After Eight: happy birthday Roaring Mouse

It’s hard, looking back, to know precisely how to feel about our eighth full year in business. While, thankfully, we’ve remained at least one step removed from the human catastrophe of COVID, we’ve certainly felt its impact.

Financially, it turned out to be a steady year. We achieved growth of 7%, alongside a respectable profit margin. After several years where growth exceeded 20% and even 30%, this could have seemed sedate. In reality, it felt like a roller coaster.

The first half was incredible. We increased work with most of our retained customers and achieved a stellar new business win in Aire: one of the UK’s most exciting fintech companies.

We appointed two new members of staff, including former national newspaper journalist Paul Coupar-Hennessy as Creative Director. We’d made room for more people in the office and were planning trade missions to the US and several European tech industry events.

Then COVID hit. Some customers reduced their activity, some were minded to give notice. Instead of the 40% growth we forecasted conservatively in February, which would have moved us into the realms of PRWeek’s Top 150 agency listings, we could have gone backwards.

That we didn’t was a testament to our new business pipeline, the loyalty of our customers and the quality of work we’ve done. We adapted, and we revised our plans to help ensure customers still got the cut-through they needed.

We won four new accounts in lockdown, including data science consultancy Peak Indicators and automation specialists HappyWired. Because we were delivering results, we were also able to secure new working arrangements with the customers that were forced to pull budgets at the start of lockdown.

So, following a year of moderate growth and mixed-emotions, I’m left with a mixture of pride and relief. Proud of the performance of the team in challenging circumstances, and the quality of work that led two-thirds of customers to state ‘extremely satisfied’ with our performance in our latest survey.

And relieved that we’ve been able to stay on track financially, without any drastic measures to reduce costs. I know that not every agency has been so lucky.

Looking forwards, we are certainly not complacent about the year ahead, which could be as challenging as this one. 

But we are determined to be optimistic. Despite COVID, Brexit and other harmful influences, prospects remain good for early-stage companies involved in fintech, cybersecurity, AI and cleantech. These are areas where we have a wealth of experience gained helping to build some of Europe’s most innovative and fastest-growing organisations.

Please raise a glass to Roaring Mouse’s eighth birthday. We’ll see you soon.

All the best

James

Standout campaigns

The team at Roaring Mouse has delivered some exceptional campaigns and results for customers this year. Here are two standout examples…

Five Years in Cyber Security: This campaign for internet service provider Beaming highlighted the growing impact of cybercrime on businesses and how they can better protect themselves. We looked at half a decade’s worth of data and spoke with several cybersecurity experts to produce a thought leadership report and film, and secured blanket coverage across target technology and business publications. The campaign has cemented Beaming’s reputation as a reliable, knowledgeable provider of secure connectivity and telephony services.

Kevin Keegan’s Secrets of Leadership: This digital PR campaign for technology company BigChange tapped into the expertise of its famous ambassador: former England football captain and manager Kevin Keegan OBE. Unable to engage with BigChange’s clients in person, Kevin kindly agreed to feature in a nine-part YouTube series exploring the qualities of successful leaders and the lessons he learned playing under the likes of Sir Alf Ramsey and Bill Shankly OBE. The campaign launched two weeks ago and has already achieved thousands of organic views and exceptional levels of engagement across BigChange’s social media channels.