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Chris Howatson on capping growth at 200 staff, never selling, and advertising to a more inclusive Australia
Two years after launching, founder and CEO of Howatson+Company, Chris Howatson speaks with Mumbrella's Calum Jaspan about setting limits on the agency's growth, why high performance doesn't always mean lots of work, never being for sale, and retiring in his sixties.
Howatson+Company is two years old, but for many in the local advertising industry, it already feels like part of the furniture.
Maybe that is because a lot has happened since then for the agency that now boasts a client list featuring Allianz, GMHBA, Belong, Maurice Blackburn, The Guardian, PetBarn, Matilda Bay, TK Maxx and Doordash amongst others, with 115 staff joining across this time.
This kind of growth is rapid, but it’s not sustainable. In fact, Howatson tells Mumbrella the agency already has a cap on its growth. Two offices and 200 people. And the former is already ticked off.
While 200 is still a fairly decent size (it’s more than most creative or full-service agencies have locally), it’s still around half the size of his former agency, CHEP, at the time of his departure. So Howatson has form leading an agency of scale.
Why 200? He calls it the “intimacy inflection point”, which rejects the Wall Street model of growth needing to happen all the time.
“We’ve grown really fast, but it’s not going to be like that forever.”
Once you are above 200, he says, you stop knowing people’s strengths and weaknesses, and you have to rely on processes to connect the dots. It doesn’t happen organically, as opposed to what he says now is process-oriented, “with organicness in and around that”.
“In the agencies I’ve run before and worked with before, once you get over 200, you get little sub-agencies within the main agency and the quality of work suffers against different outputs, so we’re really proud to be pursuing a quality model, not quantity model.
“Our ambition is to be an agency that can churn out unbelievable quality work for decades. So we’re close to 120 people now, which means there are 80 more jobs available, and there’s only space for clients to fill 80 new people.”
What this does, says Howatson, is make choices around partnerships more impactful, only choosing those that align around the same cultural values and ambitions around work.
He also references some of the top agencies in the world, BBH, Mother, Weiden + Kennedy, “when they got bigger than 200 they really struggled”.
Will this cause headaches?
“We’ll never sacrifice a client we have now,” he says, in regards to breaking this policy, referencing a particular episode of Mad Men where Sterling Cooper drops Mohawk Airlines in order to chase the big fish in Amercian Airlines.
Client presentation in the fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency
“We’ll never do that. Any client we have now, particularly our foundation clients Allianz, Belong and Pet Barn, are clients that risked themselves to give us an opportunity. Anyone who trusts us to work with them, that respect has to be paid back. So we’d never let go of a client to bring someone else in. But what that does mean is we don’t have to rush to the 200, we can be really choiceful about what we take on.”
He says 200 is also big enough to be prolific and have something great to put into the world every month, rather than two or three times a year.
“At 200, there isn’t one massive client in the corner that brings everyone’s standard down, every one of your clients can be high performing.”
A recent version of Mumbrella’s Campaign Review on the Mumbrellacast saw Innocean’s Wez Hawes and 72andSunny’s Andy Flemming praise the agency’s recent work for Belong.
The thing about being an indie, is you can make these choices of quality over quantity, he says. Will that ever change? “Never, ever for sale.”
“I’m 38, and my idea is that I retire in my late 60s, and I’m really excited about doing this until then.”
“A lot of people might look at that and go, that’s not particularly ambitious, but I guess one of the main reasons for opening this company was I love the work and I love being close to the work.”
H+C’s first work for Belong
“The plan for this agency is to be here in three decades, and not have lost what we’ve created.”
Howatson says some of Australia’s family-owned businesses from the ‘glory era’ of advertising, and those that shaped culture and the narrative of what it meant to live in Australia in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s are now largely owned internationally, “but I think there’s something special about retaining a sense of Australian ownership in an agency, and in businesses that are creating Australian culture”.
The role of the agency is a lot more complicated than it was at that time though.
“The media is fragmented. But we’re also a bigger, more expensive, and more inclusive culture than before.”
Ads are no longer about just drinking beer with the boys, or having a barbeque he says, “those were sort of culturally exclusive narratives”.
“I think the challenge for advertising is to create meaningful ads around what it means to be Australian without just doing a montage of what a whole of different people look like. It’s finding the new rituals and the new codes that define our inclusive society, rather than just having a mirror in the ad to show all the different people.”
High-performance culture
The agency works on an ‘in-person culture’, but has no set hybrid working policy. Howatson says there is a high-performance culture at the agency.
High performance doesn’t just mean “lots of work”, he says, which can often be the inherent bias in a statement like that.
“We’re not a weekend or late-night agency”, which he again says comes down to its focus on quality.
Matilda Bay’s ‘Rejected Ales’
“We won’t take on a pitch if we don’t have the capacity to take it on, if people have to do late nights or weekends, we just won’t do it. All of that stuff has to happen within the workday. That is the real challenge though, I would put out to people, that high performance doesn’t mean you have to spend a lot of time at your desk.
“When we said we don’t have a flexibility policy, it’s quite deliberate. I’m hearing from a lot of people now that the flexibility policy for their workplace is three days in the office, and two days at home. That’s not a flexibility policy. That’s saying that you can work from home two days, but you have to be in the office for three days. It’s not flexible.”
This plays into the agency’s operating model, which it calls intersectional creativity.
“Essentially we have six capability practices – Brand, Experience, Technology, Data, Media, Influence – it’s the interconnection of these practices which creates impact on the consumer and growth for our clients. Hegerty once said advertising is 80% idea, 80% execution. We’ve hacked that somewhat to suggest effective communications is 80% idea, 80% craft, 80% orchestration. It’s an acknowledgment that how and where the idea lives in the world, is often as influential as the idea itself.
Just over two years in, he says there are a number of other avenues by which the agency is forging its own path. Those include taking a stake in two businesses, Inkl and Fetch; having no house style; being Climate Active Carbon Neutral certified; and investing 5% of the company’s total revenue on training and development.
With a clear focus and structures in place, only time will tell if Howatson+Company can deliver on its promises.
Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
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“We won’t take on a pitch if we don’t have the capacity to take it on, if people have to do late nights or weekends, we just won’t do it. All of that stuff has to happen within the workday.”
The fact that this is a leadership point in advertising says it all about the industry. Big props to Chris, love the discipline.
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