When I first joined Thinkplus in April 2014 as a freelance copywriter, I could never have dreamed how far my career with the agency would take me. Almost a decade later, I’m very excited and proud to take up the role of CEO.

Who Is Charlie?

I’m Charlie and for the past six and a half years, I’ve been COO at Thinkplus.

During that time, I’ve led our teams and supported the agency to achieve some incredible results. In this period, company revenue has increased 244% and we’ve become the long-term marketing partner for many of our fantastic clients.

We’re proudly a search-first marketing agency and in 2021, 2022 and 2023 ​​we won a stack of industry awards for our SEO and PPC campaign successes. These included three Global Search Awards this year! We’re currently shortlisted for five UK Search Awards as well.

In 2023, we expanded our services to include ROI-focused, no-fluff branding services. These have been incredibly successful, shaping our client’s brands and bolstering their conversion rates. We’ve had some phenomenal design innovations and tone-of-voice transformations for our clients through these services so far.

It’s not all about the bottom line though. In May 2023, we achieved our B Corp certification. The process took a lot of hard graft — thinking about our impact, writing up policies, doing our figures, benchmarking and figuring out how to keep improving. Achieving B Corp status that recognises our passion and work to make our industry even better has been one of the proudest moments in my career.

There have been challenges too. During my time as COO, we had the COVID-19 pandemic which hit many of our clients’ industries hard and made the marketing industry a turbulent one. We had 40% of our client base pause their marketing services overnight, but through effective leadership from our management team, we were able to support our clients to pivot their businesses and rebuild (and even grow) our client base within just two months.

Enough about Me. What Will Tim Be Doing?

I have some huge Ninja shoes to fill following on from our founder and former CEO, Tim. But I have learned from the best, having been managed, coached and mentored by Tim since I first began working at Thinkplus.

But the question on everyone’s minds is what will Tim be doing?

Tim plans to continue to be involved with the running of Thinkplus, and will still be involved in hands-on marketing work for our clients behind the scenes (just try and keep him away!) You’ll still be seeing him on our YouTube videos too 😉

However, Tim’s always been one to take things to the next level, and he plans to do this by acquiring new businesses and expanding the Shinobi Group.

You can learn more about Tim’s future plans, and a bit more about me, in this video:

What Does This Mean for the Future of Thinkplus?

We’re still going to be the Thinkplus that our clients know and trust.

We’re relentlessly focused on driving results through search for our clients. Our ROI focus will continue to be our DNA as we develop our services and processes to deliver incredible marketing results and create long-term partnerships with our clients.

There is no time more important than now for our team to continue to be at the cutting edge of search, and that is exactly where we are. As Google plays with and plans for wider rollouts of SGE, we’re expecting significant disruption in the industry. In true Ninja style, we’ve been all over this.

We’ve run innovative tests and experiments to figure out SGE ranking factors to bolster search positions for our clients. We’ve found a set of ranking factors for SGE and have successfully got content ranking in the carousel. Whilst the rest of the industry panics, we’re confident in our search expertise.

Building on the success of our newly launched branding services, you can expect more creativity to come from our Ninja team too. We’ve loved collaborating with our clients on more creative projects, including branding, design and content strategies, and feedback from clients has been glowing.

We’ll continue to innovate by pairing up our search expertise and ROI-focused mindset with our creative branding. Our vision is to create brands for our clients that customers fall in love with, and that drive conversions from search traffic through to repeat purchases.

The ultimate goal, as always, is to drive leads and sales for you, our clients. And to have fun doing it.

I’d Like to Thank My Mum…

It’s not an Oscar speech I know, but it wouldn’t feel right for me not to share my thanks for the support, feedback and encouragement I’ve had throughout my career and moving into the CEO role.

I hear this is a common ‘trope’ of women leaders to thank others rather than credit themselves, but none of us exists in a vacuum and I believe that all leaders can only be successful thanks to the team around them. If this is a trope of women leaders, I hope it will become a trope for all leaders.

Firstly, thank you to Tim who since the very first day we met believed I was capable of anything and everything. There’s a lot of power felt in having someone else who believes in and trusts you, and taking the baton as CEO is a privilege.

Thank you to all of our Ninjas. There would be no Thinkplus without you, and I am in awe of your ideas, hard work and super talents of you all daily. I could not be more excited to serve as CEO for such a brilliant bunch of people.

A special mention to some of our long-standing Ninjas who have contributed to creating the amazing culture and company we have now too. Rain, your numbers are the backbone of everything we do. Luke, who is stepping up to be our new COO, I couldn’t be more confident in your leadership. Benz, your design wizardly is second to none. Dale, you have rooted for me always.

And of course, I would like to thank our SLT and management team who are relentless. Tim, Rain, Ali, Vic, Luke, Dale, Nic, Jenny, Abi, Andy, Gemma and Andrea — your support, encouragement, endless hours of hard work, end-of-the-day fried(-egg) brains, obsession with improvement, care for our clients and our team, and motivation to climb mountains is everything.

(I would also like to thank my mum — the original cheerleader, advocate and believer in me).