Talent firm 24 Seven consolidates the new business efforts of its three concentric agencies

According to each agency’s leaders, clients, from a golf brand owner to a Fortune 500 financial services firm are already expanding their reach from work with just one shop into one or both of the others. And since 24 Seven has an 80 to 100 person new business team helping a range of clients with staffing needs, the full-service breadth of the combined agencies becomes a natural new business pipeline. 

“We’ve basically joined up our frontline client services strategy intake team, such that every new opportunity goes to one team,” explained Chris Finneral, founder of SketchDeck who sits with the other two agency founders (Markacy’s Tucker Matheson and Futureman’s Jamey Barry) on a leadership team with members of the new business team from 24 Seven) on a leadership team. That leadership team “is basically figuring out what does this client need, what’s their problem, where do they need our help — and then which agency or agencies are best fit to solve this. So that’s a really unique piece. Then through that process, once we work with the client to establish what is the work here, it moves into the individual agencies or agent agencies.”

The streamlining of the approach prevents the agencies from potentially cannibalizing each other — although it’s not a big concern since their respective strengths don’t overlap much. 

“it really does fit cleanly,” said Finneral. “It’s not like we’re three agencies all doing the same thing, like really like going after it. So it’s worked pretty well.”

Markacy’s Matheson said the financial services firm, which he declined to identify, needed creative add-ons to some of the media work Markacy is doing for the client, which SketchDeck is filling in while Futureman pitches AI-driven creative elements as well. “We’ve been able to open it up because we have the different services. It’s not just Markacy in a silo,” said Matheson. 

As every other agency looks to bulk up in size of scale, the three agency founders noted that because they stayed separate rather than being merged into one multi-offering agency, they can still go after smaller projects as well as bigger fish. 

“We will still go in and support a mid market client with a single project,” said Finneral. “But we’re now also coming to the table and bidding on RFPs that are $10 million plus.”

“We’ve worked through them to launch a few CTV campaigns, and that was not previously a part of our marketing mix,” said Christian Brunone, who oversees DTC marketing for the Greg Norman Collection as well as broader brand strategy for golf firm Dunning. “They help spearhead partnering with the right outside provider for those things. And we’ve seen enough success that we’re going to start doing a little bit more of that type of work … We need strategic partners, not executional partners, and they’ve been a great example of that.”

With the 24 Seven tie in, a constant mainline into staffing helps keep the full-time head count and requisite costs to a minimum, said Futureman’s Barry, who notes the agency has added only one full-timer since the acquisition last year. “But our bench of contractors or go-to producers has grown substantially.” 

Finally, a new growth area for all the agencies is helping clients in-house where necessary, said the agency founders, who have devoted some of their expertise to a 24 Seven unit called Sage that helps clients in-house. 

“We’ve joined that team to provide project management oversight support, like setting up projects, a project governance layer, reporting up the key stakeholders, and helping to elevate the value of the work that we’re doing, in hopes that we can continue to staff more consultants there,” said Matheson, who’s recently helped a Fortune 50 tech brand do just that.