The digital media and marketing industry is supported by a small army of individual investors, chairs and advisors.
These individuals have hard-won experience of creating, building, running and often selling businesses that have of themselves been instrumental in driving the success of our entire industry.
In our new series, The Connectors, we interview these people, discovering what they’re making their next bet on, which technologies, approaches, partnerships, leaders and teams they believe will supercharge the next generation of positive change in our industry.
The Connectors have been there, done it and have the success stories, and battle scars to prove it.
Now, we want to tell their story.
Felix Velarde has founded and led agencies including Hyperinteractive, Head New Media and Underwired, and was CEO of The Conversation Group. He was the UK lead at (father of the Internet) Vint Cerf’s People Centred Internet, on the Innovation for Jobs Leadership Forum, founded agency accelerator the 2Y3X programme, and is an adjunct professor at Hult International Business School.
Felix has helped scale (and sell) more than forty agencies including Beyond, Local Industries, Impero, Nucco Brain / Unit9, White Bear, Alpha Century, Rawnet, Deeson, TopRight Partners and Mike Teevee. In 2021 he co-founded AVA Acquisitions which acquired, scaled and successfully exited several US agencies in 2024.
What are you most proud of in the ‘advisory/chair/investor part of your career?
I spent twenty years starting, running and occasionally selling agencies, and by the time I finished I was running an agency and an agency group and I’d made so many mistakes I was all done. So when I sold up and stopped I did two clichéd things: decided to ‘give back’ – do something that would help people avoid making all the same mistakes I’d made – but before doing that, go and party.
I did the party bit for nearly a year, fell in love with Burning Man, fell in love, chased my new love around the world, said yes to every favour anyone asked (which led to working with Gillian Anderson, Vint Cerf and Mei Lin Fung), and had a ball.
The giving back bit started as a favour and took root with me becoming an agency chair specialising in fast growth. I chaired Impero, Rawnet, Deeson, White Bear, Alpha Century, Verb and a few others… I ran a focused programme I’d put together which helped them scale up or sell, and they were all extremely successful. I loved it. My LinkedIn profile is still linked.com/in/agencychair.
The focused programme became 2Y3X, which now has ex-agency founders delivering it around the world. I’m really proud of the fact that a) it’s been working well for ten years, b) some of the consultants are ex-clients, c) it’s had some brilliant leaders including Mo Lishomwa, Simon Wakeman and Marcus Bray running it.
Hachette published a book about it, Scale at Speed, which is in its third edition and is in Chinese too. So that part of my career has been really fruitful, and I’m really pleased to have shared all the amazing things I’ve learned about scaling agencies over the years with a new wave of really cool entrepreneurs.
What has your biggest mistake been and what did you learn from it?
I’m still making mistakes, and still learning. I think the biggest mistake I ever made was not realising that everything comes down to your personal values. If you ever make a decision despite your values it will always, always come back and bite you. When I sold to Lowe I ignored it.
When I sold to Hasgrove I ignored it. When my agencies hired charismatic but corrupt people, wow that hurt. My biggest disasters came from ignoring the values of the people who wanted to work with me. Values are non-negotiable.
These days if you’re not a thousand percent honourable and not proactively being inclusive I won’t work with you at all. As a result I have very little stress and thoroughly enjoy working with the people I get to work with.
What technology, innovation or way of thinking most excites you at the moment?
I’ve been fooling around with generative AI since 2017 and working with amazing thinkers in the field ever since, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about its affect on the agency industry for quite a few years.
I love the thinking Azeem Azhar did a few years ago with how his team was using it at work. And I’m fascinated with the tension between ethics and expedience in how agency entrepreneurs have been deploying it. It’s interesting seeing how the agencies I own or advise are getting their heads around it. I’m currently in the market to acquire or help scale a team of AI trainers (hit me up on Linkedin!). It’s front of mind!
How do you decide what companies to get involved with?
There are several different criteria. My business partner Peter Lang and I spent three years raising money to build, scale and successfully exit an agency group in the US. We now have a specific strategy around building an AI-aware agency group, which has a flywheel (scale through 2Y3X, sell into the group, reinvest in other agencies, scale them through 2Y3X, etc) and watering holes (we recently acquired Digital Mastermind Group in the US). There are several components to the machine we have our eye on from a corporate point of view. So we’re starting the fundraising journey for that.
Separately I really enjoy working with a few agencies at a time to help them scale up really fast. That takes a certain kind of genuine desire to exit upwards and make lots of money. But it also requires guts, because the way I do it is by empowering the next generation of talent in the agency to take over. So occasionally a really ambitious, really smart founder will come to me and we’ll do the work. I’ve helped a few people like that become millionaires and it’s quite a rush.
And sometimes I just get brought in to show the owners what to do to fix their biggest blockers and scale up or exit. Those can be fun too – snappy projects with very high impact.
But back to my biggest lesson – no matter what the challenge or the project there has to be a values match. I spend some of my time mentoring people who don’t look like your typical agency owner, and even when I do work with people who do, I spend a lot of time encouraging more diversity. I’ve found it gets better results faster. And I quite like having a company that represents the mix I have in my social life, especially in a predominantly white, male dominated industry.
What factors determine how deep that investment gets?
I don’t tend to invest directly. I do acquire companies – as I say I have several, including an agency in Atlanta, 2Y3X, digital mastermind group and others. They tend to become part of our family rather than just one of a portfolio of investments.
To be honest, the ones I’ve put money into are the ones that have generated the least return. The ones we’ve acquired and scaled (and on a few occasions exited) have been the most exciting. That said I’ve just invested in a learning business because I want to share the learnings from 2Y3X and Scale at Speed with markets we can’t reach yet. But the return there is about satisfaction not dollars.
In such a fast-moving industry, how important are lessons from the past?
People’s values don’t change. That lesson stuck. Everything else changes, and that’s why it’s still exciting to be part of this industry after 31 years. As long as I remember it I should be ok. But I did have to exit a partnership when it turned out that there was a values mismatch, which took a while to come to light.
I’ll always make mistakes because I want to believe in people, no matter how bad a judge I’ve been in the past. I really like the quote attributed to civil rights activist Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” – I just wish sometimes I’d remember that when I’m being won over by some charismatic chump.
What is your one piece of advice for someone looking to emulate your success?
Oh I wouldn’t. I’d tell them to do it their own way. My success is a hodgepodge of rebellion, dumb mistakes, saying yes to random favours, wanting to be different from all the other non-execs, wanting to give back, and being told by a podcast host to write a book (thanks Lucy Mann!). I follow my values and my passion for creating elegant and progressive business operating systems. I pursue a low-stress, high fun life.
Everything else is a bonus.
What is your biggest hope, and your biggest fear, for o ur industry and the impact it has on society and the world?
I’ve spoken with hundreds of agency owners in the last couple of years. Far too many of them genuinely think that generative AI’s role is to reduce headcount. It’s incredibly shortsighted not to understand that if we do away with jobs we also do away with consumers.
The founders who inspire me are the ones who’ve thought through how to use AI to improve creativity, customer experience and the value clients get. They tend to be the ones with an eye on the future and an appreciation that we have a responsibility to the next generation – which is very much aligned with the way 2Y3X works especially for agencies who want to scale up and exit.
