THAT MOMENT - the secret to driving efficiency and growth. Presented by Supo.

How do you know it's time to leave a business you helped name?Emily Cousins was employee number one at Realtime. She joined when it was two people planning in a café, stayed almost nine years, and helped take it to nearly 90 people and an acquisition in 2024. She describes herself as the risk-averse one in a partnership with a visionary founder, and says she still felt accountable for a business that wasn't hers. This conversation on That Moment is about what comes after the goal you built towards is achieved.Employee Number OneEmily helped name the company. Day one was planning sessions in a café near her boss's house, and then straight into client work. With two people there was no such thing as a job description. She did whatever needed doing."You're kind of doing everything. Anything and everything that needs to be done."The pressure of that role is unusual. You feel accountable for the success of the business, but ultimately it isn't yours. What made it work was that she and the founder had opposite strengths. He was visionary and confident, she was more risk averse and prioritised differently, and she challenged him on it. She says it felt more like a partnership than a boss-and-employee relationship, and that's why it lasted.Family, Tribe, VillageEmily describes growth in three stages. In the early days it was a family, with no silos, everyone round one table and no "that's your job, not mine". Somewhere around ten to fifteen people it became a tribe. New external hires arrived, the founders stepped back from work they'd been doing hands-on, and structure and process started to replace chasing their tails.Each stage asks something different of the people in charge. The habits that hold a family together don't scale, and the trick is knowing when to build structure without losing the culture that made the business worth building. Emily's view is that the earlier you build that visibility, the cheaper it is to fix problems.The People Side of AIEmily now works with agency and service business founders on the same challenges she lived through. Founders are keeping the lights on while reinventing their businesses from the ground up, in a difficult economy, and it can be lonely. Her support comes in three parts: defining the value proposition, redesigning the operating model around AI rather than bolting AI onto old processes, and scaling people and culture."You're fundamentally selling people. You're selling relationships."Her view runs against much of the noise. Everyone will be efficient with AI, she argues, so the value in a services business shifts even further towards people. Businesses may hire fewer people in some areas, but each hire matters more. She also thinks how we define scale will change. Headcount used to be the benchmark for a successful agency, and that's unlikely to hold. Most founders, she says, are feeling a little behind, and she expects the practical reality to catch up with the hype within the next 12 to 24 months.About Supo:Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people.For more information about Supo: ⁠www.supo.co.ukAbout Realtime:Realtime is a global digital marketing agency that began in performance and social advertising and grew into a full-service agency with teams across the UK, US and Asia. Emily Cousins was its first employee and helped scale it from a two-person start-up to nearly 90 people.For more information about Realtime: https://realtimeagency.com/

What do you do when you've reached board level and you still don't get the final say?Katy Stolliday, Co-Founder and Chief Client Officer of Blurred, had a strong career in consumer and corporate comms and a seat at the top table. She never planned to start a company, and says she didn't feel brave enough to do it alone. This conversation on That Moment is about what happens when you say yes anyway.Board Level, Still Not Her CallKaty built her career in consumer comms, moved into the CSR space, and reached board director level. On paper, that's the seat where you steer the business. In practice, she found the ultimate say often sat somewhere else."You're actually working for other people, making them lots of money."The frustration wasn't only about control. Comms had started to feel superficial to her, and she was convinced it could deliver real change if it was set up differently. She had always wanted to build something from the beginning, but she was looking for the right thing rather than following a plan. That gap between influence and authority is something many senior people in agencies will recognise, and it pushed her to ask what a business would look like if she got to make the decisions.Building Blurred Around the ClientThe invitation to start an agency came at speed, with a clear message: it was happening with or without her, but they wanted it to be her. Katy said yes, and once she had, the practical worries stopped mattering. The only safety net she needed was a good career behind her and skills another business would want."I also think making those leaps or taking those steps is what builds that confidence."Blurred launched in 2018, not long before Covid, and quickly turned towards ESG as corporate reporting pressure grew. As Chief Client Officer, Katy starts from the client's side of the table, and she had seen where agencies weren't delivering. Clients were splitting work between a corporate agency and a consumer agency, or relying on a network that claimed to do both. They wanted one team that understood both, which is where "blurred briefs" came from.About Supo:Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people.For more information about Supo: ⁠www.supo.co.ukAbout BlurredBlurred is a London-based strategic and creative advisory firm, founded in 2018 and built on ESGP (environment, social, governance and purpose). It works on briefs that sit between corporate reputation, creative campaigns and sustainability expertise.For more information about Blurred: https://blurred.global/

