Almost six years after Olly Kendall set up Westminster PA, he and business partner Sam Cunningham sat down with PubAffairs to talk about the next steps for the strategic communications agency.
In February 2011 Olly Kendall handed his notice into John Lehal - boss of Insight Consulting Group. "I had spent five years at Insight, I'd had a great time but knew I wanted a new challenge. I had no idea really what I was going to do except I knew I wanted to go it alone, roll the dice and see where it took me. The plan back then was just to survive and hope that I could pay the rent."
After a year freelancing, the business started to grow. "It happened organically to a degree. There was a bit of ad hoc new biz but I admit, looking back, I rested on my laurels a lot. Work came in and that was enough. I definitely spent more time in the Virgin Active steam room during working hours than I do now!" Some of that work was not just consultancy though. "For a few years I did the graveyard stuff on telly. Unforgiving, early morning slots on ITV and the evening stuff on Sky News. It's actually a great place to network and it paid some of the bills so suddenly I found myself in the position where I had this profile and it was helping me to land work, which really helps when you're a one man band. It really gave me a lift and suddenly had to take somebody on."
Fast forward five years and things have changed somewhat. Ensconced in new South London office space Sam and Olly look like they are two guys really enjoying what they do. "We're political anoraks" says Cunningham, who is sparky and full of energy and who met Kendall in 2004 when they were both working in Parliament, "so this is a pretty good way for us to make a living, being in and out of Westminster is sort of in our DNA".
Cunningham joined the agency at the start of 2016, following two years heading up political engagement in Australia for global education company Pearson. Along with David Hubert who leads up their EU offering and Dan Hartropp who heads up their digital offering, Kendall says what marks out the team is the "boutique, senior expertise we offer clients. You pick up the phone and you're guaranteed to speak to someone with fifteen years' experience."
"Sam worked on Gordon Brown's digital comms at 10 Downing St and came to the table with some interesting ideas. Dan has really brought those to life which means we're now offering a suite of digital lobbying tools for clients that even a year ago I couldn't have dreamed of." Cunningham says, "Much of public affairs is personal but there's still room for digitisation in our industry. As all our lives become increasingly digital, so is our democracy and people are increasingly looking to voice their issues via email campaigns, petitions and on social media. Post card campaigns and letters are really a thing of the past. Nowadays, politicians have no excuse to be out of touch on the big issues, or lobbyists for not harnessing the ground swell of digital public opinion to push for changes in policy. We recognise that digital tools will increasingly play a role in political communications and we're determined to be on the vanguard of that."
"With Sam's energy we've also been much more ambitious and self-confident and it has led to a number of great client wins", says Kendall. Westminster PA boasts a number of leading corporates on their website including Virgin Atlantic, Betfair and Danone who they've worked with in the past. But Kendall says that the agency is moving into a "new phase" following clients wins in 2016 which include the Management Consultancies Association, Vivergo Fuels, IFS ProShare, Midland Heart and HS2 Into London.
So what next? "Let's just say the plan is to grow but we're pretty relaxed how that happens" says Cunningham, "and so long as we keep working hard I'm confident it will happen". Westminster PA launched PoliMonitor last month - a free monitoring tool for the public affairs industry which has already attracted over 2,000 users, and they say there are plans to launch other digital tools later this year. "But for now we're not saying any more!", adds Cunningham with a smile.