Stephanie Brimacombe: Where Graft Meets Growth

Stephanie Brimacombe has a better 'origin story' than most agency leaders, although she is not especially inclined to over-polish or shout loudly about it (indeed it took months to persuade her to be interviewed at all).

Before starting at VCCP 16 years ago, there was a Devon farm, a geography degree, a stint studying sharks in the Bahamas, PR, her own consultancy, a race to the North Pole that raised £50,000 for Mencap which, rather neatly, put her in the path of the VCCP people who would later hire her. VCCP’s own version is that Michael Sugden and Andrew Peake (who she later married) “went to the ends of the earth to recruit her”.

Since joining VCCP in 2010, Brimacombe has become one of the group’s most high-profile figures on the industry circuit in an agency that was already blessed with plenty. She also has a number of remits — its global chief growth officer, its CEO of EMEA and, since January, chief executive of VCCP Roar, the PR and communications agency created from the amalgamation of Good Relations, Harvard, and Teamspirit.

Her tenure has not been short of external validation either. She was named Campaign’s Global Agency Growth Leader for 2023 and again for 2025, has twice been named Campaign’s Top New Business Chief, and was included in Campaign’s 40 Over 40 in 2025. VCCP, meanwhile, has become almost indecently familiar with the top of the new-business tables: Campaign’s Global Agency of the Year citation credits Brimacombe with helping VCCP top the AAR new-business table 11 times in 12 years (the only year it wasn't top was when she was on maternity leave, she jokes), while the agency has led the AAR league for the seventh year running. Just last week VCCP added the Ikea account to its haul of clients.

The danger, with a record like that, is that it can make success look inevitable and strategically planned. But Brimacombe is far more interesting than someone who has schemed or pre-determined her way up the corporate greasy pole, as so many still do. Her career has been less a masterplan than a series of well-taken bold chances, stitched together by graft, stamina, and an unusually low tolerance for standing around while someone else does the hard bit. “It’s easy to think that people who are perceived to be successful have got a grand plan,” she says. “But I think it is about saying yes more than you say no.”

That instinct now has a new outlet. In November 2025 VCCP launched VCCP Roar under Brimacombe’s leadership and positioned the business as “disruptors of influence”. The move is a return to her PR roots, but also a bet on where brand-building is heading: towards a more connected world in which brand reputation, earned media, culture, and creativity can no longer be treated as separate disciplines. It's also a further vote of confidence by VCCP in Brimacombe's capability as a leader.

However, if you ask Brimacombe where that appetite for the difficult bit comes from and she does not start with pitches, awards or boardrooms. She starts with the farm. A mixed family farm in Devon, to be precise, where there were dairy herds, beef cattle, and arable land where harvest did not care what else was in the diary, and where her farmer father’s view of gender equality was pleasingly direct: “You’re not any different to the rest of the lads. Get on the tractor. Go and do your bit.”

There are probably worse preparations for agency life than being told, early and often, that the job simply needs doing — for example a cosseted humanities degree at a Russell Group university. Consequently Brimacombe’s version of leadership is not wrapped in management theory or an overblown sense of entitlement. “If you don’t do it, no one else is going to do it,” she says. “The jobs that need to get done, need to get done.”

The story that best explains this is one she finds difficult to tell without getting emotional. Her father was having cancer treatment and Brimacombe would travel down from London to sit with him during chemotherapy. It was harvest time, which is inconveniently indifferent to illness, family stress or the state of anyone’s diary — even someone as busy as Brimacombe. She remembers telling him that surely he was not going to work after treatment because he would feel terrible. He did it anyway.

So Brimacombe and her brother got into the tractors. The combine was running, the grain trailers were going back and forth, and they were trying to get the crop in during the narrow window available. It was late, everyone was tired, and the neighbouring farms were still harvesting under spotlights.

Then one of those neighbours finished his own field, packed up his combine, drove down the road and came into theirs to help. “Nothing said. This is the other thing — nothing said,” says Brimacombe. “You don’t need to ask to help. You just help each other out.”

It is a heart warming story, of course, but it is more than that. It is, in essence, also the Brimacombe operating system — and one that also neatly fits into the entrepreneurial ethos of VCCP.

“That’s what I hope you can create a little bit of in the City, in a big corporate world,” she says. “That element of togetherness. We’re all one family. It sounds really cheesy, but I think that’s what sets us apart a little bit from our competitors. You can’t manufacture it. It’s either there or it’s not.”