Megan Morass started Full Fat in January 2012, in her early twenties, in the middle of the second wave of the financial crisis. She wasn't planning to build the largest music and festival communications agency in Europe. She just watched the agency she worked at fall apart and thought she and her co-founder could do it better."We were in a really cool agency, and our team were doing so well, but the agency wasn't working. So in that naivety of young 20s... we thought, we can do this."What followed was over a decade of learning, sometimes painfully, what actually holds a creative business together. Not talent. Not chaos. Something in between the two.The Agency That Had Everything Except StructureThe agency Megan left behind was full of brilliant people, several of whom went on to run marketing for the Olympics or lead major beauty brands. What it lacked wasn't talent, it was systems strong enough to withstand the unpredictability of the industry around it."The systems and the processes of the agency were not rigid or not strong enough to withstand the chaos of the environment."That tension, between the freedom creativity needs and the structure a business needs to survive, became the thread running through everything Megan built afterwards. Too much rigidity smothers the work. Too little, and brilliant people can't turn ideas into anything sustainable.About Supo:Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people.For more information about Supo: ⁠www.supo.co.ukAbout Full FatA Certified B Corp culture agency built from festival and music PR into one of Europe's leading brand and culture consultancies, working with brands including 1664 Bière and MASAJ, and creator of the Cultural Resonance Index, a scientifically backed framework for measuring and building brand equity through cultural relevance.For more information about Full Fat: https://www.wearefullfat.com/

Sam Holwell built a dashboard that compressed five weeks of work into a single click. Then he went and helped run a data consultancy through the exact kind of growth that dashboard was supposed to make manageable.Sam Holwell is Managing Director of Data Cubed, a data and AI consultancy that helps businesses treat performance tracking like checking the weather, something you should be able to do at a glance, not something that takes a specialist team five weeks to produce.Learning Data on the Navy's MoneyBefore Data Cubed, Sam spent five years at a defence consultancy, working hands-on with data for the Royal Navy's procurement arm. The Navy had billions in spend and no granularity on where it actually went. Sam's team built the rules to find it."There was 100 million pounds worth of savings identified through that process. I think there was more than that, then there was kind of billions, but they decided to take 100 million off the shortlist."The project evolved from a single point-in-time study into an ongoing system, feeding data back monthly rather than producing a report and moving on. When the consultancy was acquired and Sam's team of roughly 100 suddenly became part of an organisation of 100,000, the work barely changed. What changed was the appetite around it, suddenly he had access to an entirely new internal market hungry to apply the same thinking elsewhere in the business.About Supo:Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people.For more information about Supo: ⁠www.supo.co.ukAbout Data CubedA data and AI consultancy founded in 2017, delivering over 300 data and AI projects across more than 100 clients in 30-plus industries, helping organisations build stronger data foundations, automate processes and adopt AI with real, measurable value rather than headline ambition. Certified B Corp.For more information about Data Cubed: https://data-cubed.com/

Most agency origin stories follow a pattern. Business plan. Market research. Pitch deck. Network aggressively. Land first client. Scale. Lauren Tauben's story doesn't follow that pattern at all.Her path into marketing started with a design course at London Metropolitan in the late 90s - the old school way of working, when courses taught you photography, architecture, managing design all at once. Work experience at MK Saatchi came through knowing people. Good relationships, early on, opened doors that cold pitching never would.Then came the moment that changed everything.Lauren was working at BD, a creative agency, on the Nintendo account. This wasn't just any account - it was the era of the Nintendo DS, the Wii launch, the cultural phenomenon of motion-controlled gaming reaching families who'd never thought of themselves as gamers. The work was exciting. The brand was iconic. The energy was palpable.But there was one moment that crystallized something deeper about what marketing actually is.BD decided to launch Wii Sports Resort at the NEC in Birmingham. Not a traditional product launch. A living experience. They transformed the entire arena into a real-life version of the game. Two thousand Nintendo employees attended. Ant and Dec hosted. Every single element of the game - the bowling, the boxing, the tennis - came to life.Lauren ran around that event and felt something she'd never felt before. Not excitement. Not just adrenaline. A clarity. "I'm just where I need to be," she thought. "I want this feeling for the rest of my life."That feeling - that sense of purpose, of connection, of creating something that made people feel something - became the north star for everything that came next.About Supo:Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people.For more information about Supo: ⁠www.supo.co.ukAbout Lauren Tauben, Agent 42:Lauren Tauben is founder and CEO of Agent 42, a London-based social, performance and PR agency that uses data to create impactful storytelling. Her career spans MK Saatchi, BD (where she led the iconic Nintendo account and the legendary Wii Sports Resort launch), and PlayStation at another agency, before founding Agent 42 on the philosophy that marketing should be relationship-led and human-first. Under her leadership, Agent 42 has grown entirely through relationships and word of mouth - no cold calling, no pitch decks, just trust. The agency was acquired by Atoms and Space in 2024, and Lauren remains CEO, continuing to build Agent 42 across EMEA and the US while maintaining the relationship-driven culture that made it work from day one.For more information about Agent 42: http://www.agent42.co.uk/

