A little under two years ago, it was announced that Sefiani, the 25-year-old fiercely independent communications and PR agency named for founder and CEO Robyn Sefiani was acquired by London-based global marketing and communications business Clarity.
At the time, it may have seemed to be an unusual move. Sefiani herself told B&T in an exclusive chat in the lead-up to the second anniversary of the acquisition that when she founded the agency, “it was never about being the biggest”.
It was, however, about “being the best” in everything the agency did. Sefiani the agency was best known in Australia for its crisis and reputation management when it was acquired by Clarity in 2022. It was a reputation (apologies) well earned and was very enticing for Clarity as Rachel Gilley, Clarity’s CEO, told us.
“Offering the strategy-level guidance and consultancy to clients was very attractive. The calibre of the team was extremely important. And the fact that the crisis offering was so bedded in, it set a benchmark for us to take and then set around the whole business,” Gilley explained.
As it stands, there are 21 staff based in the Sefiani office in Sydney, including staff who hold global roles across the Clarity Group, such as Alice Spraggon, head of editorial content. To put it another way, a fifth of the entire Clarity global workforce is based on Pitt Street in Sydney. It’s perhaps fair to say that the acquisition of Sefiani by Clarity was not the latter swooping for the former. Instead, it was about adding strings to both businesses’ bows.
As well as a market-leading reputation and crisis management skills, Robyn Sefiani had created a network of affiliates (starting during the 12 years she spent with Edelman before stepping out on her own) throughout Asia that, at the stroke of pens in London and Sydney, became available to Clarity’s global clients. It has resulted in Clarity being able to offer a “follow-the-sun” model for its clients.
“We have always been able to do regional work from Australia into Asia for our clients. When Clarity became aware of that, the need, the urgency to make an acquisition in Asia became less important because we already had established contacts,” said Sefiani.
On Sefiani’s end (the agency), the Clarity acquisition allowed it to step into areas of the communications and marketing sector.
“One of the key reasons that I agreed to be acquired two years ago was that I wanted Sefiani to have a much stronger digital capability. Clarity has a very strong technology platform, works with a lot of technology-based clients and it has a big digital, social, intelligence and analytics footprint that we’re now building here,” said Sefiani.
Clarity has been highly “acquisitive” of late, explained Gilley, a strategy that she has driven to help expand the business beyond its initial stance as a pure PR agency for B2B tech clients. Though she also said that the business will take a pause on acquisitions for the moment, to let the new agencies settle.
“Clients were asking for additional services which we didn’t have, so we started looking for agencies which we knew were going to bring in those additional service lines and go into markets where we knew we needed to be,” she said.
Clarity has offices in Amsterdam to service mainland Europe and on the east and west coasts of the US.
“A large part of the discussion with Sefiani was that digital marketing was a big play for us. We’d acquired two agencies in 2021 and 2022 that did both digital performance and UX design. That opened up a whole new world for us in terms of the client base, how we could extend those services and, for Sefiani, it had already identified that it wanted to have much more of a digital marketing play,” continued Gilley.
“Sefiani is able to pitch for large briefs—in fact one came in this week and there was a requirement for digital expertise with that. We can offer it at a cheaper value from the UK because obviously that’s where a large portion of that is and we can hire locally.”
“Taking Stock Of Each Other”
No acquisition is without headaches—whether major or minor—and Sefiani and Gilley were refreshingly honest about the process of the two coming together. While there was no consolidation of roles, there were slightly more mundane hurdles to vault, though the two were very culturally aligned before the process started.
“The first year was all us taking stock of each other,” said Sefiani, “and it takes a while”.
“You’ve got to convert to certain software systems, timesheet systems. It’s relentless, to be honest. The whole integration process in the first year was all about coming across onto systems and processes.
“The second year has been a joy. This year has been amazing for us, we’re just working as a seamless global team. So many people in our Sefiani team are now on global taskforces, global client accounts, we’re sharing knowledge. Our team is loving it, I’m loving it!”
For Sefiani, the acquisition was personally significant. For the first time in more than 20 years, she has a boss. She described the change as a “big adjustment” but said it was “rewarding” to expand into new areas.
“You know though, I’ve never been busier!” she said, laughing and explaining that she is on Clarity’s global board and exco.
Gilley, now a seasoned acquirer of businesses (though she resisted our joking characterisation as the female Sir Martin Sorrell), explained that while “change scares people” convincing staff around the world that the acquisition was in their best interests was relatively easy.
“It takes about three months to to work out who’s going to stick around and who isn’t. Change scares people. Some are nervous about what it’s going to mean for them. We had two acquisitions in quite quick succession in digital marketing… People were came in and were worried that someone else already had their job and what that was going to mean for them,” she said.
“The job as someone leading the team is to say ‘You all have a future here’ and convince that we understood that from the get-go or we wouldn’t have done it. Of course there are cultural considerations that you need to have and to make sure everyone comes together as a group. We’re 100 people globally, we’re not vast, but when you do a town hall, you’ve got to work out how those time zones come together and that everyone is hearing the same message.”
“I Have To Sleep Well At Night”
The marketing communications industry writ large is in a state of flux. The way people consume media is changing and clients budgets are shrinking, a potentially deadly cocktail resulting in irrelevance and apathy. However, Sefiani believes that the new combined agency has never been better placed to overcome these challenges.
“We’re not seeing anything that’s worrying us. Quite the contrary. We’re very optimistic about next year, perhaps because of the services that we offer,” said Sefiani.
“We’ve proven over 25 years to be very resilient in tough times. When brands stop spending, or when you’ve got a global financial crisis or a COVID epidemic, when companies are shedding teams internally, they come to agencies that are very strong in corporate communications, in change management and reputation management. We can actually grow during those difficult times. We might lose the proactive, positive PR-type work, but we gain the premium billing in senior strategic corporate communications and reputation management work.”
Gilley concurred.
“As we offer such a vast capability of services, it’s meant that when times are tougher for clients when they came to us after ’23 and said ‘PR is tough for us at the moment’, we’ve been able to switch them to different services,” she said.
“We are optimistic. But we’re pragmatic, we can read all the forecasts that everybody else can read and we know where we’re at. But a lot of clients that we work with, by nature of them being B2B tech, there’s a lot of VC funding and there’s a lot of dry powder out there that needs to be spent.
“We’re seeing an uptick massively in Q3 and Q4 in terms of organic growth from existing clients, too.”
Sefiani also disputed that the ‘retainer is dead’ conversation that has entertained large conversations in the industry.
“We have a big retainer model. I have to sleep well at night!” said Sefiani.
“We have clients that have been with us for 15 or 18 years and they’re retained. We’ve been through several CEOs, CMOs, but the trust they have in Sefiani keeps us as part of their extended team. There’ll always be projects or hourly rates. Our crisis response work is on hourly rates, though you never know how long it will take to diffuse a crisis.
“But I really contest this view that the retainer is dead. It’s alive and well and it gives healthy cash flow. It enables you to plan strong agency growth and investment, and it helps agency owners sleep well at night.”
