In an industry used to churn, two years is considered a good stint. But at digital and customer experience agency CX Lavender, people stick around for ten, fifteen, even twenty years. The benefits to clients and the agency of long-tenured employees are many: operational efficiency, consistency and stability, strong relationships built on trust, and reduced turnover costs. Plus, the ability for long-tenured employees–who know the company inside out–act as mentors for newer employees.
B&T chatted with some of CX Lavender’s longest-tenured employees to see what the secret sauce is that’s contributed to them staying in one place for so long. Claire Austin, creative director, has been at Lavender for 18 years; Georgina Thomas, client services director, has been there for 15 years; Ingrid Spiga, visual design lead, 10 years, and Sandeep Gowda, lead application developer, 11 years.
“It doesn’t feel like I’ve had one job for 15 years. It feels like I’ve had seven or eight different roles. Every time the agency evolved, I evolved with it,” Thomas said.
Lavender’s fostering of growth, switching roles, and taking on new challenges is one of its biggest retention incentives. Austin, for example, started as an account exec before moving into creative and climbing to the top of the department in her current role of creative director.
The agency’s longstanding Genus Graduate Program, first launched in 2015, offers permanent full-time positions to graduates interested in a career in marketing and communications. All Genus Grads receive a guaranteed 10 per cent pay rise after six months of employment and a review for promotion at the 12-month mark.
Since 2015, CX lavender has recruited 44 graduates from the Genus program, with many still employed at the agency, including senior designer Alex O’Neil and senior copywriter Tash Velkova, both of whom joined as part of the initial 2015 Genus intake.
It’s not just staff who stay for the long run. Clients, too, stay around. Westpac has been with Lavender for 28 years, and American Express for 18—with both enlisting the agency for digital content and website production work. A roll call of other long-standing relationships follows the same pattern.
Lavender calls it being a “career agency,” a place where people don’t plateau, they pivot.
The client upside
Clients who work with the same agency for a long time can reap several benefits, most notably deep trust and open communication, which more often than not translates into bold and exciting work.
“When you’ve been working with a brand for more than a decade, you know the unspoken rules,” Spiga said.
“There’s a real benefit in tenure when it comes to things that have been tried and tested before. Understanding how clients work and their nuances allows you to help the business evolve,” Thomas said.
“Having had that background on those tried and tested methods makes you almost an extension of their team, as opposed to just learning that on the fly,” Thomas added.
That kind of long-term memory saves clients from constantly educating a new team. It also means the agency can challenge clients, resulting in new ideas.
“You’re not wasting time proving yourself. You’ve already got the trust, so you can be braver,” Austin said.
“We have this breadth and depth of knowledge of our client’s brand, little intricate details that we often don’t even realise. Things like design, layout, or certain ways that the brand sounds or looks become an intrinsic thing to us.
“They might not be in their brand guidelines or put to paper, but we’ve learned to do it. We become that brand guardian, ensuring that there’s consistency across the brand, as well as helping it evolve through different evolutions,” Austin added.
“I think that fits into the tech side as well. The advantage that we have is knowing a client’s system for a very long time, so we know the challenges that they have. Any new system they are bringing in, we can direct them in the right direction, and that’s actually going to be more helpful to them,” Gowda added.
Recent examples include steering BlueScope away from a costly tech upgrade toward a centralised system that built on tech the company was already using. Lavender also challenged St George to turn a simple home loans campaign into a brand platform that honed in on its value within the space, with animation and AI-powered visuals.
“That’s an example of how we were able to zoom out and strategically lead them down a path that felt bigger and braver,” Austin said.
Permission to fail
Underpinning all of this is Lavender’s culture. Weekly wrap meetings foster encouragement and open conversations. Recently, a focus has been encouraging employees to share the AI tools they’ve been finding and using to drive efficiency in what they do in their day-to-day.
Senior employees have encouraged younger employees in this venture to break any stigmas associated with adopting the technology. Thomas mentioned that when younger employees see their senior counterparts using AI, everyone feels more comfortable and in the end, all learn something from the experience.
“As an organisation, we believe that it’s not just about disrupting the market, but doing so in such a manner that’s going to add value to it and affect people,” Austin said.
That’s meant building AI into reporting dashboards for clients, experimenting with AI animation tools for campaigns, and creating prompt playbooks for brands.
“Without fail, every single week, there is an all-agency meeting. I think in my 15 years, we’ve maybe missed two. The whole agency comes together, and we share work, we share anniversaries. We have a letter box there where we write little posters and shout each other out,” Austin added.
And then there’s the most powerful ingredient: permission to fail.
“It’s a cultural value here, where we are given room to fail. And that’s one of the reasons why we can bring up new ideas, or we don’t always have to play it safe. The company always has our back, even when things don’t go according to plan. That’s the way we’ll learn and the way we’ll grow. If you don’t try different things, if you don’t fail, you’re not going to learn. Having that room for improvement or room for failing is one of the best cultural values,” Gowda said.
“It’s an environment where if you try something and it doesn’t work, it’s not a career-ending move. It’s just part of the process,” Thomas said.
Indies’ special kind of freedom
Lavender’s independence also helps. With no holding company hierarchy, clients aren’t ranked by billings. A smaller project isn’t sidelined in favour of a million-dollar account. That creates consistency; the same people who were in the pitch room often stick with the client for years, sometimes decades.
“No matter how big or small the client, they get treated the same way. If you spend fifty grand or five hundred with us, you still get the same attention,” Thomas said.
It also leads to siloes feeling up–developers sit with creatives; designers join client workshops; and feedback is delivered directly, not via account service layers.
“I’ve been here 15 and a half years. You almost feel embarrassed to say you’ve been with an agency for so long, because it’s so unheard of. But when I look at my 15 years, I honestly feel like I’ve had seven or eight different roles.
“I’ve gotten to grow this way because we are nimble and independent, and I’ve evolved as the agency’s evolved. We’ve gone through periods where we’ve dabbled in human-centered design, or we’ve gone really deep into research, and I’ve learned those tools and taken the best bits of them and then evolved in my career.
“Some people think that to move up in your career, you’ve got to job hop, and you’ve got to go to different agencies, but I think as long as you’re somewhere that is constantly evolving and growing and innovating, then you as an individual can benefit from that,” Thomas added.
Agencies dealing with stagnation or siloes may want to take a page from Lavender’s book and put their eggs in the loyalty basket.
