This CEO is Working a Five Hour Day in 2025
Jess White, the CEO of Melbourne-based indie agency Cassette, is going to work a five hour work day at the start of 2025 “to show that it can be done, even as a CEO of a business.”
“We're a member of the Five Hour Work Day movement, and I've actually committed to moving to the five hour work day for term one of next year, because my little girl is starting as a preppy,” she told LBB.
It’s a way to prove senior roles in agencies can be flexible, especially for women juggling childcare responsibilities. Over the past month, the Australian and New Zealand ad industry has been alight with a conversation about the industry still lagging on gender equity. 87% of Cassette’s team are women.
“Not on purpose, but that's just how it has come to be,” Jess said. “I'm really passionate about continuing to see female senior leadership, because it's just an absolute chasm that drops off as you start to get into those more senior roles.”
Jess was a marketer for a decade before taking over the agency 13 years ago. She knew she had a point of view on what marketers needed from an agency, and “how Cassette could exploit some of those opportunities and fix some of the challenges.”
“I like to think of Cassette as the marketers' agency. So it's an agency that's actually built by a marketer for marketers. A lot of agencies are built for the work, built for creativity, built for ego.”
The agency’s proposition is ‘Remixed Thinking.’ The first remix, Jess said, was becoming an ad agency owner with no ad agency experience. She takes similar risks on who she hires - the majority of her account management team has worked client-side, she hired media strategist Sam Enshaw to become a creative agency strategist, and she’s currently hiring a client services director who used to be a CMO.
The musical connotations of the agency’s name, and ethos of remixing, extends to how it engages with clients.
“It just opens up a whole other level of creativity for how we do pitches. There's an idea that we're building at the moment, a breakup Spotify playlist, so when we lose a pitch, we send it to them afterwards. It's like, let's just put some fun into it.”
In deciding what to pitch for in the first place, Jess asks the marketer to define their three-year vision. “If they can't articulate that, they're not the right client for Cassette.” Equally, “if they come in and say, 'We want a wacky, crazy Christmas TVC in 12 weeks' time,’” they’re not the right client. “We're not the one hit wonder TVC agency.”
In a climate of shrinking budgets and tenures, it’s harder than ever to sustain long term client partnerships, and retain talent for the long haul. Jess is proud that her average team tenure is eight years, and of the agency’s nine-year partnership with Melbourne Airport, and eight year stretch with L’Oreal Group.
“We are about being there for the long term. We'll be accountable, we'll re-pitch, we'll do all the things that we need to do, but we're looking for clients that do really want a long term team.”
