Most people who sell their agency spend the first year of the earnout looking over their shoulder. Fiona McKenzie proactively focused on quickly tearing down the walls between two businesses and building something new. Seven months on from the acquisition of her agency Revere by Marketbridge, she is out of earnout, off the legacy systems, and running a near-100-person European operation as its President. She is also, in the same breath, thinking about the CMOs who quietly ask her how to stay in their jobs for another two years.
Rich: What have your new American overlords actually put you on the hook for?
Fiona: Europe is a really strategic part of the overarching plan. Expanding beyond the US was a key strategic initiative and part of their growth strategy. My remit in the immediate term was to take the two businesses that are now together and form part of our European base. Revere has only just finished a very fast integration. We are out of earnout already. We are fully integrated. We are working as one team on the same P&L, everyone aligned, working towards common goals.
In the long term it is continued expansion in Europe across geographies, building out service capabilities aligned to the wider group model. But most importantly, every agency is evolving regardless of whether you are part of an acquisition or not. Clients are layering in AI, layering in technology. They have their own challenges. Agencies have to be evolving constantly to meet those needs.
“The real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader.”
Rich: How on earth did you achieve so much so quickly? I would expect a typical earnout to be at least 12 months.
Fiona: A big part of the success was the fact that I spent a lot of time with Fiona Shepherd, who was leading Europe at the time, even ahead of the announcement. We had very transparent conversations, not just with her but with the rest of the leadership team. When you go into these discussions and you have decided that a particular brand is right for your agency’s next stage of growth, you have to go into the diligence phase and trust the process. Keep it human.
I spoke to any agency leader that would let me buy them lunch ahead of going through that process. I asked them for their war stories, understood the journey through the sales process, asked them what they would do differently. So, I felt I went in with my eyes open. I was almost overly human. I wanted to have conversations outside of all the spreadsheets and finance.
The advice I always give now is: if you are about to go out to market to sell your business, have a holiday before you go out, not after. Because the real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader, not just to the team you have led but to the team you are going to be working with. And everyone has had their own journey of how they got there.
I practised what I preached on that one. We got to the point where we had a number of LOIs (Letter of Intents) and then we went on a two-week holiday and signed the LOI when we came back. So, we could go into diligence full throttle. I always do my best thinking on holiday. Your mind slows down, you think about the big picture, and you come back with real clarity on what comes next.
Bob Ray, our CEO, says something to people when he talks to them in smaller groups that has always stuck with me. He says: “no one here chose to work for Marketbridge”. So, you have to be really respectful. People chose to work for Revere. They ended up in here. I tried to over-communicate during the process to explain to people why it was the right move.
It was also a real divide and conquer effort on the integration itself. I cannot lead everything, nor can a few of us. You have to empower people in the right roles and trust them to get on with it. Seven months on and we are all on the same systems, working to the same goals. That allows you to move at pace. And that is what you need to do in this market.
Rich: It sounds like you went into a marriage wanting to build foundations and settle down, rather than going in thinking about what happens when you get divorced.
Fiona: Exactly. And as someone who has been through divorce, it can be a very complicated and traumatic experience. You can only make the right decision in the moment. My experience before Revere was a few other agency brands. I had had a little experience of acquisitions and mergers with other agencies, and sometimes you can have a happy divorce and sometimes it can be a really bad divorce.
In this instance, I was joining under Fiona Shepherd as the leader of Europe. I do not think at the time she necessarily had plans to step out so quickly. But I think she always had a vision for what Europe could look like. She really saw that our team would be the next step for that vision. And the success of the integration meant she felt she could step back and hand over the reins. She has been in this industry a long time and it is a big decision.
Now, funnily enough, everyone wants to buy me lunch. Which is quite good fun. You just do not have enough hours in the day.
Rich: I’ve heard you say that a lot of CMOs have lost their marketing mojo. Why?
Fiona: There are a large number of restructures that continue to take place. That creates fear in role. And there is a constant need to prove ROI. Essentially, they are in defence mode. There are very few businesses or marketing leaders that are able to step out into that proactive mode as much as they try, because they are exhausted. They constantly feel like they are fighting a battle and justifying their existence.
