Why one CEO made ‘respect’ a business objective

In 2020, Chris Mellish set himself a very public deadline. Having only been CEO of TMW (part of Unlimited) for a year, he announced to his staff that he had ambitions to expand the business out of the “traditional direct marketing space” and transform it into a fully integrated creative agency that would “appeal to customers and stand out in the marketplace”.

“We did this by ensuring that every component of the business was ‘best in class’, which means hiring the best talent and ensuring our offering is as good as and better than all of our competitors. We set about trying to underpin everything we did with a unique offering, which was around leveraging behavioural neuroscience.”

The company worked with PhD-level neurobehavioural scientists – “we had people in white lab coats walking around the office” – to help improve its understanding of human behaviour. Tapping into the learnings from the behavioural scientists, Mellish and his team then worked with clients to develop ideas that would “move people emotionally”.

Respectful ambitions

Consolidation was also a major part of TMW’s business strategy; Mellish integrated four individual businesses together within the wider TMW group, which involved “quite a process of change management” as he brought people with “different operational methodologies” together. He not only worked to galvanise people behind the new business strategy, but also a “non-commercial ambition” that his “relatively young” workforce could get behind.

“We came up with this idea of ambition based around respect. The dictionary definition [of respect] is something along the lines of ‘a deep admiration for an organisation or individual’. We wanted to be respected by our clients and feel that they had a deep admiration for us. We wanted to be respected by the industry and our staff as well. We set ourselves the ambition of respect alongside our commercial ambitions.”

His ideas paid off: TMW has since recouped its revenue lost in the pandemic (when it was down 37%) and managed to retain 100% of staff by introducing a tiered pay reduction structure among the senior teams. Compared with its competitors, TMW has relatively low attrition rates (10% versus 25-30%). In 2023, the agency won 100% of its advertising pitches – including Suzuki for £1m – and can confidently say it has never lost a client. 

“We regularly use a third party to assess the quality of the relationship we have with every single client; we ask them for detailed feedback and we really act upon it. We ask each client if there are areas of concern or where they want to focus their attention. It’s a methodical and transparent approach. If you have that ability and willingness to evolve with each other then you’ll develop long-term client relationships.”

In April this year, TMW was acquired by tech giant Accenture Song after being a privately held company since its launch. Mellish says a sale was something that was “going to happen at some point” and the company was thinking about potential acquirers and partnerships – Accenture being one of them.

“When that phone call came it was a good moment for us. We had been outperforming the market for quite some time and there was a lot of interest, but this move felt like the best strategic fit for us in the long term. They’re a hugely impressive organisation with access to pretty much every kind of C-suite in the world, so it’s now about picking and choosing the right opportunities. Although I’m not trying to run before we can walk.”