Support to grow
Jay Gunning
Owner-Operator & Founder, Owlbridge Media (Austin, Texas)
I’ve been a Compadre since first being introduce to Clive in 2014 in a mentoring capacity while working at Global Citizen in New York City. Clive has since been a Compadre on my own venture, Owl Bridge Media (OBM) as we first launched and then expanded the business from the US to the UK. Working across production and media campaigns. As a non-traditional entrepreneur (aren’t we all?) I sought guidance from the simplest of business fundamentals to more complex contract pain points that creative agencies encounter.
It’s difficult to know where to start when speaking to the tremendous impact Clive has had on my career and subsequent personal growth but, it’s within that inability to pin down a start that Compadre can be celebrated, because much like a business, it takes more than one gear in an engine to drive forward and Compadre is a holistic approach that sees to all elements simultaneously.
It can be easy in a modern professional setting to break down components, processes or work streams one by one to see where we can be more efficient, where we need to make choices and where we need to lead with our heart only to break them down once again, in search of a prefect solution. Where Clive’s extensive experience really came to life in supporting the growth of myself and OBM was being able to look at our business holistically. Our values and the way we grow with our team is extremely important to us, and sometimes those values can seem counter-intuitive to traditional business practices. I can honestly say that without Clive and his commercial success paired with his reflective real world experience brought a profound sense of empathy to our conversations the allowed us to reach our goals in a manner true to our values.
Navigating the start of a business can be a lonely experience and there are just some things you can’t get from books. Clive provides a transparent and open space to discuss professional challenges and successes with an acute understanding of how they simultaneously have wider implications to our personal well being and, in turn, how they will impact the next phase of growth. Clive’s ability to connect his experiences to your own on a granular level gave me great confidence when putting our solutions into practice.
You can be a Compadre and write your own roadmap, be it practical overall guidance or approaching a specific challenge, I’m confident you will find more than what you are looking for.