I find now is it’s so easy to go, “Okay, things aren’t going well, it must be because we’re doing what we do versus what everyone else does,” and in reality, it’s because we’ve probably lost touch with what we do, and gone too close to what everyone else does.
And it’s harder and harder, I think, as a founder to pull the group away from that muscle memory of just let’s just run like every other agency, they’re all doing fine. And I think certainly there’s periodic challenges in each market that are macroeconomic we can’t do anything about, and I think the way we react to those has to be innately Manifest, otherwise, it’s not going to work.
And again, we’ve made mistakes where we have gone, “Okay, let’s be like everyone else.” Not consciously ever, but that’s happened in pitches where we’re desperate, too desperate to win, and you learn from that. It’s a challenge, but that’s the exciting part of running a business.
Darren:
So, for me, a book called Maverick by Ricardo Semler which I was given a copy of soon after I started my business, before I had anyone working with me. The lesson was, don’t hire adults and treat them like children, hire adults and treat them like adults — was the single biggest thing that before I’d started my own business, that I had never even contemplated what that meant.
Is there something like that, that you’ve learned that’s come up for you over the years of managing your business and growing your business that has really impacted your approach to this?
Alex:
I mean, we’ve covered a lot of it. I think hiring nice people. No one kind of asks themselves in a questionnaire, in an interview, like, “Is this person quite nice or easy to get along with?” I think that’s really important.
But I think the thing that I’ve learned is that you can’t shape people, you can’t ask for people to revolve around your business, the business has to revolve around them, and that the rules aren’t set in stone. You know that everything’s going to change all the time and that’s fine.
I think one thing that I think is a challenge at Manifest, because we want to be an agency of the future, it’s not going to stand still. And I think we’re not right for the people who want to sit down in a cubicle and work their day through or sit at home at a desk and work their day through without speaking to many other people and without any pressure. It needs to feel like it’s a collective burden to get this work right.
Not necessarily a collective burden to pay the bills, that can feel oppressive, but understanding that cohesive culture comes from sharing responsibility, sharing accountability. I think sometimes we’ve got it wrong too in what you just said, around hiring adults and treat them like adults.
I think you’ve also got to help them become adults because you can’t always hire junior people that are made to be an MD. Do you know what I mean? And I think sometimes it feels like Bugsy Malone at Manifest.
Darren:
Alex, even worse, because we hire people that have been in agencies and the thing we have to do is actually teach them how to be noninstitutionalized; how to go from working within one of these big corporate structures to actually just working as a person with other people, and it’s really interesting seeing that transition.
So, it’s not just junior people, sometimes people that have had a good career in a corporate structure need to rethink what that means, what work means.
Alex:
I mean, when did nobody does that in our industry become a reason to not do something? Surely, the fresh snow is interesting to explore as a creative, and I think too often it’s like, well, I’ve just come from this other place, and this is how they do time sheets. I’m like, “So …?” Exactly, like we do it differently.”
I was talking to Isabel yesterday about our appraisal system that we built originally, I built that on back at Football Manager which is a video game. Because in football, your value is your potential and your performance combined.
So, you might be performing poorly because the players around you are out of position because you are in position or then, a different level. And what you do is you try and find where that person can shine in the team, and if they can’t, then you move them on, of course.
But our appraisal systems and review systems that are systemic, generally say, “What are you bad at and how can we make you better at it?” Who cares? Who cares what people are bad at. Like I said, with the Elemental System, it’s built around helping people to shine. So, if you are really terrible at something, we need to ask ourselves, “Can you be good at it?” And if you can, then we’ll fix it.
But no other appraisal system asked, “How good can this person be at this?” Because if you score 5 out of 10 for something and your potential is 5 out 10, why are you working on it? That’s just your ability in that space.
Darren:
Strength Finders, I think it was called, why do we waste so much time focusing on our weaknesses when we should be playing to our strengths? And they tell a great story that our culture loves the Cinderella story, the from rags to riches story. And that’s why we focus on weaknesses and trying to turn those into strengths. Whereas, if you put that same effort into just honing your strength, you’ll be phenomenal.
Alex:
Definitely and I think sometimes the people who shine in network agencies, the people who ignore those systemic pressures and just do what they’re good at, and then they’re idolized in the end. I’m sure Rory Sutherland was a maverick in the Ogilvy network until people realized that people buy shit from Rory because he’s really clever but the way he works is very different.
And every single person, maverick aside, who’s kind of idolized globally in creative circles is a person who’s not done things by the rules, who’s not made themselves a generalist. So, why do we insist on doing that to our junior members of the team instead of allowing them a path to shine in their own way?
And Isabel’s a great example in Melbourne. She didn’t think that she was ready to be a leader, and she probably wasn’t, but the support network was there, and now she’s a shining star in the group and it comes from that trust, that the potential’s there.
And seeing that potential, rather than defining people by their existing level of knowledge and performance, it’s our job to elevate people as leaders, it’s not our job to tell them where they’re shit. Anyone can do that.
That’s like you said, the difference between managers and leaders. Managers have staff, leaders have followers, and you’ve got to be able to stand behind your team, not in front of them. And that can only come from seeing what’s great inside people.
And I think that’s a secret power if anything, that a founder has sometimes is if you build a great successful team, it’s not because everyone else would’ve done the same thing. It’s because you’ve spotted things in people that other people haven’t and you believed in them.
Darren:
Alex, this has been a terrific conversation. You’ve held up really well, I’m not detecting any signs of jet lag kicking in.
Alex:
It’s the caffeine, the intravenous caffeine.
Darren:
But thank you for your time and for sharing so generously your experience and your insights of building the world’s smallest global agent. No-
Alex:
World’s first global small agency.
Darren:
Global small agency. I’ve got to get that right. Thank you and have a great time in Australia.
Alex:
Thank you very much.
Darren:
Oh, look, a question before you go, and that is I’m just wondering, do you think anyone could actually replicate this or should they try and find their own path forward?