Rebecca Oatley is the Co-Founder of The Wilful Group, a B Corp-certified communications consultancy working with innovators and gamechangers in climate and sustainability. With over 35 years of experience in PR and marketing, she previously founded Cherish PR and has worked with pioneering digital brands like lastminute.com.
Can you tell us a little about your background and your company?
The Wilful Group is a communications agency specialising in climate and sustainability innovation. We take the positive work that business and brands are doing and translate it to make it interesting and powerful for marketing to corporate and consumer audiences. We work with all areas of communications from internal stakeholders to external consumers.
We have been Wilful for three years but my Co-Founder, Narda and I have known each other for 25 years, having met and worked together in the early stages of the dot com boom. We were the PR team behind the rise of lastminute.com and many of the dot coms of the late Nineties and our experience in building the profile of these companies demonstrated just how powerful PR really is.
Of course, in the late Nineties internet penetration was far too small for many of these companies to realise their ambitions and when the dot com bubble burst, Narda and I went our own separate ways, starting our own firms. We ran our own agencies for almost 20 years and throughout that time, we stayed in touch, sharing stories of work and our growing families.
Then, one day in 2019, we realised that our experiences and respective sector specialisms could create a unique proposition if we joined forces. I had been working in digital innovation, helping new technologies take hold and Narda had been helping big companies with their purpose and sustainability strategies. We knew that innovation was needed to solve some of the big planet and climate problems and that experience like ours was badly needed to get new ideas to audiences, and to change entrenched behaviours.
With Covid, we didn’t join forces to create Wilful until 2021, but after working in marketing for 30 years, Wilful is something completely new, challenging but brilliantly exciting and stimulating at the same time.
What inspired you to start your business?
We could see the climate horror stories that were filling the media. Stories of freak weather events, icecaps melting, horrendous carbon emissions from heavy industry. My eldest son was suffering from asthma and the impact of everything was looming large on our children’s futures.
But telling horror stories doesn’t inspire change and there was an acceptance that we needed to inspire people and help them to understand what they could do. We needed to evolve behaviour by showing potential solutions and the products and services that would help. Essentially good communication was vital because the doom and gloom was just making everyone feel helpless.
Strangely, when the world stopped because of Covid, there was an almost immediate impact on nature. We saw dolphins in the Thames, we breathed cleaner air, we heard less seismic noise, and as people headed to parks and open spaces, we felt the impact of nature on our wellbeing. This set the stage for new ideas and innovation in all areas, from climate to health, carbon to the built environment.
That was when we really decided to focus our efforts on telling stories of what people could do that was planet positive, introduce products and services that were available and share what companies were doing to take responsibility for change.
How did you create awareness for your brand?
We didn’t have huge marketing budgets but we were good at storytelling and so at launch, we used these skills to capture attention amongst our industry. The good news was that we also had a bit of a track record with our previous agencies and therefore we could access and introduce Wilful to our connections within our respective industries and through our networks, we spread the news and received so much support for the new venture.
Connections have been the lifeblood of the business ever since. Launching Wilful enabled us to go out and reintroduce ourselves and discuss how we were different and better. At the time, very few agencies were in our world but that has changed somewhat now.
We now have a marketing machine in motion with a dedicated marketing team in place for our social media, content, PR and email marketing. We also hired a new business consultant who works closely with the marketing team to spread the word about Wilful with those companies we’d love to work with.
What strategies helped you secure funding and scale your business?
Narda and I both started our original agencies with our savings and grew them from there. In 2021 when we started Wilful, we were able to bring previous profits into Wilful to support our growth ambitions.
We are ambitious for our mission and can see what great marketing services can deliver, and we have looked at bringing in external funding to help us accelerate growth and offer new services. Working with investors is about fit as well as funding and we really need to see that our partners have agency experience as well as the same passion for how great comms enhances the future of our planet.
What have been your biggest successes so far?
It’s interesting and possibly even a luxury, to start a business from scratch with two 20-year-old businesses behind you. Perhaps that’s why our success is based not on growth but on perhaps on solving the biggest challenge of the merger.
It is no mean feat bringing together two teams, two cultures, two very different ways of working. We had to create a new culture, a fresh vision and mission, a new belief system and values, but rather than workshopping it and then sticking it on the wall and forgetting it, we had to make it work otherwise we’d stay with two companies and nothing would move forward. Many mergers have faltered because founders underestimated the challenge of “people”.
In the process of working on this challenge, we came across two strategies that have been incredibly valuable.
