Five years ago this April, we made a big decision. We took a 15-year-old agency – one that had done well, employed brilliant people, and had every reason to stay the course – and completely mixed things up. New name. New proposition. New market. New geography. All in. No half measures.
The agency was called Workbrands. It had served us well. But if I’m honest, we’d drifted into a comfortable rut. We’d do anything for anybody. We weren’t fulfilling our potential. And somewhere between the first and second lockdowns – amid all that strange, quiet soul-searching that 2020 forced on so many of us – I made a promise to myself and to the team to make our agency the best it could be.
After a lot of soul searching, Workbrands became Shaped By.
So. What actually happened next?
When we relaunched in April 2021, we did four things simultaneously that many I spoke with considered a little reckless: we changed our name, our brand identity, our entire proposition, and our target market.
We decided to niche – to go deep into high-growth B2B tech companies, predominantly in the US. We viewed ourselves, only half-jokingly, as a 15-year-old startup.
What we quickly realised was that building a new brand with a new audience in a new geography meant we couldn’t treat sales and marketing lightly. We had to invest in it. Heavily. More than a traditional creative agency typically would.
That raised a few eyebrows, and I’d be lying if I said there were no wobbles. For the first 12 to 15 months, our return on marketing investment (ROMI) was roughly one-to-one – for every pound invested, a pound came back. Not sustainable and certainly not comfortable.
But something the financial numbers couldn’t show were reflected in other KPIs – the right things were happening. The conversations were getting better. The relationships being built were real ones. We trusted the team doing it and trusted the plan.
That patience paid off. Year on year, our return on sales and marketing investment has essentially doubled. We’ve hit our targets. Doubled headcount. Revenue and margins are up and increasingly strong relationships have been built.
About a year into the Shaped By journey, there was a change in ownership of the agency. I became sole director. It gave me something I hadn’t fully had before: the space and freedom to ask a simple question. What kind of agency do we really want to be?
The answer came down to three things.
Vision. Not a fluffy mission statement – a genuine north star for what we were building and why. One that could guide us when the easier path was to drift back into doing anything for anybody. Clarity of vision matters more than most people realise.
People. I have strong people-first values, and I knew we hadn’t fully lived up to them previously. So we rewrote pretty much everything: how we recruit, how we onboard, how we reward, how we talk about our team (our Shape-lings, as we like to call them). London-weighted salaries. A proper benefits package and a focus on well-being.
Hiring for values as much as skills. And crucially – expecting people to hold me accountable to those same values. Culture, I’ve come to believe, is a living, breathing thing. It only works when it stops being something you consciously maintain and simply becomes the way things are.
Finances. Do we have the money to pay for the talent to achieve our vision. There’s a quote I keep coming back to: Financial success is the applause that follows great work.
It reframes everything for me. Get the vision right. Get the people right. Give them the environment to do extraordinary work and the financial results will follow. Not always immediately. But they will follow.
One of the things I’m most proud of is the reputation we’ve built among high-growth tech companies across the States – built almost entirely remotely. No office there. Only a few visits under our belts. Yet some of the strongest, most trusting client relationships we have are with people thousands of miles away.
Lockdown, strange as it sounds, was a catalyst. It forced us to get genuinely good at building relationships without a meeting room. And the clients we were targeting – global companies whose teams were already scattered across time zones – were completely at ease with it. They just wanted brilliant, committed people who showed up, delivered, and cared. Turns out geography isn’t the barrier most agencies think it is. Being truly present matters far more than being in the same postcode.
I can’t write a five-year retrospective without mentioning AI.
My early reaction was cautious – there’s a tendency to fear what you don’t understand. Not necessarily about the technology itself, but about what it would mean commercially. I worried we’d simply end up doing things faster and cheaper, squeezing margins, racing to the bottom.
But our thinking has shifted significantly. Over the 18 months we’ve gone deep – not just learning what AI can do, but genuinely rethinking how we approach problems.
The framework that’s landed for us is what we describe as a human-AI-human sandwich: human strategic thinking defines the problem, AI augments the process, and human creativity and judgement shapes the final output. Start with the problem. Define the solution. Then – and only then – apply the technology.
We’re not an AI-first agency. Our competitive advantage will always be human creativity and strategic thinking. But AI, used with real intent, makes us sharper. And in a sector where many of our clients are building AI into the very core of their businesses, getting this right really matters.
We’re not done. Far from it. The thing about growth is that you rarely feel it day to day. But when I look back – a year, two years, five years – the progress across every part of the agency has been great. It’s not my story to tell alone. It belongs to every person who’s been part of this journey.
The Shape-lings, and valuable partners with a special mention to Andy Brown (non-exec advisor), and Pete Carter (our fractional FD) are the reason for our success. And, of course I need to mention my incredible family, whose love and support keeps me going.
Here’s to the next five!
by Nick Farrar, Founder and CEO at Shaped By
Listen to the Changemakers podcast episode where Nick reflects on five years of:
We are an independent creative agency. We help scaling tech companies stand out embracing their bold through creative thinking and exceptional design. We put creativity at the heart of what we do because we believe in the undeniable connection betwe...
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