Dean Morris

Get the people part right and everything else, the quality, the deadlines, the commercials, tends to follow.

Dean looks after the day to day running of the business, which in practice means he has a hand in almost everything, from how work moves through the studio to how it feels for the client at the other end of it. He keeps an eye on the whole journey of a piece of client work rather than just the finish line, making sure the quality holds up, the timelines are grounded in something real, and the commercial side works for everyone involved. It’s a role that rewards paying attention to the small things well before they become big ones, and he rather enjoys that side of it.

His approach is built around people more than process, on the basis that most operational wrinkles turn out to be human ones in disguise. That means making sure the team has what it needs, knows what good looks like and has enough room to do the work properly without someone hovering over their shoulder. He’s a firm believer in the value of actually being in the room with people too, and will happily take a proper face to face conversation over a written update any day of the week.

Experience & Expertise.

Dean brings a rare combination of commercial sharpness and warmth to the way he runs things. He can spot where a process is creating more friction than it’s removing, where efficiency is slipping away unnoticed and where standards need shoring up long before a client would ever pick up on it. Just as usefully, he knows how to have the conversation that puts it right, and how to hold a high bar on service without making the place feel like hard work. Building strong relationships, both with clients and across the team, is where he’s at his most effective.

What makes him good at this is that he cares about the people just as much as the numbers, and has never really seen the two as being in tension. He wants clients to feel properly looked after and he wants the team to enjoy themselves while they’re doing the looking after, which is a balance he manages to hold with a fair bit of good humour along the way.