Executive Voice
The founders of growth agency Growth Division run through their journey and vision for the future
Who Are The Founders?
Growth Division is a London-based growth agency founded by three friends and ex-colleagues: Tom Dewhurst, Tristan Gillen and Kim Than, and has gone from a tiny team on a shoestring budget to a revenue powerhouse that’s pulled in over £800k ARR after just one year. The agency works with 50+ start-ups backed by the best investors such as Seedcamp, Index Ventures, Kima Ventures and b2b service agencies that are looking to test out different traction channels to acquire more clients in new markets.
Although Tom’s also done stints at major corporates Accenture and Vodafone, he’s always been a lifelong entrepreneur who’s learned to roll with the punches… when his first venture failed, he was determined to succeed at his second, and found his niche with online ordering app Ordoo, where he spent 4 years serving as the CEO — becoming a strategic thinker and outstanding project leader along the way.
Tristan’s spent the last 6 years embedded in the London startup scene, both as a founder and then as a CRM & marketing automation consultant, where he helped over 25 startups set up their initial sales and marketing infrastructure — dealing with 10+ at any given time. He’s also the founder of CoWork Division, a popular coworking space in Budapest — a venture that came from the boredom of working from home.
After Kim finished his undergrad with a degree in International Business, he cut his teeth at investment bank Natixis, working in Paris and Hong Kong before joining Rocket Internet’s HelloFresh sales team. A few years later, after the completing an MSc at Imperial College London,
Kim joined Early Metrics, the first rating agency for start-ups where he worked with clients including Barclays and Handelsbanken aon the growth and management of their portfolio startups. Afterwards, he joined the Mercantile Group (a UK based family office) and their VC fund, Propology Capital as a VC Partner. Kim is also the Founder of Sales Division, a Growth Division subsidiary focused on market entry, go to market strategies and sales closing training with many extremely satisfied clients.
Throughout this time, the three worked hard to distil the processes they used to realise sales and marketing success down to a science. After finding the formula, they joined forces to found Growth Division, and have since used their collective talents to help passionate founders and high-growth startups scale faster than they’d ever imagined.
Growth Division: The Story
The story of Growth Division is the story of ‘practice makes perfect’. “There’s two key things when it comes to building a growth agency model that can universally add value for any client in any industry”, says Kim. “The first is insight — we start every client engagement with an onboarding workshop that helps us understand exactly who they are, how they operate, and who they should be selling to. The second is networking. Nobody is an expert in every single thing, but as we’ve grown, we’ve assembled a wider team of brilliant minds across 19 different traction channels and dozens of industries that can provide client-specific research, such as pain point analysis or industry macrofactors”.
For many startups, the resources required to invest in growth marketing services can be a huge issue — but with years of experience working with startups, all three co-founders know the importance of cost-efficiency. Their “bullseye framework” offering model has become more modular over time — lowering the barrier to entry and enabling founders to prioritize the services they need. “To build high-ROI growth stacks at SME-friendly prices, we need to keep up with every new tool on the market — and understand which ones deliver the best results”, explains Tristan.
Growth Division Model : Growth Division optimises your marketing expenditure and finds the best way for your business to grow rapidly. We use the Bullseye Framework, the Lean Startup Methodology and our community of expert marketers to find a scalable, profitable route to market.
Bullseye Framework, the 20 different traction channels to market. Method and content created by Gabriel Weinberg – Co-author of Traction
What Comes Next?
All 3 founders are excited about the future for Growth Division — their plans for the next quarter include scaling their team, building out their copywriting and web design offering and
establishing an international, multilingual presence to help businesses around the world find a profitable and scalable route-to-market.
“Each week is about auditing and refining our models — as the barrier to starting a business gets lower, the barrier to business support gets lower as well — and as an already trusted partner in the industry, we’re ready to ride the wave”, says Kim, while Tom brings up another important aspect of helping small businesses — “positivity is also key — when we’re faced with challenges throughout life and business, how you deal with these situations defines your success — and having the right people by your side is the best way through them. We have been extremely lucky to work aside great talent including our strategic account management team which includes Michael Soselia, Fiona Moucq, Ollie Simpson, Clare Gittins, Ed Davidson and our team of 50+ marketing experts that help us strategise each traction channel to market for our clients.”
Contact Details
● Company: Growth Division
● Contact: Kim Than
● Email: kim@growth-division.com
● Telephone: +44 7505 494647
● Address: 40 Bowling Green Lane, London EC1R 0NE, United Kingdom
