Feature: Jim Lucas, Managing Partner
I’m Jim, one of the managing partners at Ten Toes. I’m coming up for my second anniversary of joining the company and my first taste of agency life.
Since then I’ve overseen much of our work with clubs, leagues and federations – a relatively new venture for Ten Toes, whose roots very much lay in dealing with individual ‘talent’ (i.e. players) and commercial brands. We’re far from the only agency in this particular space, but we’ve made some great strides in a relatively short space of time and have worked with some brilliant clients already.
Why? I’d like to think it’s due to a combination of three things: our story, our team and our approach.
Our story is a short one – we’re barely seven years old – but our track record of working with talent and brands makes us interesting to sports organisations, so many of which are seeing the size of their digital footprint become eclipsed by those of their players, while also creaking under the pressure of producing content that promotes their commercial partners without losing the attention of their audiences.
Our team – as detailed last week by our founder/CEO, Ben – has a mix of experience from a range of industries, but I’m particularly proud that we’ve been able to attract people who’ve created content and managed channels for some of the biggest organisations in football. Tom Biggs led The FA’s coverage of England’s EURO 2020 and Women’s EURO 2022 campaigns before joining Ten Toes, while Ella Jerman arrived after growing the Women’s Super League’s social accounts by more than a million followers. Formerly of the Premier League, Fi McCrindle is one of the smartest brains in the industry, while Josh Hershman – another of our managing partners – has the honour of establishing UEFA’s Facebook presence way (sorry, Josh) back in 2012. Oh, and we’re still recruiting.
That level of ‘organisation-side’ experience is what shapes our approach. We know the pains, stresses and pressures that in-house content teams can find themselves under. They’re often dangerously over-worked and over-burdened, but scarily under-resourced and under-valued. Such are the business-wide dependencies on a club’s social channels, team members are expected to wear so many hats – from marketeer to journalist with PR manager, customer advisor and data scientist along the way. Is it any wonder they need a helping hand now and then?
Ten Toes wants to be exactly that: a helping hand. If you’re looking for an agency to come in and push your staff aside, it’s not us. It isn’t always easy to plot a route forward in this ever-changing industry, but we’d love to help you find the way.