Most agency founders tell you about the plan. The vision, the five-year strategy, the moment they knew.Pietro Ranieri doesn't have that story."I'm not a business guy, I don't understand any of this stuff. It's just kind of trying to figure it out as you go."That sentence is doing more work than it sounds like. Because the business Pietro built by figuring it out as he went grew to 65 people across Europe. And the business he nearly lost, through no fault of his own work, taught him more about running a company than any plan ever could have.From Farming College to Fleet StreetPietro went to Harper Adams, an agricultural college near Telford. He wasn't from a farming family, his father was a barber, so farming itself was never really on the table. He was there for rugby as much as anything else.There was no plan to end up in PR. A girlfriend was contracting in marketing, and the world of daily rates got mentioned to him almost in passing. He landed a placement with an agency for what he assumed would be six months. He'd get paid more for less work than his account director salary. That was the whole rationale."At the time, the only reason why I went that way is because I just thought, well, I am getting paid more money to do far less work."The six-month placement never really ended. It just kept extending into more clients, more retainers, more work he hadn't gone looking for. This is the pattern that defines Pietro's career: not chasing opportunity, but recognising it when it was already standing in front of him.About Supo:Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people.For more information about Supo: ⁠www.supo.co.ukAbout Ranieri Agency:Founded by Pietro Ranieri, Ranieri Agency is a London-headquartered communications agency working across consumer, technology and gaming brands, with additional offices in Paris, Munich and Dusseldorf and partner agencies further afield. The agency covers the full spread of modern brand communications, from PR and influencer work through to social, content, digital marketing and paid media, and counts KEF, the hi-fi brand with over six decades of heritage in sound, among its current clients. Ranieri Agency has been named among PR Week's Top 150 agencies, and describes itself as boutique in ethos despite operating on a genuinely international scale, taking on both established giants and challenger brands with the same level of attention.For more information about Ranieri Agency: https://ranieri.agency/

Most people who talk about culture in business are talking about strategy.Better collaboration. Stronger alignment. Improved retention. Increased productivity. These are the words you hear at conferences, in HR decks, in carefully worded mission statements that no one reads.Paul Hutton doesn't talk about culture that way.When Paul walked into FOUR Agency three weeks before his conversation with Jim, the place was a graveyard of silos. People worked in boxes. Accounts were managed in isolation. No one talked across departments. The whole operation was built like a fortress - every person for themselves, every discipline sealed off from the rest.But that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was what the client said."We thought you just did the boring PR bit."That sentence contains everything. It's not a complaint. It's a diagnosis. The client didn't know what FOUR could do because FOUR didn't know what FOUR could do. The company had stopped seeing itself. The silos had calcified so deeply that no one could point at another department and say: "We could do something interesting together."That's when Paul understood: culture isn't something you strategize. It's something you feel when it's broken. And you know exactly how to fix it.--About Supo:Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people.For more information about Supo: ⁠www.supo.co.ukAbout FOUR Agency:FOUR is an award-winning creative marketing and PR agency based in Norwich and London. Established in 1963, FOUR has spent over 60 years shaping brands, crafting compelling stories, and delivering marketing communications that make an unmissable impact. Under the leadership of CEO Paul Hutton, FOUR has evolved from a traditional PR agency into an integrated powerhouse - bringing together brand strategy, PR, social media, and digital to help clients stand out, connect, and grow. The agency specializes in understanding people: what they want to see, what they engage with, and how to move them. FOUR operates with a culture built on breaking silos, playing out of position to support clients, and ensuring that every person who works there leaves better than they arrived.For more information about FOUR Agency: https://www.fouragency.co.uk/Culture isn't a strategy. It's what you build when you stop pretending business mechanics matter more than human ones. When you break the silos. When you remember that they'll remember the sports day, not the late night. Ready to hear what happens when a leader chooses that - and what changes in a 63-year-old agency as a result? This episode is exactly that.

