When Sam and Alana founded Thought Quarter in 2014, they started with "one major client that paid most of our bills, paid on time, and we had a small team of freelancers." By 2017, they knew this wasn't sustainable and decided to grow - but lacking agency experience, they looked to bring in established talent.
"We thought what we really needed was a big shot from a big agency to come in and take care of us," Sam explains. "So we went to market, we found a couple of candidates, but there was this one candidate who was relocating from a really large, well known London agency." The hire turned disastrous, ultimately costing them over £250,000 in salary, lost opportunities and projects.
The experience taught them that "there's no substitute for a founder's leadership and clear vision," Sam reflects. "The mistake we made was to try and bring somebody in to do it for us. If you're going to grow a business, you need to do it. You need to drive it."
This realisation came just as Covid hit in 2021, when their turnover dropped below their first month as a company. Rather than give up, they used it as a chance to rebuild: "What we had in front of us was a perfect opportunity to just reevaluate what we were doing, why we were doing it and how we were doing it."
Today, Thought Quarter has refined its focus to the energy transition sector, working on decarbonisation and renewable energy projects. As Sam puts it: "We're constantly refining the services that we offer so that we're doing higher value services that solve more complex problems for a smaller number of clients. And that's what really excites me about the direction that we're going in at the moment."
Check out this episode on our Happy Teams Podcast.
