How PR shop The Romans is growing its global empire
Winning Gold at The Drum Awards for Agency Business in the Business Growth category is The Romans. Here’s how, in its own words, the PR shop is spreading its wings globally.
The Romans has won gold at The Drum Awards for Agency Business in the Business Growth category / The Romans
This year has been a wild ride for The Romans. We lost five pitches, then won eight retainers in a row. We won two seven-figure accounts while two clients went bust. One of our top creatives quit for another agency, then boomeranged back two months later. The giddy highs and the dizzying lows have been hard to handle. Running a PR firm has never been more stressful/exhausting/ridiculously fun.
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Despite the swirl and turmoil, the past twelve months have been our best yet as an agency. We’ve hoovered up some of the most exceptional talent in the world. We’ve stayed true to our D&I commitments. We’ve won more pitches than we’ve had any right to. And we’ve gone international, opening three new offices in just 18 months: Brooklyn, Dubai and Amsterdam, with two more in the pipeline.
We know what you’re thinking: when 'creative boutique' agencies quickly get bigger, quality control goes out the window, the work becomes dire, the culture tanks, and the agency leadership convince themselves that they’re a “content agency” that only competes with ad agencies now. We don’t think any of these apply to us. We’ve just had our heads down grafting, focused on making the best earned media campaigns in the world.
And we think this is the year we’ve made our most exciting and innovative work yet.
Talent
We’ve always had a singular business strategy: seek out the very best talent in the world and develop them to be individually exceptional.
This year we’ve made well over 30 new hires in the UK (and over 50 globally), including creative director Dan Roberts, formerly of ad agencies Grey and Havas. As well as having hundreds of awards under his belt, he’s also a fierce campaigner for working-class representation in the creative industries. Shivani Choda joins us from Portland as head of digital.
Our biggest hire of the year by far was industry legend (and nicest-man-in-PR), Sam Hodges. Formerly in chief comms roles at Twitter, BBC and Netflix, he’s now leading across an increasingly significant portfolio of corporate, B2B, tech, and financial clients, which has gone from £0 to over £1.3m in four months.
Among all the accolades the team has picked up this year, Kandace Williamson being named as one of the industry’s Global Changemakers is one that we’re most proud of. A shy, introverted, Black, non-university educated woman, and easily the smartest person in any meeting she finds herself in. Kandace also brokered our long-standing relationship with People Like Us, a not-for-profit organization created to attract more diverse talent to the PR industry. Our team work with them on a pro-bono basis and also help fund their campaigns.
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We practice what we preach too: 26% of our team are Black, Asian or Mixed-Heritage. We have trained seven of the team as mental health first-aiders, and continue to offer best-in-class mental health support, including access to wholly anonymous and paid-for psychologists, psychiatrists and therapists, for anyone in need.
Regardless of how big we get, our benefits won’t dilute. Everyone still receives free breakfast and lunch everyday (we employ two chefs). Everyone still gets a Shoreditch House membership, and gets to jump the three-year waiting list. We still take over Soho Farmhouse for our summer party. And 10% of company profits get paid as annual cash bonuses to the team.
This year we also implemented a 10% cost of living payrise. In real terms, it meant that our average employee’s salary increased by 23% last year. Nothing has ever felt better. And anyway, if you’re thinking about your electric bill, you aren’t thinking about your clients. Paying people more isn’t an attack on our margin, it’s simply good business.
The work
In percentage terms, we have the highest number of full-time creatives of any PR agency in the UK, which definitely contributed to us picking up our biggest-ever haul of campaign awards. We’ve got a clear view on the sort of work we want to make: work that doesn’t just look good, it does good. In the past 12 months, two of our campaigns have actually changed the law.
Sadly, one of our longest-serving team member’s father died from a particularly aggressive cancer in 2022. And so, in 2023 we signed Macmillan Cancer Support as a long-term pro-bono partner. We’ve supported them, without fee, throughout the year. Combined with our other pro bono initiatives (People Like Us, Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide) we have donated over £230,000 worth of time in 2023 and will donate over £300,000 worth in 2024.
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Growth
Our UK growth was a pretty mega 25%. Globally, our revenue grew a ridiculous 83%. In 2024 we will be a £10m+ UK business and a £20m+ global business. This growth isn’t at the expense of either creative output or margin; our profitability is the strongest it’s ever been (it’s what’s driving our global expansion).
As for new business success in the UK, we’ve had our best year to date. One client fired us: Twitter ended its seven-year relationship with us (thanks Elon). We immediately replaced them with the Snapchat retainer, alongside dozens of sizeable UK retainer wins including Airbnb, Bambino Mio, Blank Street, B&Q, Community Fibre, Deliveroo, Desperados, Dove, Flora, Fosters, Heatherwick Studio, Heineken, Hoka, Malibu, Many Pets, Mars Wrigley, Mecca Bingo, Nationwide, OneDay, OnlyFans, Pip & Nut, Reveri, Saracens, Strongbow, Supercell, Talis Capital, and Wray & Nephew.
What’s driven our success over the past 12 months? There's just one answer: exceptional creative work, for existing clients and at pitch. All of this domestic growth has meant we’ve been able to export our brand of creative comms further afield. We opened our first international office in Brooklyn (headed up by EVP Sarah Jenkins, formerly of BCW in New York), where we’re already at a headcount of 17, forecasting to close 2024 with a team of 30.
Our Dubai office opened in August and will hit seven figures in its first year, landing Audi in its first month. And Amsterdam opened in September 2023 and within weeks had picked up Flora, Tony’s Chocolonely, and Heineken as founding clients - the three biggest Dutch brands.
Finally, we made a six-figure investment in Bear Grylls’ mens mental health app, Mettle, and another six-figure investment in a top new agency. Founded by Nikki Collins, Earnies opened its doors in late 2023 and is set to be the UK’s hottest new shop, with revenue already over £1M. What’s the point of calling yourselves The Romans if you're not building an empire?
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