Inflect Partners: Our Story

As communications consultants, we work with organisations to help tell their story, to explain who they are and what they stand for, we explain how important it is to have an authentic voice, with words back by actions and we endlessly talk about the need to build long-term meaningful relationships with key stakeholders.

We do this day after day, week after week, year after year, yet we rarely practice what we preach. Most agencies fail to tell their own story, many don’t even try, and those that do feel glossy and polished and not at all authentic.

We want to try and break the mould, to tell the story of Inflect, as it happens, our real-life experience of starting our business, our highs and lows, the challenges we face and the decisions and discussions we grapple with.

So, we are Inflect Partners, and this is our story so far:

You join us in January 2021, a month after our official launch, eight months after the three of us first met to discuss the idea and three months since we started trading. Although the official launch (here if you missed it) saw us appear as a bright shiny new agency (PRWeek one to watch no less), the launch felt like the end of a chapter, or the end of the beginning perhaps.

There’s not much written on those first tentative steps you take… the meeting of minds, the deciding to ‘do it’, the endless discussions about ‘USP’ and what to call ourselves, and then one day you click onto companies house and finally register your new company. 

These are all milestones, each of us, working out independently if this is the right time, the right people, the right business to commit to. Will we all get on? Can I take the risk?  What if it doesn’t work? There were conversations with others that fell by the wayside, there were (and still are) doubts. Can we do it? But we took the big step, we launched our own agency, and people noticed. Phew.

We share a vision of a new type of agency which is focused on the challenges of tomorrow, down to earth, straightforward to deal with and obsessed about delivering value, but it is just that, a vision of what we want to create, and now we actually need to make it real.

Sounds easy right… its not. 

The reality is three people – all parents, home-schooling and struggling with lockdown like the rest of the country, we don’t have investors or money in the bank. We are taking a risk, and if you stop to think about it for too long, it’s scary.

We each put a couple of thousand pounds into the business to pay for our start-up costs, and whilst we started working with our first clients in October, in our business, generating actual cash in the bank takes time. You win the work, do the work, invoice the work, then wait to get paid before any money actually hits the bank account, so this month we hit another important milestone, we have enough money in the bank to feel comfortable paying ourselves, and yes it’s been a long three months, and yes, this definitely feels like something to celebrate.  

We are ridiculously grateful to those first few clients and lovely people, for helping us to get to this point so a shout out to those who have helped us reach this important milestone (in no particular order):  

Dominic Church, Ian Targett, Andy Wertheim, Loree Gourley, Adam Mumford, Jarl Severn, Jane Edbrooke, Sara Gorton, Becky Wright, Jon Skewes, Seena Shah, John Wood,  Hannah Reed, Andrew Pakes, Sue Ferns, Jenny Olson, Anna Hemmings, Arvind Hickman, Delroy Corinaldi, Ian Vogler, Blanche Shackleton, Emma Harper… and many more