How do you scale a consultancy without becoming the bottleneck yourself?

Ben Tye is CEO of Gate One, the growth transformation consultancy within Havas. Alongside leading a 300-person business across three continents, he also works as a psychotherapist - giving him a unique perspective on leadership, organisational change and human behaviour.


In this episode, Ben shares how he:

• Explains why giving someone your complete attention is often more valuable than offering a quick solution
• Uses psychotherapy principles to uncover what sits beneath resistance, conflict and indecision inside leadership teams
• Trains managers to coach rather than rescue, reducing dependency and encouraging genuine accountability
• Organises a growing consultancy around “bases” that give people both a sense of belonging and a platform to grow from
• Transitioned Gate One from founder-led decision-making to distributed leadership with clearer ownership across the business
• Learnt that the hardest leadership shift is letting teams solve problems without stepping in to fix them

Ben offers a thoughtful perspective on what leaders need to unlearn as their organisations grow - and why curiosity often beats certainty.

How do you transform an established agency without losing the people who made it successful in the first place?

Chris Jones is CEO of Space & Time, the growth marketing agency he acquired through a management buyout in 2018. Since then, he’s led the business through a major repositioning to focus on commercial growth, innovation and long-term client impact.

In this episode, Chris shares how he:

• Protected the agency’s strongest qualities while redesigning how the business delivers value to clients
• Reframed client conversations around revenue, business outcomes and commercial impact rather than marketing metrics
• Developed a 10-year AI vision centred on amplifying human talent rather than replacing it, helping drive adoption across the business
• Built an innovation culture by giving employees the confidence to experiment with AI and lead new initiatives
• Created an internal ‘Netflix-style’ learning platform where teams share innovations, experiments and lessons across the agency
• Helped sceptical employees embrace major change through direct conversations, transparency and relentless communication

Chris offers a practical perspective on agency transformation, showing that change is rarely about processes alone. It comes from creating clarity, communicating consistently and helping people build confidence in the journey ahead.

How do you step into your first CEO role, make difficult restructuring decisions whilst merging two businesses and still build trust quickly?

Rebecca Crook is CEO of MSQ DX, the digital impact company. She leads a 150-person business across the UK and Spain as part of the wider 550-person global MSQ DX group.

In this episode, Rebecca shares how she:

• Learned that first-time CEOs should throw away their perfect 100-day plan and spend far longer listening than acting
• Redefined high performance around client commercial outcomes - and not utilisation, delivery milestones or agency output
• Built trust during a major merger through radical transparency, open access and a genuine “Ask Me Anything” culture
• Created unusually high engagement with internal comms with optional all-hands deep dives, team-led sessions and practical forums
• Hired an AI Collaboration Director to align the business around an AI strategy for its people
• Uses office culture deliberately to accelerate learning - especially for younger talent who benefit from informal day-to-day exposure

Rebecca offers a candid look at leading through uncertainty, making difficult calls early and why trust is the operating system behind meaningful change.

How do you transform a 1600-person global agency without leaving your people behind?

Annabelle Walters is Global Chief People Officer at Jellyfish, leading the people and talent strategy across 30 offices in 22 countries. She’s helping reshape performance, culture and leadership while preparing the business for an AI-driven future.

In this episode, Annabelle shares how she:

• Defines high performance around impact - and not visibility, busyness or activity
• Pushes leaders to talk openly about change, rather than letting uncertainty fill the gaps
• Treats AI adoption as a shared responsibility between the business and individual employees
• Rebuilt performance management to connect individual goals to wider business outcomes
• Explains why removing line managers created distance between leaders and their people
• Uses radical transparency, frequent town halls and open dialogue to keep a global business aligned

Annabelle offers a candid perspective on how to lead people through large-scale transformation and prepare teams for an AI-shaped future.

How do you build a culture that people believe in - and behave differently because of?

Alex Willcocks is Founder and Managing Director of Engage, a 60-person digital agency. He’s grown the business over the past 18 years with a relentless focus on people, culture and performance. More recently, he transitioned the business to employee ownership.

In this episode, Alex shares how he:

• Created three values that are deliberately impossible to copy into any other business
• Uses those values as an anchor for performance and to shape how people think and act
• Built a detailed competency framework where behaviours map directly back to each value at every level
• Reframes performance improvement plans as a way to support people back to their best, not manage them out
• Introduced employee representatives on the board to improve decisions and remove a “them and us” dynamic
• Runs the “Elympics” to drive energy, wellbeing and connection - while raising money for local charities

Alex shows what it looks like when culture is consistent over time, and how clarity, ownership and shared standards compound into real performance.

How do you keep culture sharp, standards high and people engaged as an agency grows?

Jessica Hargreaves Paczek is CEO of Pretty Green, the creative comms agency behind global fame-making campaigns. She leads a 70-person team and has helped build an agency that’s been named a Best Place to Work for four years in a row.


In this episode, Jess shares how she:

• Uses EOS to give everyone clear accountabilities, quarterly priorities and a strong sense of where they fit
• Treats people, purpose and performance as inseparable (rather than seeing culture as a side project)
• Has turned their values into behaviours, giving teams practical permission to take smart risks and give clearer feedback
• Invests heavily in team feedback, from CEO one-to-ones to internal focus groups that surface issues leadership might otherwise miss
• Brings talent, onboarding, retention and social impact close together through a heavily resourced people function
• Runs the ‘CanCanLion’ Awards, to recognise and reward outstanding ‘less ordinary’ and creative work

Jess offers a thoughtful look at what it takes to build a high-performing agency culture - more clarity, more listening, more repetition and a willingness to keep tightening the system as the business evolves.

How do you grow while continuously strengthening your culture and developing antibodies to incompatible working styles?

Steven Writer-Maguire is Director at the consultancy Clarasys. He joined the firm 8 years ago and has overseen growth from 40 to over 200 people in London and Boston.

In this episode, Steven shares how he:

• Rapidly transitioned away from a traditional hierarchical consultancy mindset to one of trust and enablement
• Set up a Team of Teams model where multi-disciplinary teams make decisions and collectively solve client problems by themselves
• Uses their monthly F**k Up Challenge so everyone can safely share mistakes and learnings
• Encourages people to act as business owners and make their own decisions about what’s best for the company
• Puts everyone through their internal course, Clarasys Code, so they all learn about emotional intelligence and neuroscience
• Created the Clarasys Triangle (featuring People, Business and Clients) to guide their decision-making

Steven passionately shares his ‘why’: To build the best firm their people will ever work for. As a result, their culture gets stronger the larger they grow.

How do you grow to 300 people globally with a laser focus on people and culture?

Tamara Littleton is Executive Chair & Founder at Social Element. She started the agency as a remote-first business 22 years ago.

In this episode, Tamara shares how she:

• Puts attracting and retaining brilliant talent at the top of their flywheel and as their key business objective
• Used her corporate background to apply strategic thinking from day one and grow into a large business
• Leads from the back to keep out of people’s way and allow them to take the business forward
• Appointed external auditors to measure how well they’re doing for diversity and help them continuously improve
• Rolled out DISC training across the business so everyone better understands each other, is more respectful and challenges ideas
• Takes it as her personal responsibility to retain the culture so the team keeps turning up every day and doing a great job

Tamara openly shares her 22-year journey from sole founder to handing over the running of the business and appointing two co-CEOs.