Five minutes with Will Greaves
Meet our Project Management Lead, Will Greaves.
Meet Will Greaves, our Project Management Lead. In Will’s role, no two days are the same as he leads many of the projects that come through our door, ensuring the experience of working with Fox Agency is smooth and enjoyable from start to finish. How does he ensure that? Let’s find out – over to you Will.
Tell us about your career before you joined Fox Agency
The expression to summarize it thus far would be ‘non-linear’. Most helpfully, perhaps, is to split it into before agency and agency. In the before times, I worked in environmental consultancy, electricity transmission and even quarrying. In hindsight they all had a common theme of project work and people.
I then had a clean break where I moved out to Kenya (one for another day) and taught myself graphic design using a copy of the Adobe suite of dubious legality. I did some freelance work to build credibility and on returning to the UK, got my first job in a spit-and-sawdust litho printers with a small studio attached to it. My first real foot in the door came not via my design chops (= mediocre) but through, and here comes the science, a relationship I’d built through (trigger warning Gen Z) a telephone call I’d made years earlier to a local agency who seemed like good eggs. We kept in touch, and then a few years later they offered me a design job. I felt like I was finally ‘in’. Turns out it’s good to talk.
What does your role as Project Management Lead at Fox Agency involve, and what does a typical day look like?
When you boil it down, my role is to deliver work through other people. And at Fox, those people tend to be conscientious, talented and good fun to work with.
It’s hackneyed to say that ‘no two days are the same’, but it’s also true. Mornings are busy, meeting-heavy, responsive and caffeinated. Depending on where my respective projects are in their lifecycle, afternoons will either be where I do deeper work and planning, or if we’re executing a big campaign, it’s all hands-on-deck to meet the deadline.
Do you have a standout project you’ve worked on? If so, what was it and why?
My projects are like my children: I have a favourite, but it would be inappropriate to say which.
That said, and this may well get edited out, I came to Fox with a preconception that B2B marketing was going to feel a little staid. But it’s been anything but. The Big Purple Dog™ was a challenging but rewarding project to work on (the conventional wisdom to never work with children or animals doesn’t specify whether CG animals count). Other highlights have been a track day shoot, and a drone show over the Atlanta night sky.
What does a great client experience look like to you?
The detail is naturally different for each client, but in my experience I’ve found there are some immutable truths: people work with people, competency is underrated, and if you can inject some excitement into the work then everyone will ultimately have a more positive experience. Yes, you need to be good at what you do, and hit all the necessary marks, but clients want to have a good time when they partner with an agency.
How do the four Fox values play a role in the projects you manage?
Values can be useful, or they can be (politely) nonsense. Either way, they are a common currency, and only work if there’s a mutual understanding of the worth of that currency.
Hand on heart, we have a great culture at Fox, and our values go far beyond hollow words plastered on a wall. It is totally consistent to make them the foundation of our client work.
With that in mind, those values – Own it, Stay connected, Keep it real, and Think bigger – form the bedrock of what we’ve called Xperience at Fox. If we’re being sincere in embodying those values, then it follows that the work we do with clients will make for a memorable, positive, experience. And who doesn’t want that?
What has been your biggest professional achievement to date?
It may sound trite, but for me, work is fundamentally about the connections you make along the way. To build on my earlier point, you can deliver exceptional quality, to deadline and within budget. But if everyone’s had a thoroughly miserable time in the process, then it’s an unmitigated disaster of a project. It’s marketing, not undercover police work. The end absolutely cannot justify the means, y’know?
So, after that bloated set up, my answer is this: the relationships that I’ve built throughout my career are my proudest professional achievement.
(I’ve kissed a few frogs along the way, mind.)
Finally, tell us something interesting or unique about yourself?
For a short time, I broke the 50m breaststroke world record at a swimming gala in Nairobi. Only to transpire there’d been a monumental timing error.
