Speakers

Co-founded Creative Ideaz, a UK digital marketing agency. I am a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the author of CARE To Grow. I founded my first Marketing agency in India in 1999. In 2002 I moved to the UK and started again with no network, no client list and no reputation that travelled with me. My first client here came to me in 2003. They are still a client today. That is the number I would rather be judged on than any campaign result, because it says something a result cannot: the value kept landing long after the pitch was forgotten, through two recessions, a pandemic and more algorithm changes than I can count. I co-founded Creative Ideaz in 2007 and built it from one person to a team of thirty in under four years. Since then I have worked across the UK, North America, the Nordics, Asia and the Gulf, mostly in medical aesthetics and private dentistry, retail, automotive and energy. Underneath all of it is one commercial principle I have been stubborn about, sometimes to my own cost. I would rather take my fee out of the profit I add to a client's business than out of their pocket. Those sound like the same thing. They are not. If the value lands, my fee comes from money that did not exist before we started, and the conversation about price never really happens. If it does not land, I am taking money from a business owner who is worse off for having hired me. That has meant walking away from work I could have won. It has also given me client relationships measured in decades rather than months. The CARE model — Connect, Attract, Retain, Engage — is how I have run growth for every kind of business I have worked with, from a single clinic to a national retailer. Most marketing advice stops at the first two, because acquisition is visible and easy to invoice. The compounding is in the second two.