Firstly, working with leadership coach, Giles Hutchins, we discovered regenerative business systems and leadership. This is the principle that businesses should never be a top-down hierarchy but instead a cohesive and collaborative team with each person on that team bringing a unique skill and is respected for executing an important and respected function for the whole (of the company). Then, everyone works with each other to keep the business going. Very little goes “up” to the senior leadership team. It’s how systems work in nature and so far, it’s been the foundations of a brilliant new Wilful culture.
Our six-monthly team surveys show that we have a very happy team, despite the economic environment of the past 18 months being less than favourable. Interestingly, in reading on the subject, we found that this way of working is actually more matriarchal than patriarchal and works well in heavily female environments which is quite typical in our industry.
The second big success has been our Group wide B Corp certification. It’s so important that in promoting brilliant planet positive innovation, that we are doing so sustainably. We want our business to be operationally positive. We have built Wilful using the pillars of B Corp and every year we publish an impact report in which we share how we have performed and what we need to do better. We are now really focused on improving the impact of our supply chain and we are reviewing all of our partners to ensure they are carbon and waste light and people positive. Eventually, we want to help our whole industry do the same.
What challenges have you faced, and how did you overcome them?
As well as the merging of cultures which I mentioned above, the biggest challenge has been somewhat out of our hands. We merged during the post-Covid economic bounce and our ambitions for growth were lofty. In the years since then, the world has changed enormously and it continues to do so. This creates instability and instability creates fear and that fear means that markets falter and retrench. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a rolling back from climate investment in spite of the massive need and opportunity in producing planet friendly products and services. The good news is that in the UK, policy is still committed to greener energy and nature-based innovation and so we’re optimistic for the future.
What this has meant for us is a lot of reforecasting and a clear focus on active management. We know our people are the lifeblood of Wilful and as such we have focused on protecting investment in our people and marketing activity. The structure of the business has changed and we’re leaner but this is what success looks like in much tougher economic conditions.
What are your plans for the future?
Our immediate focus is to ensure that Wilful becomes the go to communications agency for any clients operating in the sustainable innovation space. From green energy to recycling, sustainable consumer brands to nature-based finance, we have a skilled, motivated and high functioning team that really understands the nuances of sustainability and the opportunities from it.
In the medium term, our growth ambitions remain. There are services and territories that we want to include as part of our offering and for that we will be looking for partners to help us open up the opportunity. We are in talks with some amazing organisations so watch this space!
What advice would you give to aspiring female entrepreneurs?
Women will help women. If you have a great idea or a young business, get out there and start building your network and there is no better place to start than with other female founders and entrepreneurs. Go and listen to them speak, meet them and share your story. And keep in touch. So much of my success has come from building my network. The time spent will always be paid back.
What are your top three tips for entrepreneurial success?
Give yourself permission. So often, I have stopped myself doing things because I am not sure that it’s the done thing or not the right time, but that is just not true. If you have an idea, pursue it. Trust your instincts and give yourself permission.
Keep it cheap. Startups don’t have deep pockets so think about cost-efficient ways you can make your idea a reality. I had ideas for two complementary brands and with the first, I invested heavily in order to set up a separate business, spending a lot of money to do things “properly” but in reality, it didn’t need all of the planning. I had wasted time and resources when all it needed was a website and some great marketing to get it off the ground.
Read, or listen… lots. Pivot seems to be an overused word with entrepreneurs but that is because it is important to be constantly reviewing what you are doing to either keep doing it or change it. However, what many entrepreneurs don’t tell you is that learned wisdom is important yes but you are not the font of all knowledge when it comes to growing a business, many other people have great advice too. Read business books relating to your area of business and listen to podcasts or speakers because that learning time will also help guide you on your path.
Who are five people who inspire you the most, and why?
I don’t have five but there are two people who have really inspired me personally and made a marked impact on my working life.
Obviously, my business partner Narda Shirley. She is a brilliant collector and sharer of wisdom and uses this to create pretty incredible ideas. She’s also a strategist and there’s nothing I love more than what we call “noodling” on a challenge or opportunity together. She has a very different way of approaching things and I have learned so much from her.
My husband, Rob is also pretty inspirational because he completely changed his career in his forties. He was creative director of a record label and had been in music for over twenty years. When our eldest son was diagnosed with dyslexia, he decided he wanted to learn more about special education needs and then retrained to become a SEN teacher and now specialises in helping teachers work with pupils with dyscalculia and maths difficulties. It’s pretty brave to change your life and start a new career in your forties but he’s shown me that it’s never too late to do something new.
What are your favourite inspirational or motivational quotes?
“Barn’s burned down but now I can see the moon” – Mizuta Masahide
Where can our readers connect with you?
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-oatley-0a25414/
