All hail the strawman – a big deal in our merger deal

Now in my twenty third year of my big Delineo adventure, a huge milestone has been passed with our merger with fellow mancunians, Shoot the Moon Group.

Together we become stm_grp, the largest independent in the North with both agencies ranked in the Prolific North Top 50 Integrated Agencies immediately prior to the merger. Between us, we employ 80 talented specialists working across everything from strategic consultancy to photography, performance marketing to brand communication. Perhaps most importantly in today’s increasingly niche world, we’ve bundles of expertise in key sectors including technology, finance, manufacturing sectors, retail, food, drink, leisure, public and the third sector.

Discussions started months ago, followed by lots of legal work and detailed planning for a hard to predict future, so I won’t pretend it was a walk in the park getting here. The biggest lesson I’ve taken from it is the importance of agreeing things at the outset. In our case, this took the form of well documented Heads of Terms (we called the first draft a Strawman in case it needed to be picked apart). That was done and dusted in Summer 2020 and has been amazingly useful at keeping us all on the same page as we worked through things. Remarkably the final deal is pretty much identical to the first Strawman.

For me personally, it is another step in entrusting my baby (these days a fully formed adult that’s been in the safe hands of the MBO team since 2017) with a future generation of stars. There’s now a board of eight executive directors (4 from Shoot the Moon, 4 from Delineo) plus a non exec (that’s me) – each of whom are really excited to see what we can make happen in the years ahead.

This time though, having spent a career always looking to future and taking little time to celebrate the successes, I am going to try to remember to follow the advice of my golfing hero, Ben Hogan. After all, we probably don’t remember to celebrate the business achievements as often as we analyse the lessons learnt.