Meet the Agency Adventure Guides

Chris Bantock

Running a marketing agency and creative business is a journey. Along this journey you will encounter highs and lows and there will be bumps in the road. I provide advice, support, and accountability to make the journey as smooth and as enjoyable as possible.

My work also involves working out where you want to go on your journey (your plan) and helping you navigate the route to get there.

I founded The Agency Adventure as I believe a cookie cutter approach to agency consultancy is futile. Your business is unique to you, so you need tailored support at every step.

Tom Wilson

I am an agency leader skilled in agency operations with two decades of hands-on experience.

I have been on your journey with What’s Possible Group. I experienced the team of 5 expanding to over 200 staff. I've had the privilege of overseeing or being directly responsible for every function within an agency.

I use this broad, functional knowledge of what makes an organisation successful to guide agencies of all shapes and sizes on their own journey. I support agency leaders by sharing my experience and guiding them to a path of sustainable growth and helping them avoid some of the traps waiting for them as they do.

Claire Hutchings

Claire has worked in independent boutique and global networked agencies for almost 20 years. She also built her own business, Chime Agency to help agencies with the one challenge they all face - their own marketing. Chime Agency’s produced game changing research into agency marketing and supported more than 40 agencies grow their businesses. Claire now combines her business knowledge from building Chime Agency with her experience of working with agencies as an Agency Adventure Guide.

She specialises in supporting independent agency owners and leaders to make great decisions and get the best out of their businesses. Claire is passionate about mental health and supporting women in business, she therefore loves working with female and minority founders plus those with limited previous agency experience who want to scale successful businesses while maintaining a work-life balance.

Paul Egan

Paul Egan is a former agency MD turned AI-powered growth consultant. He led digital marketing agency atom42 through an exit to Iris Worldwide, where he sat on the board for a number of years. These days, he helps marketing agencies scale faster by combining two decades of experience with cutting-edge automation.

Chris Morris

I’ve walked in your shoes.
After starting, growing, and successfully exiting two agencies that generated turnovers of £4.7m (57 people) and £12m (120 people), I am now 2 years into perhaps the most rewarding part of my journey yet.

Using my 35+ years of lived experience, my purpose is to share my hard-earned knowledge, honest perspectives, and practical guidance with agency owners and their teams, to help navigate their challenges.

I understand how hard it can be in today’s fast-paced, continually evolving business world. So, I use my experience to help agencies create and deliver a clear, executable, profitable plan to run and grow a sustainable agency into the future.

Andy Hayes

I love the boring but important stuff that you can’t do, don’t want to do, or don’t have time to do.

I have over 33 years’ experience in the creative industries working on the commercial side of the business, with 12 years at board level. I’ve worked in start-ups and high profile network agencies. And I've been involved in winning new business, managing clients, managing projects, working with creative teams, and running a consultancy business.

I'm here to help you make more money. And to let you focus on the side of your business that interests you and inspired you to be a creative entrepreneur in the first place. I can help you with all commercial aspects of running a thriving creative business: from tendering, to pricing, negotiating, client onboarding, risk compliance, and client satisfaction surveys.

Thinking about your exit plan? I co-led a successful exit strategy moving a business from share ownership to an Employee Ownership Trust.

I’d love to hear your story and see how I can help you.

Steve Firth

Steve is an experienced business and agency advisor with over 25 years spent inside fast-growth group and independent businesses. He brings both strategic perspective and lived experience, having spent a decade building and scaling his own agency before successfully selling it to a US-based brand consultancy.

Over the past two years, Steve has focused on supporting business leaders as they navigate increasingly complex, fast-moving and competitive environments. His work helps founders and leadership teams not only clarify their direction and reach their goals but also build businesses they can genuinely thrive within along the way.

Steve’s approach is deliberately flexible. Every business is different, so he works in whatever way adds the greatest value at that moment from ongoing business advisory and leadership mentoring, to focused, high-impact growth assignments that address specific challenges.

As a Guide at The Agency Adventure, Steve brings founder-level empathy, practical insight and a belief that agencies perform best when ambition, wellbeing and clarity are held in balance.