Today is a big day… it’s the day I announce my retirement from day-to-day duties at Quad. I’ll be remaining involved in a non-executive role, but I’m selling the majority of my shares to my business partner and friend Ben Dickens who’ll be captaining the business going forward.

The TL;DR: I’m wanting to focus on a number of other projects, including the OMN events and Future Voices , that I feel that I can’t give adequate time to whilst remaining involved in client work at Quad.

The long story…

Quad began on the 1st December 2009 born through a partnership between Sarah Okin, Ben and myself. We started off as a high-quality advertorial network providing access to high authority media publishers for SEO teams. This was an evolution of the business model that Sarah and I had pioneered at The Advertorial Network the previous year.

It was an exciting time! We had clients, publishers, and absolutely zero experience running a business. We were profitable from month one.

Quad has changed massively since then and become a genuine contender in the digital marketing agency arena, with an amazing team, and we proudly work with some of the biggest brands in the world.

I’m obviously a bit biased, but I genuinely believe that the methodologies for generating results that we developed are way beyond what our competitors are even talking about, let alone doing.

The last four years have been fun, challenging and incredibly educational. I feel very lucky to have been at the cutting edge of the birth of a new marketing model, and to be working in digital period. I’ve met a lot of amazing people, a number of whom I now count as some of my closest friends.

There have definitely been ups and downs.

Sarah leaving to move home to the States, and the horribly badly advised Interflora-fuelled advertorial-gate being definite low points.

Other times stick out as life-changing high points; a number of important client wins and the resultant celebrations, moving to ‘the ship’, speedboats down the Thames, and a lot of awesome nights out are particularly fond memories.

When we started, as a young unknown business, selling a product that we couldn’t really shout about in a traditional marketing sense, we needed a way to build visibility for Quad and identify prospects.

Link building was just becoming the spamfest it is today, and we couldn’t really put that as was what we did on our website, so we just had a mysterious holding page for 2 and a half years!

Then a number of things aligned: We got offices aboard HMS President ; one of London’s most unique event spaces; there were a few renegade conferences, like the inimitable BrightonSEO, that were becoming increasingly popular… and I got an email through saying that the Organiser of a struggling Meetup group called Online Marketing Networkers of 50 or so people was stepping down. I jumped on it.

Becoming the organiser of OMN was such a good move in hindsight. Not only did it become a great marketing tool and business generation engine for Quad; running OMN and The Content Creation Collective has also been hugely rewarding personally. Ever since the first event when I called in some favours and got a number of great speakers, including Nichola Stott, Paul Reilly, Claire Thompson and Judith Lewis, the event nights have been something I look forward to hugely. I’ve discovered in myself a genuine passion for helping bring together and grow London’s digital community.

The OMN events are now staples of London’s online marketing scene, with over 3500 members we regularly get over 400 attendees at each event and have had some of the biggest names from London’s digital community as speakers… and some epically merry after-parties!

According to Meetup we’re the fouth biggest online marketing Meetup in the world! If you’re not already signed up do so here .

Last year, I successfully trialled training sessions, The Digital Summer Party, Masterclasses and The Future Voices programme . The huge buzz I get from organising this kind of thing has made me realise that running these events and serving London’s digital community is where my passion lies.

Quad’s grown up a lot since we started, and I’ve complete faith in Ben’s ability to steer the business onwards and upwards. Our design team headed up by Lucy Charlewood is amazing… they’ve really understood the paradigm shift that comes with creating content that supports brand stories, rather than the traditional creative agency model, which doesn’t fit content marketing.

The outreach and account management teams are great… I’ll really miss my right-hand woman Natalie Mills Richardson.

Graeme Viljoen, the most chilled out guy in the world and our lead developer for whom nothing is impossible, has brought a whole new exciting facet to Quad’s service set… and all the rest of the team at Quad actually are amazing.

I’ll miss you guys.

So there we go, finishing off this post is when it’s really sinking in. I’ll be making a few announcements regarding my other projects over the coming few weeks so if you’re interested sign up to get the newsletter at OMNlondon.com .

Good luck Quad!

Over and out.