Chief growth officer Nick Wright on how ‘squad’ system is boosting new biz at Havas MN

“My mindset is that new business is everybody’s business,” says Wright. “Trying to instill a cultural change around growth and new business was the first thing I did. We needed to go from being quite reactive and passive and simply waiting for opportunities to come to us and become much more proactive in taking the agency out to the market. There was a mindset and a strategic direction that needed to change.”

The creation of the chief growth officer role to operate across the Havas MN business came as a consequence of how the business itself has diversified and evolved in recent years, both through acquisition and agency brand launches. It was also based on the growing realization that clients seldom come to the agency for a single service, but to dip into the many offerings across Havas Media, Havas Market, Havas Play, and even B2B through Ledger Bennett.

Tasked with implementing a holistic growth strategy, Wright set about integrating the functions and teams that had long supported Havas’s new business drives, namely marketing, lead generation, PR and sales, all of which moved to live under his new remit.

“We needed to go from being quite a traditional new business function to be more of a marketing function,” says Wright. “We needed to look at the way we pitched and at the way we set out the shop windows for all our agency brands. It was a maximal gains thing. We had to change everything and initially ask questions such as: are our agency propositions and personalities as strong as they could be?

“We wanted those propositions to be more solutions-based, and we needed to be much clearer on the stories we were telling. That then moved through to developing proper growth strategies for each agency brand, which led to a structural change. We also looked into how we pitch, examined every single element of pitching and created a clear process on how we tackle pitches moving forward.”

The structural change Wright talks of centered around the integration of the previously quite autonomous, but connected elements of new business, lead generation, PR and sales, which saw the creation of three specific ‘squads’ established to focus on new business generation across the Havas MN businesses. These ‘squads’ now incorporate all the necessary elements to ensure the right mix of skills is tailored towards getting the right new business approach.

“Brands rarely come to an agency just for media. They want a whole plethora of different things and when clients come to us they can now access all of our marketing services through one front door. That diversified business structure kind of forced us to look at how we needed to do new business moving forward. That's where the idea of ‘squads’ came in, with the squads being all part of one integrated team, but each squad being dedicated to each of our key agency brands.”

The way Wright set about equipping his squads depended heavily on the type of new business approach that he felt was required by the particular Havas agency brand they served. If more of a prospecting approach was required then the squad makeup veered more towards salespeople, while Havas Media, for instance which gets a lot of its business via the intermediaries, its squad is heavier in marketing to drive increased awareness and consideration.”

Rome certainly wasn’t built in a day – and structural and procedural changes are always notoriously hard to instigate. Wright admits that there was initially some reticence from the teams and individuals set to be impacted heaviest by this new holistic approach to growth and new business. “There was some pushback. Legacy often gets in the way. Trying to flip from one model to another is hard when you’ve got people in specific positions and you’ve had a set structure in place for some time, so there were initially questions, but everyone bought into the new approach. It was quite complex, as we had to look at how we bring people out of the individual agencies to sit within the new centralized squad structure, and then push them back out to focus on the agency brands again.”

Havas MN’s move to this ‘squad’ approach came at an interesting time. As Wright says, there was little new business floating around mid-to-late 2023, so the impact of the new approach wasn’t immediate. However, Wright says he never doubted that the new direction was the right one for the agency’s long-term success. And his suspicions have been borne out in the agency’s recent new business record.

The agency has retained seven of its key strategic accounts, totaling £130m, while it has also increased spending on three other key accounts, most notably Sega, to £45m. Wright’s ‘squads’ have combined to generate new business billings of £50m and are awaiting the outcome of a further £40m worth of new biz. The new biz pipeline is also looking pretty healthy – Wright and his squad players are currently in the running for a further £85m of client business. Naturally, that may not all convert, but regardless, the agency is on track for a 75% in-year increase in billings and potentially a 200% full-year increase.

Notable Havas Media wins this year include Ocado and the University of Law alongside the retention of the BBC, De Beers, Homebase and Matalan; Havas Play has picked up the Women’s Rugby World Cup and Montirex; Havas Market has added Lucky Saints to its client list and Havas Entertainment has renewed Wizards of the Coast and UKTV and consolidated Sega’s EMA/ANZ and Bethesda’s global accounts.

While there is little more exciting in agencyland than a new client win, an equally important element in Wright’s growth equation is client retention: “Retention isn’t something you should only consider when you get asked to re-pitch. Retention should be something you’re thinking about from the day you win a new client. What is the progression roadmap you’re putting in place for them? If you keep evolving relationships with your clients not only are you keeping yourselves fresh and moving with them, but you’ll also be diversifying your offering, which gives you more revenue as you bring new and interesting things into that relationship.”

Another key part of Wright’s growth strategy has simply been getting the industry talking about, interested in and excited about Havas MN. Focus on increased PR and an improved awards focus has ensured that Havas Media, Havas Market and Havas Play have been more front of mind. So far in 2024, Havas’s PR machine has generated 260 pieces of coverage compared with 161 across the whole of 2023, and the company has actively pushed out of its comfort zone into verticals to raise the brand’s profile in titles such as The Grocer, Retail Week and nationals like the Telegraph.

Yorkshireman Wright has been involved in new business for over 20 years since his days working as a founding partner at the agency Amplify. So, how does he feel new business has changed over the years?

Wright concludes: “It is much more in-depth, pitch cycles have got longer and there’s usually a lot more agencies in at the start of a pitch process, so it’s a lot harder to win. One thing that we’ve been about is the impression we make right from the initial RFI. We make it all about the client. Every point of a pitch is a chemistry meeting and it’s all about building that chemistry. I keep talking about maximal gains, but it is about looking for every single opportunity during the journey to engage and create the right impression.”