Blurred is five!
By Nik Govier, Founder and CEO
Five years! So many miles covered, so many more ahead.
I remember so clearly the anxiety I felt the day before we launched. I was hungover from the PRWeek awards which I’d attended as a sole agent for the first time – unattached to an agency – all very odd.
And I felt the fear. What if everyone thought it was a crap concept? Or if my legacy would always be as the founder that walked away from Unity at the height of its fame? (the year before Unity had won 7 PRWeek awards)
Fellow Blurred founding partner – Katy - reacted to my stress and suggested canning all our carefully crafted web copy and just featuring our hero film on our site. Just to take the pressure off and land, simply, what we stood for and what we believed in.
A wise thought from a wise woman. It’s what we did – and it’s essentially what we’ve done ever since: focus on our points of difference – our core beliefs, our values, our Purpose. Get them right, and everything else just follows.
When Katy (now our chief client officer), Stu (now our chief strategy officer), Emma (our FD) and I decided to go on this journey together, we had a vision for a new kind of business, and that would mean building it differently.
The first person to join us was Nick Porter (PCC CPCC), who came on board as our NED for People & Purpose. She would also chair our Board and coach our people fortnightly. Not involved in the business day to day, she would ensure we never lost sight of what was important, and would hold us to account, ongoing. Her very first act was a two-day workshop to crystallise our values – values that still live strong today.
We launched Blurred, focusing on the B-corp principles of People, Planet and Profit.
We wanted to be a profitable, net-zero business, but also to create an environment where people could be their true, best selves, where they could do the best work of their careers and where they could genuinely make a difference.
The name Blurred has meant many things over the years. At the beginning we focused in on the blurring of the lines between audience groups – arguing that corporate was consumer, internal was external and that we all increasingly care about the businesses behind the brands.
Now, it’s more about what we do – blurring the lines between comms, management and sustainability consulting; meaning we can help business be better, as well as tell those stories across the entire stakeholder universe, from the capital markets to policy makers; employees, consumers and beyond.
There have been meteoric highs and crushing lows – many of which we’ve documented over the years, believing in the power of transparency, for good and for bad.
We’ve done work we’re incredibly proud of and, of course, there are some things that I wish we’d done differently.
We’re so proud of our team, and delight in the partnerships we’ve formed with clients – many of which have been with us since year one. Without our clients we would be nothing. They’ve evolved with us, as have our glorious team.
Jenna Gifford was our first official employee. Having worked in PR her whole career she still leads a lot of our comms work, but her deep sustainability subject matter expertise – combined with her management consulting skills – now set her apart. She, too, has become “Blurred”.
She is as much this business as any of the founders, as she’s shaped who we are by living our values every day, and by evolving the work by continuously striving for betterment in what we do and how we do it. And as I look around at our brilliant team I see they are committed to doing the same. Blurred is the sum of ALL our people and ALL our clients.
Over the next three weeks we’re going to shine a light on some of our highs. We will profile some client work – though note a lot of what we do we can’t talk about, but we’ll share what we can. And we’ll bring to life our values.
Slight spoiler alert, but here are three of the things I’m perhaps most proud of:
- 99% approval rating in our latest anonymous employee survey (May ’23). 99% either ‘strongly agreed’ or ‘agreed’ across our 40+ questions bucketed into Purpose, Values & Behaviours; Line Management & Development; Senior Leadership; Structure; and General.
- The diversity of the team. The Blurred team is proudly diverse in terms of ethnicity, gender, disability, neurodiversity*, socio-economic background, sexual orientation, age, religious belief and national origin. Purposefully. And we track and report, six monthly, as accountability matters as much as transparency.
- This year we were recognised as a ‘consultancy of the year’ across the three areas that we ‘blur’. We won both Corporate Agency of the Year at PRovoke’s EMEA Sabre awards and Best Agency for Corporate and/or Financial Comms at PRWeek’s Corporate, City and Public Affairs Awards. But we also won Best New Management Consultancy at the Management Consulting Awards and were a finalist for Consultancy of the Year at the EDIE sustainability awards. We are first and foremost a strategic communications business, but our management and sustainability consulting skills ensure more robust and credible comms - essential in today’s highly regulated and increasingly scrutinised world.
Our fifth year has probably been our toughest year – for a number of reasons I will no doubt blog about at some point. But I know we’ve made a difference – a material difference. And I know that the hungover me, the day before we launched, would be blown away by what we’ve built and who we’ve become.
So thank you – to our team, clients, Cohort members, friends and family that have made us who we are. We couldn’t – and wouldn’t - have done it without you. Thank you. Here’s to the next five (and beyond!).
*we separate out ‘neurodiversity’ from ‘disability’ as we don’t believe it to be a disability.