The Duke of York visited adverstising agency Mother in Techcity in March 2013. Dylan Williams, Chief Strategy Officer, notes how the visit has spurred on his team.
Mother is a brand communications company. British-born, independent, sixteen years young, with offices in London, New York and Buenos Aries.
On the 13th March 2013 we had the privilege of hosting HRH The Duke Of York KG on a royal visit to ‘Tech City’, the high growth technology cluster in London’s East End. It was a fantastic occasion. HRH was scheduled to spend fifteen minutes with us. He ended up giving us an hour of his time. He took a keen interest in our culture as well as our output and gave a stirring address to all three hundred staff. An impromptu speech that, its fair to say, was met with the kind of raucous applause that breached all etiquette. Everyone in the company went back to the desks with a smile on their face and a spring in their step.
And that’s when things got interesting.
You see we’re the UK’s current ‘Agency Of The Decade’. We’ve doubled in size since the 2008 Credit Crunch. We’ve handled the down-turn pretty well. But just prior to The Duke’s visit we had taken our first real hit. Our first quarter had been seriously tough.
Yet as we write this some two months on, the picture is much brighter. We’ve won three new pitches on the bounce. We’ve also just opened a new maker lab for entrepreneurs. After an awful start, 2013 is now shaping up to be our best year ever.
Now we may have regained our momentum anyway. We’ll never know. But we’re pretty sure that the ‘spring in the step’ provided by the Royal visit was an important factor. The morale boost we received cannot be dismissed as ‘soft value nonsense’. It translated into a tangible productivity increase and, in-turn, new business success. Everyone went back to those desks galvanized and energized. We all redoubled our efforts. And it has started to pay dividend.
Quite frankly we’d quite like it if HRH could drop by every six months or so. He’d be very welcome.
Dylan Williams, Partner and Chief Strategy Officer, Mother
