2024 marks firstlight’s 15th birthday. Our founder and CEO, Paul, looks back at the last 15 years – and ponders what’s next.
Can you sum up 15 years of firstlight in 500 words? Groan. Seriously? Thanks so much Sam. You do know that’s 5,475 days right? OK, alright, I’ll try.
It was against this backdrop that I set up firstlight in 2009.
I didn’t have a grand plan to try to make firstlight a certain size and I didn’t want to load the business with debt to inflate our worth. Nope, firstlight exists so I can do the kind of work that interests me, for the type of clients that inspire me.
That hasn’t changed. It’s just that over the last 15 years I’ve been joined by an amazing group of people who share the same philosophy.
Which is handy because our business plan was, is and will remain to – hire great people, do brilliant work and build a great agency.
It’s a simple enough plan but by ‘eck it was hard work in the early days. But it’s incredibly rewarding building something from nothing.
It’s maybe this mentality which has driven us to take a longer-term view. Whether that’s when we look at people’s careers or how we see clients as partners not walking cash machines. It’s certainly why the team and many of our clients have been with us for a long time. You just can’t work closely together without genuine friendships emerging.
That doesn’t mean we’re not ambitious or commercial in our approach. It just means that if we can’t help a client, we’ll tell them. If we don’t agree with them, well, we’ll tell them that too. But if we can help, we’ll tear up trees for them.
Well, I don’t see the world getting less complex anytime soon. And with news now a utility, will there be a flight to trusted sources? Possibly. But it depends on the context and the content of the message (I’m writing this in a year of global elections after all).
What I can confidently say though is that technology in the shape of ML and AI will industrialise and simplify much of what we do – initially removing many low value, high volume tasks that we don’t like doing and clients don’t like paying for. And it will execute these processes faster and more accurately than before.
Worrying for our industry? Certainly, it will be for some people, but I think AI will empower the good agencies and it will make it easier for smart people to access more sophisticated services and to integrate them at scale.
Big is still cool and of course we admire the large agencies. But scale might just be less of a competitive advantage as value becomes more important than volume.