Meet the founders: a conversation with our CEO on merging RCCO and WILD to create &above

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Today we're diving into the heart of &above, the London-based creative and tech agency born from the merger of RCCO Creative and WILD Productions. Listen as our CEO and founder, Jordan Richards, explores his initial thought process behind this exciting union and where &above is headed next.

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What was the initial thought process behind merging?

"A vision for me has always been - how do we deliver the best value to our clients who are growing really fast? And often what you find is that big businesses have loads of different point players that they really struggle to manage. They lack the benefit of having a single person or company to connect all the dots across their business. So, when we went through the process of deciding whether to be a group of companies or single entity a big consideration was the fact that we want to be able to help scale ups and enterprises connect the dots across their products, sales, and marketing. Therefore we need to be a single unit to be able to do that."

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Most of our clients know you quite well as the face of RCCO, but lets talk a little bit about our co-founders, Josh and Tom…

"Obviously as we scale, we need to have experts in these spaces. Josh, who has a super technical background, and Tom, who is creatively award winning. That combination means we can lead the first two pillars of our business into the next level of growth and deliver great service to our clients. So while I'd love to still be on every project, and I'll be on as many as I can with clients, it's great to have people leading those teams who have a deeper experience in those areas."

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How do you think that’s made your role evolve and change?

"I think what's really exciting is - with Tom and Josh leading their respective teams - they're really focused on delivering great output and that's enabled me to start looking at the third pillar of our business, which is strategy. So, my focus has been more in delivering strategy to clients, tying both our creative and tech skill sets together for the most powerful results. It’s a department we're going to be developing over the coming year that I'm really excited about as it will really level up what we can deliver for our clients."

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There's so many different elements to think about when executing your own rebrand. What was a personal challenge for you?

"I actually went back to the fundamentals and reread a book called Start With Why. It made me think, we're merging companies, but what is the bigger, "why" that we're doing this for? And truly, we're doing this to help grow products of the future. That's the unifying thing across everything we do that ties &above together. I think it was really important to start there, because then all of our messaging, our identity and work off of that is centred in that core reason. There are tons of agencies out there, so we wanted to really stand our mark in the industry and show what we are here to do. And working with those scale ups, working with the enterprises, they all have one mission - growing something for the future."

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I'm not saying the branding process was easy. Trying to fit it in with all of our client projects that take priority was tough. Plus, being your own critic and client as well… I feel sorry for our team having us as the client. Obviously it was a challenging process, but I'm super proud of what we've done with it. I'm really looking forward to hearing what people say about it.

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Any other books that you've read recently that just really inspired you? 

I've just given this book to Tom actually, it's called Sprint. It's written by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and the Google Ventures design team. It's about building a product idea within five days. We can often elongate the process, especially when it comes to big clients that we work with - they have to go through layers of bureaucracy in the business. So what I love about the Sprint book is it teaches you to focus your time. In those five days you can establish the foundations of a really good product, test if it has market fit and it's viable and unique. For me, finding those little processes and pieces of wisdom that we can build into the way we work is really valuable. 

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I just love reading business books, I am actually addicted to it.

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How do you think our relationships with our long term clients are going to look now that we've become &above?

I love the long term partnerships we've built. I think they really show our differentiator as an agency, which is the fact that we can be a marketing and product team on demand as a bolt on hub. Generally that is for scale ups who don't have the resource, but it also works well for enterprises that need the dots connecting. So for me to have a few clients who have basically been with us from day one and still work with us five years later, really proves the value of us being a single company. With tech businesses, often the product's really complex. So that subject matter expertise takes a while to build up and that's what makes us really efficient and effective to work with. Then, for five of those businesses that are long term partners to have been acquired in that journey really proves the value of our partnership.

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What do you think are your next biggest goals for &above?

My vision for &above over the next five years is to enhance our strategic partnerships with clients. That means getting really deep into their business so that we can make recommendations to support them in driving their goals, whether it's OKRs, acquisition, or getting investment ready. Then personally for us the other thing I'm excited about is building our own product. Investing in our own products, testing our skillset and the way we work with clients, and hopefully making some products of the future from our own internal team.

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When hiring, do you feel a CV or degree is more important?

Obviously my background did not entail going to university and I've been lucky to hire such a diverse mix of talent from different backgrounds, and I think part of that is not just looking at someone's CV. Being a creative agency, we have the flexibility of not just looking at that, but looking at people's work and bringing people in for paid test projects.

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It's a breadth of things really. People shouldn't be judged on just one thing and I think a degree is such a tick box for businesses and a barrier to people joining. It just limits them from the diverse talent they can hire.

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What do you think is the best advice someone has given you?

I think the best advice I've ever received is from one of my business coaches. He said, “Treat yourself like an athlete.” What I loved about that was he would never actually ask me specifics about the business or try to solve those problems. He would always focus on me as a person, my mental health, my physical health, my diet, my reading, and meditating. Because if you're at your best, then the business comes easy. A lot of business is ambiguity and solving problems. You can never be fully prepared for what you're going to face. So at least if you're at your best, then you're going to have a good chance at doing well.

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Reach higher with &above.