Iain spent close to two decades inside the kind of agency a lot of people aspire to lead. White Space went from a ten-person studio in Edinburgh to a multi-award-winning agency that was eventually acquired by Dentsu, with global clients on its books and a reputation as one of the best places in Scotland to work. The story of how that happened is not a tidy narrative of constant momentum. It is a series of choices made in pressure moments, most of which Iain reflects on with refreshing honesty.
Pulled together, those choices add up to a working philosophy of how to grow a business smartly and sustainably without losing what made it worth growing in the first place.
Iain’s story begins with a phone call he almost didn’t take. He had just handed in his notice at Navy Blue with a one-year-old at home and a mortgage to pay, fully intending to start his own agency. Then White Space called and offered him a creative director role.
His response is the part worth pausing on. He told the founders, in his words, “unless I’m going to own part of all of this business in the next five years, then I can’t say yes.” He thought they would tell him to get lost. Instead they built a succession plan that saw him and two other incoming directors eventually own the agency.
The lesson is about the courage to articulate ambition out loud. As Iain puts it, “if you don’t ask, you don’t get.”
Sustainable growth often starts with the uncomfortable conversation everyone else is too polite to have.
The businesses that move fastest are the ones willing to name the thing they want before anyone else gives them permission to want it.
Becoming creative director at 29 meant Iain had to stop being the best designer in the room and start being the person who hired the best designers in the room. He is candid about the gap between the two: “You don’t know anything about running a business until you actually do.”
The instinct to keep doing the work is strong, especially when craft is what got you here. Iain remembers some of those early board meetings where six directors, three outgoing and three incoming, would spend more energy debating lunch orders than running the business. Roles and responsibilities had to be properly drawn up before that table started producing decisions.
The breakthrough came when Iain accepted that de-skilling in his own discipline was not a loss – “If you’ve got a team that are better at doing something than you are, then that’s got to be the ultimate goal,” he says.
That mindset shift is the unlock for any business serious about scaling. Growth is about creating the conditions for other people to do their best work.
For founders and leaders who recognise this shift but are not ready to commit to a full senior hire, fractional marketing support can be a sensible bridge. Senior firepower without the full-time overhead. The point is to stop being the bottleneck on growth as quickly as possible.
When I asked about failures, Iain didn’t reach for a campaign that flopped or a hire that did not work out. He goes straight to the harder mistake: taking on the wrong clients for the wrong reasons.
The trap is familiar. Pipeline looks thin. The brief is not great. The fit is questionable. But the revenue would plug a gap. So you say yes. Iain has seen where that road leads.
“we probably won more new business from saying no than saying yes.”
Clients noticed. They asked why he was turning the work down when every other agency was pitching. The answer was that protecting the team, the standard of work and the reputation of the business mattered more than a short-term invoice. Or as Iain puts it, agencies get the clients they deserve and clients get the agencies they deserve. Get the fit wrong at the start and the cost shows up everywhere: in the work, in the team, in morale, in the leadership decisions you end up making to clean it up.
Qualifying new business properly is one of the most underrated growth levers there is. The disciplined alternative to taking work you should not is building a pipeline that gives you room to be selective. That is the whole point of well-targeted demand generation and content marketing that attracts the right people rather than just any people. When the leads coming in are aligned with the business you actually want, saying no gets a lot less scary.
User research and testing plays a role here too. Knowing your audience deeply, with data and empathy, gives you a much sharper sense of which opportunities are genuinely a fit and which only look like one on a slide.
White Space had a name for the kind of person they were trying to hire. They were looking for a “white spacer”. Skills mattered, but the harder thing to define was the mindset. Iain describes it as people who are “completely open to working with each other.”
He contrasts it with agencies he had worked at before, where the competition was internal. Designers wouldn’t show each other their work. Energy that should have been pointed at the market was being spent in the studio. At White Space the goal was the opposite: collaboration as a positive and diverse perspectives in the room.
The hiring process reflected it. A second director would always sit in on interviews to give a gut check on cultural fit. Hire slow, fire fast was the rule. The handbook spelt out the values rather than leaving them implied.
Many former White Spacers say it was the best place they ever worked. That is the kind of result that does not show up on a board report but drives every other number that does.
It’s a philosophy that lines up with how we think about growth here too. People are not a line item. They are the multiplier on everything else. Get to know our pandas and you will see the same belief in action: hire for values, build for collaboration and let the standard of work follow.
White Space won Scottish Design Agency of the Year three times: 2010, 2013 and 2016. They worked with the Edinburgh Fringe, Tennent’s, Lego and a long list of brands Iain still talks about with obvious fondness. But when he is asked what he is most proud of, he doesn’t lead with any of that.
He talks about walking around the studio at Norloch House when the agency had grown to about 70 people, looking out across the floor and seeing the volume and variety of work being made. He talks about people developing, doing brilliant work, sometimes leaving for somewhere new and going on to do brilliant work there too. He talks about staying in touch with former colleagues all over the world.
The financials are easy to measure. Happiness, satisfaction and momentum are harder to put on a board report. Iain’s view is that they belong on it anyway, because they are the conditions that produce the financial numbers in the first place.
That perspective has shaped how we think about the work we do for clients. The case study tells you what happened. The team and the relationship tell you why.
Asked what advice he would give his younger self, Iain offers two things.
The first is to enjoy it more. Leadership comes with a quiet pressure to always be six months ahead, shielding the team from the inevitable wobbles. There is a facade that goes with the job, a sense of having to project calm when payroll is tight or two big clients happen to be up for review at the same time. Looking back, Iain wishes he had paused more often to actually enjoy the wins.
The second is more pointed. His original ambition was to win Scottish Design Agency of the Year. White Space won it three times. But, he reflects, “why are you thinking about just the Scotland thing? Why did you not think bigger than that?”
The Dentsu acquisition eventually opened the door to global work and global clients, which is where his ambition went. The regret is that the bigger thinking came later than it could have. The talent was always there. The ceiling was the imagination.
Whatever the current ceiling looks like, it is probably lower than it needs to be.
I end vb every podcast on a note of gratitude. Iain’s answer is unguarded. He thanks every person who came through White Space over those two decades, his fellow directors and especially his wife. He admits he was never very good at the work-life balance thing. The support behind the scenes was the reason any of it held together.
It is a small moment in the conversation but it lands. Building a business looks like one person making decisions on the public-facing side. Behind that there is always a wider team, professional and personal, holding it up.
Sustainable growth is rarely a single big swing. It is a stack of unglamorous decisions made repeatedly over time. Asking for the thing you actually want. Hiring people who outclass you. Walking away from work that does not fit. Protecting culture as fiercely as cashflow. Letting yourself enjoy the win when it lands. Setting the ambition higher than feels reasonable.
It is the same principle behind everything we do at Think Bambu. Growth that is built on people, fit and ambition tends to compound. Whether the next step is sharper SEO, smarter conversion rate optimisation or a bigger conversation about strategy, the goal is helping ambitious brands scale in a way that protects what makes them worth scaling.
If any of that resonates, our growth services are a good place to start. Or come and meet the team at one of our roundtables, where conversations like this one happen in the room.
So the question we like to leave you with is the one we always come back to: what’s your more?
Want to talk about what sustainable growth could look like for your business? Get in touch with the Think Bambu team.
