Introducing our new chief commercial officer - want to know the sauce?

Today I am excited to announce Karl Loudon as our new Chief Commercial Officer.

Karl was the former COO at Ingenuity, and previous to that Managing Partner within IPG Reprise.

How I found my next leader

Several months ago, I was recommended to speak to Karl. His experience of jointly building and scaling an agency, which was sold to IPG, leading Reprise as Managing Partner, and then holding the position of COO at Ingenuity was inspirational to me. There aren't many leaders that have the creative craft, the business owner experience as well as similar agency experience that has successfully scaled. He was someone I knew I needed to meet.

An afternoon meal and drinks quite quickly turned into a strategic conversation about the many opportunities Rise at Seven has.

Karl asked questions, dug deep into the true realities of what makes us great, and presented me with ideas and ways of thinking that left me running home with an iPhone full of notes. It was the first time in a long time, I had met someone external to Rise at Seven that not only taught me something new but generously gave me ideas and a burst of enthusiasm about what else we could achieve.

After several phone calls, back and forth texts we found an incredible synergy and connection between how we both thought about marketing, our beliefs around agency sales and leadership. So much so that I had to have him in our team. Karl accepted the offer, and today I’m excited to put it out to the world that he is a fully-fledged member of Rise at Seven.

Karl has been working with me for a few months now planning our strategy both short and long term.

Karl previously held board level leadership positions at Reprise as part of IPG. Working with global enterprise clients including Water Wipes, UPS, Natwest, RAC and PwC on their digital paid, earned, shared and owned media and digital products. And he joins us at an exciting time as we add a number of clients to our roster.

Karl’s role

Karl is purely responsible for top line growth in the agency group as a whole. He will be owner, leader and decision maker for all commercial growth looking after expansions to new markets for Rise at Seven, specifically our fast growing U.S. arm , market positioning, development of new products and services and scaling clientele to full service accounts.

And he didn’t come alone!

Since the public plan on a page following the MBO in November, we have been investing in growth teams and brought in some of the industries best.

We've brought in 3 client services seniors from Stickyeyes, including senior account director Laura Smales and account director Danny Porter. Alongside those we also brought in 2 senior account managers levelling up commercial acumen and strategic growth within the agency.

Our mission was to offer more of our magic to our clients and prospective clients, both driving and facilitating search demand. And this was a success.

By March we launched social, influencer and content creation offering, as well as our own Rise Network of content creators and already scaled this winning new clients including Dermalogica, Chiquitos, Mark Hill, Getir, Insinkerator and more.

We also launched and scaled a senior search strategy team, offering search discovery projects and multi channel search strategy and already serving this to one of the worlds largest alcohol brands.

As a result of our expansions of new services and commercial investment, 6 months in and we now have 45% of clients buying multi service from us. We aim to increase this to 60% by December.

We are successfully spreading our influence across our clients' brands and helping digital, search and brand teams bridge the gap and banish the silos. We offer 360 campaigns, strategies and executions delivering search first creativity that pushes users along the funnel at each stage of the journey.

Not only that, but Rise at Seven US now contributes 25% of overall revenue winning clients including SIXT, Decluttr, Revolution Beauty, Look Fantastic and more. We aim to double that by 2025.

As the digital landscape and search landscape grows leaning perfectly into our proposition as an agency, this has given us endless avenues to explore. To lead this mission commercially, I have brought in one of the best commercial directors and agency leaders I know, Karl Loudon.

Karl is housed in our growing London office further helping bring a layer of commercial strategy to accounts, positioning Rise at Seven as serious competitors when it comes to strategy consultancy for digital growth across earned, shared and owned media.

He is no stranger to working with high growth start ups and global enterprises. He was part of the leadership team who built and sold Mubaloo (a digital product agency) to IPG in 2016, held a board position at Reprise and then joined Ingenuity as their Chief Operating Officer before joining us here.

Having the opportunity to have Karl join us as a team is one I couldn't refuse. Karl’s extensive experience of working with similar enterprising agencies, commercial acumen and innovative approach to tech and creativity is just what this agency needed as we go through our scale up journey.

I was looking for a commercial leader who can help navigate me and my team through our next growth phase and Karl was the perfect guy for the job. I have ideas after ideas and I needed someone to sit alongside me and my team to lead us to commercial success. We are excitingly growing through a digital and search revolution and as search and Google prioritise users first, our position in the market has strengthened.

Karl Loudon, said, “I’m thrilled to be joining Rise at Seven, I’ve been a fan of Carrie and the agency since its inception. My personal mission is to destigmatise sales in the creative world and build a more inclusive future for commercial teams. We’re doing genuinely innovative work in a crowded and undifferentiated market and I’m fiercely proud of what our teams do and honoured to be part of the journey.”