My Biggest Lesson: Tim Clyde

After drumming in various bands, Tim gave up the drumming dream and began his proper career at M&C Saatchi where he spent eight years creating and leading campaigns across a wide range of brands. He then became managing director of youth marketing agency Magic Hat where he met Ed Chilcott.

Driven by the want to be their own bosses and with the aim of making strategy, creation and execution of advertising more cost effective and efficient for clients without compromising on creativity, Ed and Tim set up Kitchen which led to 20 years of creating great work for lots of lovely brands.

LBB> Is there one event / piece of wisdom from your career that's always stayed with you? What is it? 

Tim> Make sure you do a little mischief every day!

LBB> Set the scene! How old were you when you learned this insight, where were you working, how long had you been there, what year was it, what was your role and how were you feeling generally about your career at this point?

Tim> Ed (Chilcott) and I were about five years into running our own agency. It had been a fantastic first few years - turnover, employees and clients growing in number each year and the beginnings of an exciting future for our agency. But as the weeks and months progressed, we felt increasingly isolated and to some degree insecure as leaders.

We were still relatively young as agency owners (still in our early 30s) and as the responsibility of HR, driving in new business, growing relationships with increasingly senior and experienced clients, we started to question what we could or should be doing better. (Having said that we were hugely lucky to have each other - I have no idea at all how people achieve this on their own). So, we managed to seek informal and ongoing advice from an incredible mentor called Terry Mansfield CBE who had an incredible distinguished career in publishing (CEO of Hearst).

We were keen to find someone outside of the ad business to give us a different perspective. There are many hugely valuable bits of advice he gave us over the years we went to see him, but one regular passing comment he used to make has particularly stayed with me.

He used to always begin each meeting with the question ‘so what mischief have you chaps been up to since we last met’? To begin with I saw it as a cheeky way to open the conversation. But the more anecdotes he told us from his past and ways he solved various problems in his career, the more the penny dropped that this wasn’t simply a fun conversational ice breaker but a genuine way of approaching work challenges and leadership.

So, one day I asked him about it and he confirmed that for him it was almost a philosophy with the genuine belief that we should all try to do ‘a little mischief every day’. Sir Terry was a hugely infectious character. It is no surprise that he did so well in business – his charm, positive energy and enthusiasm about everyone he met was natural and he also definitely knew how to get up to mischief. He was a brilliant man.

LBB> Why do you think it struck such a chord?

Tim> In lots of ways. Firstly, running any business can be seriously hard at times. It is quite easy to fall into the trap of solving serious challenges with serious solutions and in the process taking yourself and your business too seriously. I don’t want to sound too flippant here – of course, running a business and being responsible for other people’s careers isn’t a joke or something you should take lightly but the concept of mischief is powerful tool in your toolbox.

For example, take prospecting for new business. Some people love it and are really good at it, but for many people basically selling yourself is pretty hard in the best of times. But if you rebrand ‘making a few new business calls’ to ‘doing a little mischief’, suddenly it doesn’t seem to hard and might well inspire a slightly different approach to it which could work harder.

Or take a typical business problem – either for a client or your own company. Perhaps by reframing it with a little mischief might help look at the problem from a different angle and find alternative solutions. And for clarity, I don’t mean doing something wrong or illegal – the beauty of the word ‘mischief’ for me defines actions which are naughty but on the right side of the line.

On face value, mischief is a negative word – suggests misconduct and naughtiness but there is an undercurrent of roguish playfulness that to me seems engaging. In a very simple way, doing ‘mischief’ is a very positive twist and empowering way of approaching problem solving.

LBB> How did it change you as a person and in your career?

Tim> It helped me and continues to help me think proactively. Mischief isn’t something that it is reactive – it creates. It acts. It makes. It entertains. It wins. (As long as you don’t get into rouble, but that would suggest the wrong type of mischief).

LBB> And as you’ve progressed in your career, how have you re-evaluated this piece of advice?

Tim> I have thought about it a lot over the years. In some ways, mischief is a crucial component of creativity. As we strive for new, powerful ideas to boost brands we are challenging the norm, breaking traditions, finding something unexpected that moves people – don’t we often just need a bit of mischief?

Even if it isn’t the core ingredient of the creative process (which I admit it isn’t always), it certainly seems to the help the culture of group of creative people to have a bit of mischief in the room. I try to find ways to inject it into our agency as much as I can. As I suggested before, ‘mischief’ also inspires a more proactive mentality. Don’t be ordinary – do the extraordinary. Be brave. Break rules (especially the silly ones). And have a little fun in the process.

A great example of pitch mischief in a certain agency (which I shall not mention by name) used to have a black cab driver on the payroll. The black cab would be carefully timed to come around the corner as if by chance as the potential clients left the agency from a pitch meeting. The driver would listen to the all important client conversation in the cab between agency meetings and report back to the pitch team who were able to adapt the ideas to help win the pitch.

Mischief isn’t just valuable to the creative industry. Some investment / fund manager friends of mine are big fans of a 70:20:10 investment strategy, where 70% is invested in solid, stable investments, 20% in sensible but a little higher risk but with more potential to gain and 10% is the high risk / high gain investments. Arguably this last higher risk 10% could be considered investing with a little mischief?

It doesn’t always work though, of course. It was probably ‘doing mischief’ which led us to open an office in New York with no clients or US connections. We were doing well and thought – why not! We sadly didn’t invoice $1 in our first year and eventually closed the agency. Was fun to try though.

LBB> Is this insight or piece of advice something you now share with others – if so, how do they respond to it?

Tim> I haven’t really tried this on anyone yet. Let’s see if anyone ‘likes’ this article.