This is the kind of thing that could sound like hackneyed culture-blah were it not for the fact that Brimacombe immediately grounds it in something charmingly specific: someone from the growth team recently cooked lunch at home for around 27 people, then cycled it into the office. Nobody asked him to; he just did it. That, for Brimacombe, is culture — not the mandated 'enforced fun' sort, but the voluntary kind.

Discovering the world of comms

Her own route into communications was similarly unplanned. After university, where she studied geography, she worked in the Bahamas studying sharks. Then she decided to do something she loved and went to work at the Royal Berkshire Shooting School (naturally Brimacombe is an exceptional shot), where she was involved with Really Wild Clothing, a brand founded by Natalie Lake.

Lake, she says, was “incredibly creative” and “a bit of a trailblazer” in women’s fashion in a very traditional male world, and became a formative first boss. Then came one of those chance encounters on which careers sometimes turn. Dame Heather McGregor — otherwise known as Mrs Moneypenny — was having shooting lessons at the school and asked Brimacombe whether she intended to do it forever.

“I said, no, it’s not really the plan, but I’m not quite sure right now,” Brimacombe recalls. McGregor’s reply was brisk and life-changing: “Right, come and work for me in London.”

So she did, joining Taylor Bennett and shadowing McGregor for a few years, before being introduced to public relations, partly because she had already been doing a good deal of that kind of work. “I sound really unstructured, which I am,” she says. “But it was really taking an opportunity and going: yep, ok, I’ll give it a go. What’s the worst that can happen?”

There were other jobs along the way: wine bars, the oldest sweet factory in Crediton — now sadly closed — and chicken plucking, which she describes, with admirable understatement, as “definitely a low point”. Later came the North Pole race, after she and a university friend decided they wanted to go exploring and found that the more official routes into polar expeditions were not especially interested in someone without the right experience on paper. “I just wanted to go exploring,” she says.

Enter VCCP

It was during that North Pole race that she met the VCCP team. At the time, she had set up her own small PR consultancy, partly because the expedition required her to take a meaningful chunk of time out. After the race, the timing somehow worked. They suggested she come and work with them. “So, yeah,” she says, “married one and came and worked with the other.”

The career may have been squiggly and unconventional (and all the better for that), but the last stretch has been remarkably consistent and with a continuous upward trajectory.

VCCP Roar has been built, she says, to “supercharge our PR — or earned media, as I like to call it — offering. I think there is a huge void in our industry around brand and reputation, and those really coming together as one,” she says. “I’m a massive advocate of bringing those two areas closer together. For brand health and brand success, that’s really important.”

The old model, in which marketing sits in one corner, comms sits in another, and reputation is something that no one can really define, looks increasingly ill-suited to a world in which brands are experienced in the round, all the time, by everyone. Brimacombe points out that chief communications officers are often more likely to have board-level representation than chief marketing officers, which creates both a tension and an opportunity. The opportunity, as she sees it, is to bring reputational intelligence and brand creativity much closer together.

VCCP Roar is the expression of that belief. Good Relations brought consumer strength, Harvard brought tech expertise, and Teamspirit brought financial services and marketing capability. The move, Brimacombe insists, was not the sort of gloomy consolidation that has become all too familiar elsewhere in the market.

“This wasn’t about consolidating to manage cost and create efficiency,” she says. “This was very much about supercharging three powerhouses in their own right.”

The result is a business of around 150 people, with more than 200 clients and revenues of about £24m, positioned around the idea of being “disruptors of influence”. VCCP Roar is structured around four key specialisms: consumer, corporate, tech, and financial services. Six managing partners lead these specialist divisions, reporting to her. Lawrence Collis and Jodie Simpson lead the Consumer practice, Jim Selman leads Corporate, Lorna Hughes leads Tech, and Jo Preston and Adam Smith lead Financial Services.

The specialist practices are underpinned by earned-media capabilities, enabling Roar to build dynamic client teams. Specialist capabilities include influencer marketing, social and content, AI and LLM visibility, digital production, B2B, analyst relations and a specialist broadcast PR unit led by former broadcasters in VCCP Roar Broadcast.

“You need to earn the right to be influential and to be talked about and to be listened to,” she says. “In a world of an insane amount of content, where you’re just getting bombarded, how do we really disrupt? How do we create a definitive proposition and a point of difference?”

Roaring ahead

The practical benefits of bringing the businesses together are already apparent, she says. Broadcast expertise that previously sat within one part of the operation can now work across financial services, tech and consumer clients. Influencer capability can be shared across the business rather than rebuilt in silos. Roar has also been able to hire Jim Selman, formerly of Freuds, to lead corporate PR, a “heavy hitter” appointment that Brimacombe says would have been much harder for the three businesses to make separately.

