Waypointers
Waypointers is the go-to podcast for agency leaders. In this series, produced by Waypoint Partners, we bring together the brightest minds in the industry and our own in-house growth advisory specialists to share illuminating conversations to grow your agency.
Bringing you insights, analysis and knowledge from the leading lights of the UK agency landscape, Waypointers is a must-listen for aspirational agency leaders.
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Waypoint Partners is an expert global growth and M&A advisory firm providing support to businesses in the marketing services and technology sectors.
Waypointers
24. Challenger Agencies - MSQ – a next generation creative and tech group with ambitious scale up plans
Peter Reid, the CEO of MSQ Partners is the next guest in our Challenger agency series.
A former McKinsey consultant, Peter has taken MSQ on quite a journey. He joined in 2007 to turn around a business that at the time was known as Media Square and that came with significant financial challenges.
After several years of streamlining, in 2010 Peter became CEO and in 2011 took the business private which he describes as a key way to establish a sustainable financial structure and to drive a transformational agenda.
Today MSQ is a highly profitable operation with 1250 people across 13 offices, recently becoming a B Corp and the first international group in the sector to achieve carbon negative status. Peter’s top priority is scale in the US – 10-fold in the next few years - and to triple size of the business over the same period via a mix of M&A and organic growth.
Waypoint partner Jim Houghton talks to Peter about many things, including:
- How his McKinsey background equipped him to deal with the issues he faced when he joined Media Square – looking at the agency model through a different lens
- How the MSQ business model now works
- MSQ’s tech offer and how it gives the group a competitive advantage
- His growth ambitions