Most conversations about AI in marketing start with fear. Will it replace me? What happens to my team? How do I stay relevant?Anthony Kennedy doesn't start there. He starts with a different question: What work is actually worth doing?His career has been built inside global organisations. Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, where he fell into an in-house agency role and discovered how deeply you can understand a brand when you're inside it. KPMG, where he built their in-house capability from the ground up. ION, where he scaled an internal creative services function called Impact across 13 offices, 11 time zones, and 15 specialist teams.Then he stepped away. Earlier this year, Anthony made the choice to work independently - advising senior leaders on AI adoption, in-house team design, and the future of marketing roles. It's the kind of move that only makes sense if you've already figured out what you're actually good at.And he has. Deeply.What Anthony has learned through his career - and what he's now using to advise other organisations navigating AI - is that the threat isn't what everyone thinks it is. The threat isn't AI. The threat is average work. And AI has already replaced it.His reference point comes from David Droga, the legendary creative leader who recently gave an exit interview where he said something that landed hard: "AI has already replaced. It's better than average. Nobody should be trying to save the average." This isn't doom. It's clarity. If AI can do average work better than humans can, then the conversation shifts. The question stops being "how do we protect average work" and becomes "how do we do work that AI can't do."For Anthony, that's where the real leverage sits. Not in fighting technology. In understanding what technology can't touch - and building teams and organisations around that.The episode covers the practical reality of this shift. Anthony talks about building in-house teams at the scale he managed at ION - and why in-house agencies matter more now than ever. He talks about the difference between pressure and stress, and why most leaders confuse the two (spoiler: it's about whether you have your task list under control). He shares his hiring principle - "don't hire a**holes" - and why that rule has held across every organisation he's worked with.But the core of this conversation is about the tools themselves. Anthony uses AI deeply and daily. Six apps on his phone that he engages with every single day. ChatGPT with custom GPTs built around his Gallup Strengths Finder results, so every query comes back with advice tailored to his strengths and guidance on what to delegate. Claude for specific types of creative work. Mistral to create prompts for other AI platforms. Gemini. ProtonLumo with integrated file storage so he can capture ideas on the move and have his AI projects reference them next time he returns.This isn't theoretical. This is someone who's thought about how to work in this era and is now building the infrastructure to do it well.The uncomfortable truth he keeps coming back to: 94% of companies are adopting AI into their workflows. Only 6% of people have been formally trained on it. That gap is where the real problem sits. Not the technology. The preparation. The training. The clarity about what you're actually trying to do with these tools.This episode is for leaders who feel the shift happening and aren't sure where to stand. It's for marketers who know average work is disappearing and wondering what that means for their career. It's for anyone trying to figure out whether they're under pressure (which is manageable) or stress (which breaks you), and whether they've actually got the fundamentals right - clean data, good systems, people who know what they're doing.Anthony doesn't have all the answers. But he's asking better questions than most. And his experience building inside complex organisations has taught him what actually matters when the work changes.

