Interview: Tricia Fox, founder and CEO of Perth-based marketing agency Cunningly Good Group

One entrepreneur’s story of surviving and rebuilding after unprecedented economic turmoil.

Tricia Fox is frank about the derailment her firm Cunningly Good Group – which she founded and where she is CEO – suffered in the wake of the pandemic. With much of the Perth-based full-service marketing agency’s client base hitherto rooted in food and drink, tourism and hospitality, it lost the lion’s share of its revenue, while some PR firm peers kept the lion’s share of theirs. And Fox found that “in a time like that, your competitors actually become collaborators and colleagues… it was a real spirit of ‘collegiateness’, which I think actually still persists in the industry today”.

Cunningly Good Group also still persists today, after rebooting, realigning, and rebranding from previous identity Volpa. It was therefore a very significant moment when it last month bagged the Small PR Consultancy of the Year Award at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations PRide Scotland Awards. “You could have wiped the floor with me when they read out our name – I just didn't expect it at all,” Fox says, also welcoming the whole team being there and getting to go onstage to bask in the glory. “There was a lot of love in the room when we won that award. Other ad agency owners said ‘well done’. They recognised what we'd gone through – and that's something.”

Fox feels some business-leaders have been at pains to put a positive spin on how they navigated the pandemic, when she suspects the reality was very different. “I remember people at the time going on about ‘pivoting’. I [found] it's really hard to pivot when there's nothing to pivot. And I think everyone kind of felt we were in the same boat, but it was very clear I was in a different boat. I genuinely had no idea – probably thankfully – of how difficult it was going to be to bring it back,” she says of her business, and believes it might have been easier in some ways for it to have folded completely and then start again from scratch. Losing 85 per cent of its revenue, and then “limping on was really challenging”.

'We went from being a relatively sizable, successful agency, to overnight being very small, having to almost be a start-up again,' says Fox. Picture: Graeme Hart/Perthshire Picture Agency.

One hurdle was inevitable lay-offs – “everyone understood, it wasn't a surprise, but it was a painful thing to do” – and the group now still has the “diversity of skills” while now being a smaller “good, strong” team. “We went from being a relatively sizable, successful agency, to overnight being very small, having to almost be a start-up again. I've never fought fires on so many levels simultaneously. It changed me as a person, and it fundamentally changed the business in ways that I could never have foreseen, so it was a really tough time.”

The business backdrop remains bumpy, while a study published earlier this year by Nucleus Commercial Finance found that 76 per cent of 500 senior decision-makers at small and medium enterprises polled said the cost-of-living crisis and pandemic lockdowns have presented unique concerns and business pressures to be addressed. And Simply Business, a UK provider of small business insurance, earlier this year said it had partnered with Mental Health at Work, a programme curated by mental health charity Mind, to help business-owners handle emotional challenges, finding that three in five said they had experienced anxiety, and more than a fifth reported feeling lonely.

But Fox also says the pandemic enabled the firm to rebuild with a new approach. This includes generating much more diversified revenue streams, with more public sector, and business-to-business (including construction) clients as well as tourism, while the firm has, she says, also become more efficient and upped its profitability.

Covid also gets a nod from Fox for giving her grit, a quality that has been described as courage and determination despite difficulty. “I honestly think you could stick me in [TV show SAS: Who Dares Wins] and I'd probably be alright… [Grit’s] not a word that you will probably see in many companies’ statements of who they are and what they do. But it's in ours.” The pandemic also saw her co-found a side hustle in the form of Mhor Coffee that even led to her attending an International Women’s Day reception at 10 Downing Street.

The firm last month bagged the Small PR Consultancy of the Year Award. Picture: contributed.

But back to the day job, Cunningly Good turned 21 in October of this year, having been started by Fox in her spare bedroom. One longstanding and pivotal client is the Pitlochry tourist magnet that is winter sound and light show The Enchanted Forest. This year it welcomed about 77,000 visitors (it would have apparently been 85,000 without various challenges including poor weather).

And Cunningly Good in 2021 rebranded from Volpa, a move she says came about amid a need for “more versatility in its brand and positioning” while retaining its heritage. And both the firm, which says it specialises in strategy, communications, design and websites, and its clients look to be sailing out of choppy survival seas into the calmer waters of planning mode, according to Fox.

“We're in a period of exploration. And I think that's okay, because sometimes you don't need to have a destination in mind,” she states, also citing the “man plans, God laughs” adage. She is even personally mulling a move into the political arena (whose long list of extra-curricular roles has included being a circle member of Scotland’s National Advisory Council on Women and Girls, for example) – but say this ambition is a more of a “passing notion” than definite intention.

Her focus for now is running a business, and she in fact took inspiration from the recent documentary on sportswoman Eilish McColgan. “I did relate a lot to the grit, the determination, to just keep going, to just push through what other people would have frankly... walked away from. And therein lies the challenge of being an entrepreneur. Sometimes you just have to keep going – that is our make-up.”