Ex-Monks Growth Director Launches Consultancy to Help Agencies Beat Pitch Process

The former director of growth at S4 Capital’s Monks, Jonathan Mills, has launched a consultancy to help agencies beat the competitive and expensive pitch process and proactively win new business. 

Mills&Co has been built on 15 years’ at the coalface of new business processes across both the UK and Australia, Jonathan told LBB. It is a different business model for the Australian market, connecting agencies’ and technology companies’ pipeline, profile, and profit growth.

The business is not a pitch consultancy, but has instead developed a process that involves: setting new business revenue objectives, developing key messages and a targeting strategy, implementing a CRM, and developing events that generate PR opportunities and new business leads.

Agencies and technology companies are missing out on “so much untapped new business opportunity” because CEOs and managing directors don’t have the time or resources to build a new business pipeline, and are instead overreliant on personal networks.

Those senior leaders should spend their time “progressing and converting opportunities and earning the right to ask clients what's keeping them up at night to help solve those challenges,” Jonathan said, “rather than that top of funnel pipeline activity that is talked about often when things get too late and there's a sudden panic of 'Where's our pipeline, we need some new business conversations'.”

Jonathan spent almost four years as Monks’ head of growth, and before that was business development director at CX Lavender. He said while “pitching is sometimes a necessary evil”, the Mills&Co approach will allow agencies to circumvent the pitch process by becoming top-of-mind for target clients.

“That said, the reality is, clients are procuring agency services in different ways,” he said.

“Often, there are more procurement-led processes, and in some situations, it's not possible to get around it, in which case, agencies have to be really strict and considered about whether they do or don't pitch.

“I've seen a more out-weighted balance in terms of power with the clients setting unfair expectations for the pitch process, and agencies have to be brave in deciding when they do and don't go for something.

“Often saying no can be as powerful, and if not more powerful, than saying yes, rather than square pegging a round hole and burning resource, effort, time and sometimes to the detriment of existing client work, when they shouldn't have gone through it in the first place.” 

His consultancy acts as a white-labelled extension of the agency’s business—“Mills&Co doesn't exist to the end clients, so our clients hold the relationship with prospective clients from the beginning”—and makes its money when its clients do. 

Mills&Co can plug into businesses both with and without existing new business and PR functions, Jonathan said, and is already working with a top Sydney creative agency and a global technology provider.

“A lot of what I'm doing in the first few months of launching is building that trust with prospective clients that this is a commercially-driven and successful model that will win them new clients,” he said. 

“Ultimately, Mills&Co wins when our clients win. And it's very, very important to me that I built a model that rewards mutual commercial success, so there is skin in the game and we all stay laser-focused on the goal, winning new business.”