Jeans, Jokes and the Joy of Creative Chaos: Meet MSQ's COO

I trained as a chartered accountant out of Uni at Deloitte. For reasons that seemed to make sense to 21-year-old me, I started off in financial services. So banking, insurance, etc. I qualified and left immediately, ending up in the European Finance team of Mercer, an employee benefits consultancy. That was a move into an international people business, if not the creative side of things.

After three years or so there, I decided to move on and ended up working for a PR firm called Trimedia, which was part of Huntsworth plc. It was pan-European and a people business, but I was interested in something that seemed to be a lot of fun, informal (everyone was wearing jeans, I was still in a suit every day at that point!), and it enabled me to move in a different direction.

I spent nearly six years there working for Michael Murphy, who was an amazing boss and gave me a load of room to grow. He also showed an enormous amount of faith and trust in me, which was career and confidence-building, as I was only in my late twenties. We did a load of M&A and merged with various other parts of the group, such that six years later, I was the global CFO of Grayling (which included the original Trimedia businesses), expanding the markets I worked with to the US, Eastern Europe, and Asia.

After a while, I decided it was time to move on and became EMEA FD at Maxus, a media agency in WPP (now Wavemaker). That was great fun, fast growing and my two years there were good times. But ultimately, I had an entrepreneurial itch, and the MSQ opportunity came along. It allowed me to scratch it. That was 12 years ago!

My role as Group COO involves working with the group leadership team at MSQ as well as with all of our agencies. I'm lucky in that, having worked with our CEO, Peter Reid since I joined, I really know what he needs to know without needing to have too many formal communications/meetings, which helps with the speed at which we’re growing! I am in constant dialogue with the rest of the group leadership and attend regular (at least monthly) meetings with all of our agencies to help them and any of their issues. I like to think I’m pretty responsive though, so I am generally available when needed. Or not!

Creative environments are very dynamic and fast-moving places to work. The people are the key - working with smart colleagues who are happy, motivated, and want to do well is what keeps me coming back for more. The fluidity and fast-paced decision-making is exciting and very different from the more corporate environments I worked in earlier in my career. I definitely couldn't / wouldn't go back now! It is also true that there are never two days the same (although sometimes I wish there were). From M&A, to dealing with investors, agency teams, HR, and IT (also part of my remit), client contracts, insurance, lawyers, and lots of things in between.

AI surprises

The biggest surprise? Having started in financial services, it was all surprising!

In terms of AI, we use agents to help us throughout our finance and ops processes. We have invested in group-wide Claude licences, used it to re-engineer/automate multiple workflows, and I encourage my team to block out some time each week to invest in learning and finding ways to use it that we haven't thought of yet. It is a very powerful tool for researching and accelerating our analysis and interpretation of data.

The charging structure for creative ideas and creative processes is definitely something that, as an industry, we need to collectively improve. The conversations we’re having with clients are about more commercial arrangements where we look to attribute a value to our services, based on commercial outcomes. Due to their own circumstances, not every client wants to do this, but we are seeing more interest in the concept.

My favourite ads tend to be those from when I was younger and I watched more TV! The good old days of four TV channels, with ads on two, and you only watched one of them. And with a lot of humour. The Castlemaine XXXX ads (Crocodiles ate all the sharks, etc) stick in the memory. More recently, I loved Epic Split.

But probably my all-time favourite is this one, Berlitz German Coastguard – not the sexiest product but very clever, very funny and sticks in the memory. And obviously, everything created by my brilliant colleagues at MSQ!