Laurence Ashby

An Advertising Education in Listening

Ashby spent years in advertising, latterly as one of the global leaders for the American business Clear Channel. His accounts were the largest in the market: Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Masterfoods, and any client spending $5 million or more across the G8 markets in Europe, plus the emerging markets they were moving into. He dealt with chief executives and media directors on both sides of the Atlantic, and the discipline he took from it was blunt. Establish the need before you sell anything. Most salespeople, he argues, get that backwards.

By his early forties he could read the industry's own arithmetic. Advertising, he notes, has a well-worn change model: replace one forty-year-old with two twenty-year-olds at half the cost. Facebook had launched, YouTube had arrived, and platforms were beginning to trade directly with advertisers through digital planning interfaces. So he moved into technology consulting, advising clients on how to use and maximise those systems, and joined a listed business selling marketing resource management platforms into organisations including Royal Bank of Scotland. The sell was conceptual rather than transactional, and it suited him.

Building a Practice From Scratch

The search firm that had placed him on that board eventually turned the tables and asked him to join. The decision was sharpened by a departing chief executive who told him plainly that he could stay and stagnate, or take a settlement and go and become what he was capable of becoming. He left, and was handed a blank sheet: build an advertising practice. Working with the big networks including Omnicom and WPP, he improvised the mechanics as he went, relying on a strong network and one deceptively simple filter. Would he want this person in his own team? If the answer was no, the conversation ended there.

From advertising he moved laterally into the firm's industrial and software engineering clients, mining existing relationships rather than chasing new logos. When those technology businesses turned out to be private equity backed, the funds began asking who was standing up their centres of excellence in Krakow, Ukraine and India. The answer was Ashby, and the work escalated accordingly: from hiring Python engineers to appointing CIOs, CTOs, CROs and, in some cases, chief executives.

Three Interventions Across the Investment Cycle

Today his ecosystem is chairs, chief executives, operating partners and M&A advisors, and his work maps neatly onto the life of an asset. Before a transaction, he places domain experts alongside chairs so the asset can be properly evaluated. Once the investment lands, he builds the team for value creation and growth alignment. Roughly two years out from exit, he installs succession, because, as he puts it, nobody sells an empty business. The next investor needs a team ready to take it through the following term.

He is candid that this level suits him. There are no questions about whether a candidate will turn up or how they will present. He also remains a determined student: when he does not know something, he says, the answer is to find five people who have done it and ask them. The entrepreneur he rates most highly, a founder chief executive who built NP Group and for whom Ashby worked directly, taught him that visionary thinking and commercial discipline are not opposites. He describes him as the best chief executive he ever had.

The 20/60/20 Rule for AI

Ashby is an early adopter with a governor fitted. His framework: 20 percent is framing the question, 60 percent is the heavy lifting done by the machine, and the final 20 percent is iteration and critical thought. The test he applies to any output is whether he could stand up, defend it and admit to knowing it. At 55, with a classical education plus degrees in law and mathematics behind him, he describes the technology as the ability to consult a thousand people of his own vintage, each differently educated, and get a distilled answer in seconds.

The applications have been practical and wide. He has used it to model blood tests and diet while losing 10 kilograms in four months, to assess whether a contract was as enforceable in France as in the UK, and to populate an RFI against a job description and credentials from an iPhone while standing on a beach in Italy. Sixteen to eighteen months ago, he says, none of that was possible.

He is equally clear about the limits. Recipients now recognise machine-written outreach, and the market is quietly rejecting it. A handwritten, personally crafted mailout he sent to 70 contacts returned a 60 percent response rate. An AI-generated campaign to 900 contacts produced three replies. Where he sees genuine value is workflow management: a system that surfaces the ten people he needs to engage with today, with the engagement still done by him.

Advice for Talent Leaders

His counsel for the year ahead is a single instruction with a long tail. Do not be the solution to the problem a client thinks they already have. Be an advisor on the business and the challenges ahead of it. In practice that means asking senior leaders what they believe their problems are, how they know, and whether insight from comparable organisations run by comparable leaders would give them an advantage. Then it means working backwards from the ambition they wrote into the strategy when the investment was made.

He reaches for German car manufacturing to make the point. Porsche sells a dream first and engineers backwards to a cost. The alternative approach, he says, is to assemble something you think is clever, add ten percent, then go hunting for an audience and act surprised when nobody wants it. Clients who are told you can make their life easier and move them toward where they want to be tend not to argue about the invoice. As Ashby summarises it: go and ask, then find the solution together.