The 1st July 2021 marked the sixth year anniversary of Marketing Entourage, a company founded on the principle of wanting to help more people create decent work for themselves and for their community through job creation and economic development. We always batted for the Davids versus the Goliaths and wanted to translate enterprise strategic thinking and frameworks for small to medium sized businesses so they had the same opportunities to connect with a wider audience and grow their business. 

Phil's background was in Brand and Marketing. Ex MD of Elmwood and Head of Marketing & Customer Experience for Nokia Siemens Networks. Mine in Sales & Marketing and Digital Transformation. Ex Commercial Manager at Lonely Planet and International Sales & Marketing Director at The Press Association. We'd worked in large teams across continents with a heap of resources at our fingertips. Little did we know how hard it really is to start and run a successful business. I, especially, missed the team I could call upon to build me any data dashboard I needed to make decisions.

Our first year was finding our feet, our second year was finding new feet based on how year one went, our third year was transformational (I had a baby that year too - Phil had had two in years one and two respectively too!), rolling out a State-wide education program to support startups with their marketing, supported by LaunchVic. Our fourth year saw us strategise on the successes of the program and delve further into the development of impactful programs. 

In our fifth year, we founded two other businesses (on top of the existing Marketing Entourage brand and the Regional Growth Project) in March 2020. Me Three, a Customer Experience (CX) and Digital Transformation consultancy and 25eight. Our support, and team, had grown significantly and we were working in more areas than just marketing and needed entities that better reflected the services and audience they served. 

Then, a global pandemic hit. And it hit small to medium sized businesses hard.  Ours included. We had to work hard to work out what we were going to do, how we were going to protect our staff and ourselves.  We had also just made a senior hire to head up our product, ops and innovation. Which turned out to be great timing as she, Emma Van Smale, then helped us to shape our strategy around the value we could provide in a changing market. 

During 2020, we made a decision to focus solely on what we could be the best at. Where we could provide the biggest value and where we could carve a name for ourselves. This resulted in the stripping back of services and offerings we had previously offered, a scary prospect given the hesitancy in the market. We knew we could help others too, so we focussed on how we could help and provide services that were needed now to ensure people still had a chance for decent work and economic development.

We also decided to pool the resources we had in the different brands into one. The one brand that we thought would better reflect our transformed business. That brand is 25eight. The meaning behind the name is that we believe we are able to help business leaders win back time. Time to work on their business or time with their family. In truth, the extra hour a day (25) and day a week (8) could be used for anything. What we know, as small business owners ourselves, is that time is one of the hardest resources to gain in business and we hope that by providing guidance and support to business leaders, through impactful and transformational programs that help them and their teams build capability and adopt innovative practices, we can gift them more of that precious resource. 

It is bittersweet as we say goodbye to the brands that we loved and hello to a brand new future. One operating in the 'new normal' and one that helps everyone to succeed in that too. 

Check out our new website at www.25eight.co 

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