I very much see agencies as a comfort blanket for those CMOs, but also as their superpower. How can we be here to protect you? How can we help you? A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to wider stakeholders. So, my team and I become that outlet.
“A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to the wider stakeholders. So, we become that outlet.”
Rich: I see a lot of CMOs in a form of paralysis out of fear. Like the housing market. Sitting still, nervous to move, nervous to remodel.
Fiona: Yes. And I can tell you, having hosted my own event for people out of seat, people put on a brave face but underneath it there is real struggle. You get a real sense of what brands are expecting from CMOs when you speak to people trying to go into those roles. A lot of people are not even wanting the CMO role anymore, for that reason.
I went into a meeting with a CMO at a global enterprise organisation, someone I had seen online, clearly very capable from everything I had heard. My objective going in was to position our agency well. We had worked with her previous employer for over seven years, so I wanted to get in front of her early. As you build trust through the meeting, slowly people break down and expose how they really feel. At the end of the conversation, she flipped it entirely and turned to me and said: “what advice would you give me, so I am still in my role in two years?” I walked out and thought, God, what a turn of events. I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive.
What CMOs need is to show that marketing is connected to revenue. They need to show that marketing is part of a revenue system. It needs to be process driven. And a lot of CMOs and marketing leaders did not come into marketing to do the role they are actually being asked to do today.
“I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive.”
Rich: I see a lot of synergies with what happened 10 years ago when marketing automation came in. There was a misguided belief that it would make marketing cheaper. That same conversation has gone up a level again with AI.
Fiona: Exactly that. We are firmly adopting a very proactive and aggressive AI strategy. We did that at Revere and won a couple of awards for the work we did with that adoption. But it is not really about AI. It is about going back to what the client actually has a challenge on.
The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI and into what is it your business is trying to do, what are the goals you are trying to achieve, how can we work together to get you to those outcomes as effectively as possible. If that is using AI as a growth catalyst, great. If it is redefining your workflows, okay, let us look at that.
And for all the hype, we have to remember there are brands in very different situations. I was speaking to a CMO recently who has moved into a global role and is trying to redefine the central regional model. In reality, his team is barely doing digital marketing properly, let alone automated workflow. We have to meet people where they are.
One area where we have moved fast and seen real pickup is generative engine optimisation. We were pretty quick out of the blocks on the GEO story and have been running a lot of client projects in that space. But even there, you cannot look at it in isolation. It ties into a bigger story about how buyer behaviour is changing and how brands need to show up in a world where AI is increasingly part of the buying committee.
“The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI.”
Rich: How do you actually help CMOs get their mojo back then?
Fiona: Show them a roadmap to creating a growth system. There are so many directions of travel that people get pulled in, and CMOs just need to know they are on a roadmap. We cannot all change everything overnight. No leader can.
It is always about the roadmap and the process. You cannot ignore the business realities and the needs that have to be met in the short term, but ultimately you have to be visionary and make the right investments for the long term as well. Our job is to help them prioritise. Get some quick wins in. Do not overcomplicate it. But also help them prove investment to grow the roadmap toward long-term growth.
Ultimately that is where people get their mojo. They want to be doing stuff that is meaningful. We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. Everything is about creating a connection. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress.
When people lose their mojo, things have got a bit messy. How do we strip it back? They need to be able to say no. They need to be able to prioritise. And it just seems to be, for the myriad of reasons we have discussed, increasingly hard for marketing leaders to do that.
“We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress.”
Rich: What does success look like for you in 12 months’ time?
Fiona: Being recognised as a category creator and disruptor. Not a typical agency services model. A blend of consultancy services and agency services, bringing in new expertise, creating a new category as a leading growth and go-to-market business. Expanding beyond the CMO buyer, working into the C-suite.
I have this vision of being at your CMO roundtables and people saying: oh, you guys are a different kind of business, they would not consider themselves an agency, they consider themselves a company to support growth. That is what I want to hear. And I am going to be doing everything I can over the next 12 months to make sure we are seen that way.
I will be straight with you. I feel like I have gone from, and I probably would not normally describe it this way, but I will now, from a Championship club to the Premier League. We always felt like a Premier League brand. We just did not have the squad depth.
B2B Marketing United publishes practitioner-led content for senior B2B marketers. All editorial is independent.
