Acorn Strategy, an integrated marketing, public relations, and digital communications agency, is celebrating its 10th anniversary in November 2020, sealing a decade of rapid growth and strong market performance.
Do you want to see the future? Sign up for Campaign’s Marcomms360 Predictions 2021 virtual event on December 14-15. Registration is free.
Marking the occasion, the Acorn Strategy brand has undergone a complete make-over, including a new website that better reflects the company’s brand identity, service offering, and expertise, drawing on the values of integrity, agility and collaboration that have defined the company’s work since its inception.
Acorn Strategy was founded in 2010 by the Australian marketing and communications consultant Kate Midttun to help businesses identify target markets, retain customers, create value, gain competitive advantage and reap meaningful business benefits through a bespoke approach that balanced data and insights.
As the company expanded in the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and Australia, so did its range of services, extending to cover such areas as marketing and communications strategy, marketing operations, public relations, digital communications, reputation management, branding, secondment, and recruitment services. The underlying principles that guided Acorn Strategy’s work since its foundation, however, remained unchanged, says Kate Midttun, Founder and Managing Director of Acorn Strategy.
“Opening Acorn Strategy for investment will help us broaden our possibilities and support our growth, while maintaining our fiercely independent approach,” said Midttun. She further highlights, “We love being independent and challenging the norm whilst also helping companies to grow. Moreover, our employee investment programme will enable our team to be invested in more than just a career, having something that they can be proud of and contribute to.”
Testifying to the company’s growth, Acorn Strategy has won back former clients – this time as investors. Nick Chapman, CEO and Executive Board Member at Monarch Institute, and Clive Dwyer, Director of Engagement at the Committee for Melbourne have both solidified their confidence in Acorn Strategy’s steady growth by buying stakes in the company, which has additionally introduced an employee investment programme accounting for 10% of the business.
Acorn Strategy has notably grown in the past year, in contrast to a global downward trend. In 2020, the company has nearly doubled its 2018 revenues, and has managed a 50% increase in clients since September 2019. On the workforce front, Acorn Strategy has sliced through the slowest months of 2020 without redundancies or salary cuts, expanding in the process its pool of expertise by 42% across various functional areas, a feat in its own right, in light of the lockdown.
Commenting on this, Midttun said: “At the onset of the global lockdown, we’ve had to move quickly to re-calibrate our internal processes and workflow in a manner that ensured our services were not interrupted. Our team was quick to adapt, and we continued to work quite effectively. When it was time to onboard new members to accommodate the significant growth we’ve been witnessing, we adapted our procedures to the new situation, seeing to it that new members could be seamlessly integrated into ongoing projects, and the results of this process have far exceeded our expectations.”
As well as winning new contracts, Acorn Strategy has managed to maintain long-standing relationships with existing clients, resulting in contract renewals and mandate extensions that contributed to the company achieving 170% of its preset targets for the year.
Acorn Strategy operates out of its offices in Perth, Melbourne, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and London, with plans for future expansion in other countries.