Most agency founders never talk about the clients they turned down. The money they left on the table. The moment they realised that winning the pitch and living with the decision were two completely different things.Alex Holliman and Oliver Zenglein talk about it constantly.They met through agency networks - the kind of spaces where people go when they need to process things they can't say in normal business settings. They're both in performance marketing. They're both in different countries. And they're both building agencies that look radically different from what the industry expects.Alex spent his entire career in agencies. Three of the top five media agencies in London. A startup that grew to £25 million before he left. At 35, he thought: if I don't do this now, I work for someone else forever. So he started Climbing Trees 15 years ago. Performance marketing. SEO. Paid media. Ethical from the beginning, but it took him years to realise that ethics wasn't a marketing angle - it was the actual strategy.Oliver took a different route to the same place. He was a touring musician in a ska-reggae band for years. Then he joined windeln.de as CMO from the very start - watched it scale, watched it prepare for IPO, felt Goldman Sachs money change the pressure in the room. When he realised the IPO timeline wasn't compatible with having a family and staying sane, he left. Founded The Boutique Agency in Munich in 2015. Performance marketing. SEA. The same discipline, different country.What they discovered - independently, then together - is that turning away business is harder than taking it. Alex has turned down approximately £1 million worth of pitches over three years. Gambling clients. Fast fashion. Fossil fuel companies. Industries they didn't want to amplify. Oliver has a code of ethics that excludes entire sectors, regardless of financial pressure.About Supo:Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people.For more information about Supo: ⁠www.supo.co.ukAbout Climbing Trees:Climbing Trees is a performance ads and SEO agency based in Colchester, Essex, driven to ethically deliver results for companies that will shape the future world. Founded by Alex Holliman in 2010, Climbing Trees specialises in data-driven growth for B2B organisations, e-commerce brands, and purpose-led organisations including Greenpeace and Olympus Cameras. As a B Corp certified agency with the King's Award for Sustainable Business, Climbing Trees integrates sustainability into every decision - from who they work with to how they measure impact. Their methodology seamlessly combines performance discipline with ethical practice, proving that growth and good can coexist.For more information about Climbing Trees: www.climbingtrees.com About The Boutique Agency:The Boutique Agency is an award-winning performance marketing agency based in Munich, founded by Oliver Zenglein in 2015. Specialising in SEA, SEO, and paid social, The Boutique Agency helps B2B, e-commerce, travel, and purpose-driven organisations achieve profitable and sustainable growth. With a team of over 40 specialists, The Boutique Agency is B Corp certified and operates with core values of passion, transparency, appreciation, and responsibility. They've established a code of ethics that guides which clients and industries they'll work with, demonstrating that performance marketing and purpose-driven business aren't mutually exclusive.For more information about The Boutique Agency: www.the-boutique-agency.de

There's a lie we've all been told. You either make money or make a difference. Pick one. Clare Sweeney spent years living that false choice until she couldn't anymore.For years, Clare worked in commercial - CRM, FMCG, brand development. Senior Client Services Director. She was good at it. But in 2012, a friend's son was given a life-limiting diagnosis. Medical companies weren't interested. The disease didn't fit the commercial model. So Clare volunteered for a year to help set up a charity.That year changed everything. When she returned to agency, she couldn't feel the same way. She didn't care whether FMCG organizations were selling more products at inflated prices. She wanted impact. And she realised: the lie wasn't true. Profit and purpose aren't enemies. They multiply.Clare founded Keepace Consulting - a crossover practice connecting commercial skills with charity sector impact. She's proof the boundaries are artificial. That commercial marketing transforms how charities raise income. That partnerships between sectors don't compete - they compound.But here's what made the real difference: at age ten, Clare had a moment of clarity. She suddenly realised adults weren't operating from some higher plane of certainty. They were just big kids - still making it up and winging it every single day. No magic age where you suddenly know your stuff. Just people, improvising, doing their best.That insight removed the fear of not being qualified enough. It gave her permission to build something that didn't fit into either category neatly.This episode tackles the false choice keeping both sectors separated and struggling. It's about why commercial skills look different in a charity boardroom, not worse. Why efficiency isn't a dirty word in the not-for-profit space. Why connection, not loyalty, drives giving.About Supo:Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people.For more information about Supo: ⁠www.supo.co.ukAbout Keepace Consulting:Keepace Consulting is a cross-sector fundraising consultancy founded by Clare Sweeney. Specialising in connecting commercial expertise with charity and heritage sectors, Keepace works with organisations across culture, heritage, music and social impact to build sustainable income models that honour mission whilst respecting commercial discipline. With 25+ years spanning both worlds, Clare brings proven strategies in legacy fundraising and corporate partnerships. She lightens the load and adds passion and creativity to fundraising - her infectious energy and nurturing approach help fundraisers maximise their potential. Keepace exists to prove that profit and purpose multiply.For more information about Keepace Consulting: https://www.keepaceconsults.com/Ready to discover why the choice between profit and purpose is a lie - and what happens when you stop believing it? This episode is about why the best work happens when sectors stop pretending they're enemies.