Kia Ora Magazine: From Sumner Beach to Global Reach
Over the past five years, a creative agency – Not Another™ by name and ethos – has been quietly humming away from the near-bottom of the world: Sumner Beach in Christchurch. We head to their beachside studio and catch up with founders Mark Townshend and Adrien Taylor to find out how they’ve grown a global business and team so quickly.
In hindsight, founding a creative agency in 2019 was a bit like sailing off into the Pacific before a storm. There was the first lockdown, then the second. There’s been AI and its growing effect on the industry, and there’s the current (whisper) recession. Despite the headwinds, a B Corp certified creative agency based by the beach in Ōtautahi Christchurch has managed to not only survive everything thrown at it, but thrive.
“Not Another™ isn’t just a name, it’s an ethos. We designed the business from the ground up to be a different kind of agency. From the way we work to the way we act, we threw out the traditional agency playbook,” co-founder Mark Townshend says. That ethos comes through in all aspects of the business: its decision to be headquartered by the beach, its commitment to achieving B Corp status, its founding principle of having a team of outstanding creative doers rather than managers, and its approach to collaborating with clients.
The agency has built a global team and client base that boasts the likes of Facebook, Tourism New Zealand, Swanndri, the All Blacks, Mons Royale, ArchiPro, Polestar, multi-billion unicorn tech businesses in the US and Australia, and both the New Zealand and Australian governments. So what’s the secret to success?
“For us, we’ve built ourselves to be global from day one,” Townshend says. “We’ve always believed in the power of flexibility, of being able to work from anywhere, and of hiring the best talent in the world – no matter where they’re based. So while others are still catching up to this new way of working, we’re already well-versed in collaborating with colleagues and clients regardless of whether they’re down the road or on the other side of the planet.”
“We know most of our Kiwi clients have aspirations to take their businesses global, so it makes sense for us to give them a global perspective through people on the ground in the markets they’re looking to go to.”
It’s an approach that’s clearly working. Today, Not Another™ has a remote-first team spread across the world: Christchurch, Wānaka, Auckland, Sydney, Bali, Kolkata, Chandigarh, Berlin, Oslo, and New York City, to name a few places. The team either work from Not Another’s Christchurch or Sydney offices, from home, or from shared coworking spaces.
“The best work – creative work especially – doesn’t come when someone is cooped up in a high-rise CBD office,” says co-founder Adrien Taylor. “A global team means global perspectives. We know most of our Kiwi clients have aspirations to take their businesses global, so it makes sense for us to give them a global perspective through people on the ground in the markets they’re looking to go to.”
Having a team across time zones has its advantages in efficiency, too. Team members brief each other at the end of their days to keep the client work moving forward when they go to bed. “The sun never sets at Not Another™,” Taylor jokes. “There’s always at least one person awake and working at any time during the week.”
Taylor and Townshend have, from the very beginning, been very deliberate in their hiring: choosing to form a smaller team of highly-skilled specialists in various creative fields, rather than a large team of generalists. “This allows us to deliver genuinely world-class work and ensures our clients aren’t paying for bloated wage costs,” Townshend says.
“Sometimes, you just need to get on a plane and shake hands. We’ve made a real effort to do that this year and it’s paid off big time.”
“We’ve learnt that our team needs to have an abundance of great communication, independence, initiative to solve problems, and a real constant dedication to keep learning and sharing their knowledge with the rest of the team,” he says. “The people who have those characteristics not only make the best team members, but deliver the best work, too.”
But for all the benefits of working remotely, the co-founders have learnt the importance of showing up in person, too. “It’s fair to say that we got caught out being a little bit complacent a couple of times – opting to pitch over video calls – and that cost us one or two great projects. Sometimes, you just need to get on a plane and shake hands. We’ve made a real effort to do that this year and it’s paying off big time,” Taylor says.