Agency Land

Gary Bertwistle has never run an agency, never held an agency title, never sat on an org chart. He's still spent more time in agency rooms than most agency people ever will. This is the episode about the gap between the career you're supposed to build and the one you're actually for. Gary takes Jye from his Austereo days running promotions in the rock and roll era of radio, to the keynote speaker...

Anyone can design a logo. Strategy decides if it works. That's Sara Servan's whole philosophy, and it's the thread running through this entire conversation. Sara crossed three continents before she ever ran her own studio. Northern Spain to Rome to Hong Kong to Sydney, picking up languages and global brand work along the way, until she landed on the thing most designers never get told out loud: th...

Ashton Bishop has been running Step Change for 17 years. He started it mid-GFC with no clients, no money, and no plan — as a protest vote after finding a coup being plotted against a friend dying of cancer. That friend was Gav Larkin, and that friendship was the genesis of R U OK? Day. In this episode, Ashton talks to Jye about the real cost of ambition: 23 courses of antibiotics in a year, the he...

Gavin Heaton has had more career chapters than most people have jobs. From accounting dropout to IBM champion to agency creative to redundancy survivor to founder of Disruptors Co, he's broken things at every stop, including his own role, more than once. In this conversation, Gavin talks about what IBM really teaches you when you're willing to run servers under your desk, what "relevance deprivati...

Sophia Brockman started as an intern at Wagner Edstrom in Seattle, moved to Australia at 25, spent 11 years at one agency through three rebrandings, pivoted from account management to strategy, and eventually left agency life entirely for a global in-house role in London. In this episode, we talk about why the best strategists think like detectives, the moment she stopped suppressing the skills th...

Julian Cole grew up in the industry. His parents ran a TV production company and told him two things: start your own agency, and you'll be washed up by 45. He started at Naked, pioneered comms planning in Australia, then moved to New York as a strategy director at BBH despite never having written a brief or worked with a creative team. He spent two years making zero work and wondered if he'd ever...

Clive Burcham left home at 15, talked his way into a regional TV station, and by 16 was writing, producing and directing his own show. He went on to become the creative director of the Comedy Channel by 25, built the Conscious Organisation into one of Australia's defining social media agencies, sold it to WPP, bought it back for a fraction of the price, survived the GFC, helped set up Nestle's fir...

Kady O'Connell moved from Ireland to Sydney knowing nobody, got deported after leaving a toxic agency that was holding her visa hostage, turned that into seven months of travel, and came back to build Kady Creative from a kitchen table into an award-winning branding agency that built over 200 brands. Then in 2025, she closed the doors. Not because she had to, but because she wanted to. In this con...

Jonathan Pease started his career at BBDO New York, came back to Australia, co-founded Tong (an ideas agency he sold to STW/AKQA), judged Australia's Next Top Model for five seasons, launched a fashion label into 13 countries, and is the founding creative director of Sown Hearts and Minds, which has raised close to $100 million for medical research. He also wrote Winning the Room, a book about pit...

Katja Forbes founded an agency, sold it, ran design for the company that acquired her, wrote a book, and somehow taught at university through all of it. In this conversation she talks about the loneliness of being a sole founder, why the maths of mid-sized agency life rarely work, the moment she claimed her space in a room full of men, and why asking for help is the only real survival strategy in...