“What has definitely helped is having a defined proposition from a Roar perspective,” she says. “Previously it was very easy to work in pockets. Now it’s very defined. It’s very clear. Everyone understands within the wider VCCP ecosystem who to go to, where to go, and what we can deliver from a client perspective.”

There is, naturally, a VCCP logic to all this too. The group’s “it only works if it all works” philosophy is enthusiastic about integration, but Roar gives it a more forceful earned dimension. Brimacombe talks about the need for senior counsel across brand and reputation, giving clients a view not only on the paid media message but on how that message might show up everywhere else — among opinion-formers, critics, stakeholders and the wider culture.

That might mean thinking differently about where an idea should live. She points to PepsiCo, where VCCP works with Walkers and Roar works across the broader snacks portfolio, including Doritos. An earned activation around “sweat shaming” became an example of stepping back from the brief and refusing to assume the answer had to be a traditional paid media idea.

“Maybe it’s not a traditional paid media idea,” she says. “Maybe the budget is better invested in a really interesting activation, utilising influencers and going to market with a real PR story.”

Mattel is another example, particularly work around Barbie products using Roar’s broadcast team, as well as collaborations with VCCP around O2 and the England women’s rugby campaign. The point is not that everything must become PR, but that earned thinking can change the shape of the answer.

About 80 per cent of Roar’s business is independently won and competitively pitched for, but Brimacombe is clear that the relationship with VCCP should work both ways. Roar can take VCCP’s creative and strategic firepower to its clients; Roar relationships can also open wider opportunities for the group. “What goes around comes around,” she says.

The same mutuality applies to her own roles. Being group chief growth officer, Roar chief executive and CEO of VCCP EMEA might sound like three jobs too many, but Brimacombe sees them as complementary. Her early PR background means she understands the earned opportunity instinctively, while her growth role keeps her close to the broader VCCP machine.

She also remains firmly on client business, which feels important to her and, one suspects, to the culture of the place. She runs the Formula 1 account and the Allwyn global PR account, with Allwyn’s F1 and McLaren sponsorships creating a natural connection between the two. She also works on Google, MCC [CHECK status if not announced], Wimbledon and Barclays.

“I work on client business, and I think that’s really important,” she says. “It keeps your finger on the pulse.”

This practitioner mentality runs through VCCP, she argues. “Everyone here is on clients, whatever level. I think that’s really healthy, but it’s probably quite unusual.”

A practical approach

It is also part of what has made the agency’s new business performance so consistent. Brimacombe is quick to the idea that this is about one person and generous in praise of her team. “Would I be able to do a fifth or a tenth of what I do without the brilliant people I work with? Absolutely not,” she says.

Still, she does identify a temperament behind the success. “It is a bit of a sense of not paranoia, but never being too pleased with your own success,” she says. “Never being too congratulatory of your own efforts. Of course, you want to celebrate the times when you should, but someone is always going to be on your heels.”

That sounds exhausting, and probably is, but it also explains why VCCP has avoided some of the self-satisfaction that can creep into agencies once they start believing their own case studies or awards success. Brimacombe describes the business as “not particularly showy” and not one that spends too much time talking about itself. The work, the pitch, the client, the next opportunity: those are the things.

“Process is, of course, incredibly important,” she says. “The craft and how you show up. But without the brilliant people you have to deliver the simplicity of what we’re doing and the craft of what we’re doing, it doesn’t work.”

There is also a healthy tolerance for mistakes, provided people own them. “Being prepared to fuck it up sometimes is also ok,” she says. “We get it wrong sometimes. I’m much more prepared to admit when I get it wrong. I’ve made a couple of terrible decisions on things, and you go: right, yeah.”

In a business world increasingly addicted to certainty — predictive models, AI efficiencies, procurement logic, guaranteed outcomes — Brimacombe’s philosophy feels refreshingly practical. Say yes. Do the work. Help before being asked. Don’t get too pleased with yourself. Accept that some of it will go wrong. Then go again.

Which circles back to the farm, because in the end the most revealing thing about Steph Brimacombe is not that she raced to the North Pole, or helped build VCCP’s growth reputation, or now runs a 150-person earned media business (among other things). It is that the story she returns to, the one that still catches in her throat, is of a neighbour driving a combine into a field late at night because he saw help was needed. “You don’t need to ask to help,” she says. “You just help each other out.” Amen to that.