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Plan A Marketing

One year in, Andrew Essex and MT Carney may be selling Plan A sooner than expected

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By Katie Deighton, Senior Reporter

June 24, 2019 | 5 min read

It’s been a year since Andrew Essex and MT Carney officially unveiled their top-of-funnel boutique network, Plan A, which continues to grow through the addition of more specialist agencies to its smorgasbord of offerings. A sale was always in the cards, but now that the market has been sufficiently “frothed,” it may come sooner than they originally anticipated.

Plan A

Carney (left) and Essex officially launched Plan A last year

Plan A – that is, the office that houses Plan A – is small by design.

Since launching at Cannes one year ago, Droga5 alum Essex and former Disney marketer Carney have added Sabrina Yu as managing director, but other than that, the core staff has remained roughly the same size since launch. There’s no gushing humble bragging about having to upsize out of its Soho office anytime soon.

What’s getting bigger is the array of boutiques that are on its books. Plan A’s premise remains the same — a small, senior, core team of strategists and account managers supplemented by an array of highly specialist agencies that offer clients “anything a robot can’t do”. The latter point offers protection from the march of automation, and means no media, no programmatic, no distribution by any means — a platter, not a stack.

It began with five of these shops, and “three, possibly four more” are set to join the consortium soon.

But that doesn’t mean the drawbridge is down to any other similarly-sized boutiques looking for a bit more business. The founders have been prescriptive in the skills they need — and they’re scrupulous in making sure no partners’ offers overlap.

“I think of it as a full menu,” said Essex. “There's no rule of thumb on how many dishes you need before it's satisfactory. But I think about the services that go around the wheel: brand strategy, advertising, PR, social, influencer, experiential, maybe voice, diversity and crisis.

“Once the wheel feel's full, then we're done.”

The master plan

Essex has a number of analogies to describe what he and Carney are building, or rather, bootstrapping. The equity attached to both their names would have made it easy for them to raise the cash, but it “didn't seem to make sense to sacrifice 40% out of the gate”.

Besides, Essex added, “we are not buying the agencies, we're acquiring the agencies. Payday is not today; it's tomorrow.”

Plan A’s leadership are still refining its proposition and bringing new clients into the business as it grows; so far it has worked with the likes of Harry’s, Spotify, Oracle Data Cloud and Zappos and has largely avoided pitches so far, thanks to the “bulletproof, big Rolodexes” of its clients. But as it lines up more business and capabilities, it’s also begun to think seriously about viewing itself as a business ripe for acquisition.

“There's been a lot of interest in where Plan A is going and whether Plan A is available for acquisition — that's part of the master plan,” said Essex. “Things can happen fairly quickly in the modern world and there's just been a lot of inbound interest.”

A sale had always been on the cards, but a deal is looking far more tangible now that Essex’s former coworker, David Droga, has bound his agency to Accenture.

“There'd been interest before,” Essex said, “but that's certainly frothed the market. The assumption would be that Plan A would form part of someone else's larger platform ... and everyone's percentage would be tied to their performance."

Essex is aware the offer isn’t entirely unique, citing Mark Penn’s MDC & Partners, David Jones’ You & Mr Jones and even Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital among his peers looking to offer clients something more agile (without launching into the familiar diatribe of “faster, better, cheaper”).

Plan A’s client list may not be as illustrious than its competitors, its founders may be less likely to schmooze the media, and, without VC funding, it remains the quiet younger sibling of the pack. But it has a point of view — a “focus on human ingenuity” — and a relatively risk-adverse attitude to business building, which may pay off as the industry continues to quietly fret about both a possible recession and the automation of marketing.

“We're not new to this rodeo,” Essex said. “We each have a lot of experience and have seen a lot of failure and that's what’s probably more important than ever: having perspective. We are not just people sitting in the corner office running the plantation. We are owner-operators. It's the best.”

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