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From an Edinburgh basement to offices in 10 countries, Steve and Heather Leach are the unlikely husband and wife team running the biggest digital marketing agency in Europe
WORDS BY TINA WALSH
ILLUSTRATION BY NILS JAWA
 FOR MANY MARRIED COUPLES, LIVING AND WORKING TOGETHER WOULD BE THE DEATH OF AN OTHERWISE BEAUTIFUL RELATIONSHIP. For Steve and Heather Leach, however, it’s a match made in heaven.
Last year saw their Edinburgh-based company, bigmouthmedia, celebrate its 10th anniversary, win a coveted FT Best Place to Work award and reach a turnover of £140m (€180m), making it Europe’s largest digital marketing agency. Earlier this year Steve picked up the title International Entrepreneur of the Year at the European Business Awards, and there’s even talk of a stock market flotation in 2009. Not bad for an operation that started out as a three-man band in a less than desirable part of the city.
“We had to be evangelical in the early days because people didn’t understand what we were doing,” says Steve. “The industry was unheard of and we were nipping at the heels of established advertising and PR companies. Added to that, people couldn’t see what they were getting for their money.”
 Setting up the company was a baptism of fire for both husband and wife. At the time, Steve, a former firefighter and commercial pilot (he’s flown private jets for Tina Turner, Eddie Murphy and Kajagoogoo) was running a web services company from the basement of a former pet shop, while Heather, a renowned aerobics instructor (she even trained a Gladiator) was part way through a Masters degree in sport and exercise. Oh, and they’d also run a lingerie business called Silky Drawers before that but sold it after Heather became concerned that “the undergarments were affecting my husband’s heart rate”.
The mid 1990s were the dawn of the internet age and Steve and Heather had to practically beg, steal and borrow to get bigmouth off the ground.
“I’m probably the least qualified person to be running a digital marketing company, but we were intrigued by the industry and there right at the beginning and we like to think we helped shape it,” says Steve.
“Right from the start, we’ve always had a ‘sleeves rolled up’ attitude, which has helped us through difficult times such as the dotcom bust,” says Heather. “It’s natural to have teething problems when you’re starting a company and in the first few years everything is double or quits and we had to take a gamble.” The ground rule, however, was that they wouldn’t risk the roof over their heads; a wise decision with three children to consider but, with the benefit of hindsight, one they needn’t have worried about at all.
 GIVEN THE STRENGTH OF THE BRAND AND THE FACT THAT THE COMPANY QUICKLY MUSHROOMED, it soon started to attract attention from potential buyers and, at the end of 2006, underwent a £60m (€77m) merger with German digital marketing giant Global Media. The deal was brokered by Carlyle, the world’s second-largest private equity firm, and the move netted the couple a hefty personal fortune, some major entrepreneurial awards and — as they kept hold of a large chunk of the shares — a reputation as two of the shrewdest operators on the block.
It wasn’t the highest offer they got but, says Steve, they held off for it because it gave them “the flexibility and growth potential required to get us where we wanted to go as a company”.
Staying in control after a takeover is a pretty remarkable achievement by anyone’s standards, and one that Steve puts down to “skills sets”. He says: “As a group of shareholders we had to look at who was best suited to take the business forward and this turned out to be me.
I may not be the right person forever though, and it will be important to recognise that when the time comes to put someone else in charge.”
They also hung on to the name bigmouthmedia (which came about after a member of staff nominated it in a competition, bagging themselves a weekend in Amsterdam) as Carlyle decided the brand had a stronger image than its German counterpart and rebranded the whole operation. In March 2007 Global Media founder Thomas Gerteis stepped down, leaving Steve as the new organisation’s global chief executive and Heather as marketing and communications director.
 Today, the company employs over 200 people in 10 countries and provides digital marketing services such as search engine optimisation (which employs a raft of techniques to ensure a company features as highly as possible on search engines like Google), online advertising campaigns and brand protection to over 350 of the world’s biggest brands, including Tesco, MTV, Wall Street Institute and Starbucks.
Being at the helm of a multi-national organisation is obviously much more high maintenance than running a small outfit, but Heather and Steve go to great lengths to make sure that business doesn’t encroach on their personal lives. “If we go out to dinner, we have a rule that we can only discuss business up until the first course,” laughs Heather. “The same applies to holiday so there’s no more shop talk once we’re flying.”
Until the Carlyle deal 18 months ago, the pair rubbed along quite happily in a small office but all that’s changed now. Steve travels frequently to check the empire is running smoothly and Heather spends a lot of her working day online and on the phone—all the while juggling two teenagers and a three-year-old.
If the going does get tough, the couple take time out to relax in their Scottish castle just south of Edinburgh, which was designed by the famous architect Robert Adam. There’s also a bolthole in Valencia, although both Steve and Heather admit that holidays are somewhat thin on the ground and the business can often take precedence.
For such a hugely successful couple, hitting the big time is something they remain refreshingly self-deprecating about. “It’s been a wild ride and sometimes it’s pretty hard to believe,” says Steve. “When we launched the business in 1997, I always thought it would be possible to build it into a major international company but, if the truth be told, I never thought for a moment that it was very likely.”
STEVE:
* I wish I’d known that Heather was such a slave driver.
* I ‘d have appreciated a warning that my hair wasn’t going to last the pace of this life.
* If I’d known how much I was going to enjoy the day-to-day challenges of running a business, I wouldn’t have waited so long before starting one.
HEATHER:
* I was pretty sure that we had what it took and I wish I hadn’t worried about what other people said about couples running businesses together.
* If I’d realised that international business relationships were going to play such a big part in our lives, I would’ve paid much closer attention in language classes earlier on.
HEATHER:
I was 12 years old working in the canteen on an army base. The manager wasn’t about to give me any privileges and it was a real slog but it taught me the meaning of hard work.
HEATHER:
My parents taught me that if you want to get things done, the best thing you can do is roll your sleeves up and get on with it yourself.
 Professional trendspotter Reinier Evers on this month’s hottest new business idea
Although consumers exhibit varying degrees of ‘infolust’ for new products and services, their interest doesn’t often extend to direct mail. Enter Matter, which is taking an unconventional approach to direct marketing by sending out boxes of interesting stuff. London-based Matter—a collaboration between brand agency Artomatic and Royal Mail—works with product manufacturers to compile collections of items that are carefully designed to please specific audiences, and it sends them out free to consumers.
Each participating company creates and contributes one item—something that explains what the company does, says something about its ideas or values, or can be tried out. Matter then combines the items and sends them out so that they arrive on a Saturday, when consumers are deemed most likely to spend some time with the products.
It’s a example of the rise of free stuff, from free daily newspapers to ad-sponsored phone calls. What’s fuelling this trend? An all-out war for consumers’ attention is making sponsored freebies an attractive alternative to traditional advertising. Matter’s pilot box included items from Sony Ericsson, Stolichnaya, Nintendo, Nissan, Penguin and Virgin Atlantic. The next edition will be aimed at males aged 25-35 and is scheduled to ship out this summer. www.matterbox.co.uk
Reinier Evers is founder of Springwise, one of the world’s leading sources of new business ideas. Free weekly newsletter at www.springwise.com.
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