How it started
Paul and I have worked together for about 20 years. For a long stretch of that, we were board directors and shareholders at another agency together, and somewhere along the way we started talking, properly talking, about what we would do differently if we ever got the chance to build something from scratch.
We wanted to build an agency that was successful because its clients were successful, where the team could work hard, develop and actually enjoy coming in, and where the Sunday night dread that follows so many people around in this industry simply did not exist.
In 2018, we got the chance when we took over Catalyst. We changed pretty much everything: the approach, the offering, the processes. Everything had to be anchored to a real commercial outcome, because results were always going to be the way clients measured us.
Nearly 9 years on, that is still true and it still shapes everything about how we work.
Working at Catalyst
One of the first things people notice when they join is how flat the structure is. Paul and I are both hands-on and involved in the day to day, which means decisions get made quickly and the work never gets lost in layers of management.
Beyond that, what tends to strike people is how much the team genuinely supports one another. There is a real mix of personalities: people who like to have a chat about everything alongside people who prefer to get their head down, people at completely different life stages with completely different interests outside work. What everyone has in common, regardless of all of that, is that they genuinely care about doing good work, for clients and for themselves.
When we are interviewing, we look at skillset but we look equally hard at how someone would fit into the culture and whether they genuinely give a shit. We can teach a lot of things, giving a shit is not one of them. When we find someone who genuinely does, we know the rest will follow, and for any gaps in knowledge or experience we have more than enough varied skill across the team to help fill in.
We work exclusively with SMEs, which in practice means working directly with the founder or MD of a business rather than being filtered through layers of stakeholders. You have real input and you can see the difference your work makes. People who come from larger agencies tend to love that visibility. People who come from in-house roles often find the pace a step up, but they love the variety: our clients range from manufacturing and finance to beauty and bespoke furniture businesses, and no two briefs look the same.
We are also more organised and process-driven than most agencies, which in practice gives people a genuinely good work-life balance. We work four days in the office, Monday to Thursday, with Fridays at home.
Anonymous feedback from the team tells us consistently that people feel valued and supported, both professionally and personally, and we also know how to enjoy ourselves when the week is done.
Career development
With regards to career development, we don’t have rigid paths or ceilings, progression is down to the individual.
Liv joined us on work experience back in 2018, came back a few more times and then joined us full time over two years ago as an executive. Since then she has moved through senior executive and junior account manager and is now account manager, because she had the ambition, put in the work, and we backed and supported her. That is the pattern, If you want to develop, we invest in you.
We also work hard to stay ahead of the curve: we are one of a small number of agencies genuinely doing GEO properly, we have always been transparent about how we use AI internally to benefit clients, and we were early adopters of HubSpot long before it became the obvious choice.
Stable and growing
The last few years have been hard on a lot of agencies, and we are seeing more candidates coming to us who have been made redundant and are understandably cautious about where they land next. It’s worth knowing we are stable, profitable and carry zero debt. For an agency of our size, that is genuinely not that common.
Open roles
We are currently hiring for a Marketing Manager and a PPC Manager. If either of those sounds like the right next step, you can find out more and apply below
