10 Years of Steph "Crusher" Clish

(And some of the other strong women we’ve built Wordnerds on)

There aren’t enough women in tech.

Too few businesses—particularly tech businesses—have female founders and leaders.

These well worn laments, regrettably all too true, underline the need to keep talking about inclusion in all its forms. But let’s also remember to appreciate and celebrate some of the many brilliant women UK and NE tech do have. To wit…

In Summer, 2013, Maureen Storey and I hatched a plan to merge two agencies. Maureen—herself an amazing and inspiring tech entrepreneur—founded and ran Durham-based marketing agency, Virtuoso, Angela Daykin (the original no-nonsense female founder) and I had grown design-and-build agency from humble beginnings on the mean streets of Ryhope, Sunderland.?

On 2nd September 2013 we came, blinking, into the bright lights of Gateshead as full-service digital offering, Daykin & Storey .

I don’t know what Maureen put in the Virtuoso tea but amongst their number were three of the most driven, formidable and talented people I’ve had the pleasure to call work friends: Sarah Storey , Joanne Hutchinson and Steph Clish .

As we all know, agency life is hard. Really bloody hard. The constant cycle of pitch—win—deliver is exhausting. The client-provider power dynamic means everything is always your fault, even when it isn’t. Even great clients sometimes don’t see the contradiction in screwing budgets to the floor and then complaining a job was rushed. Bad ones? Man, I could tell you some stories.

You need three things to survive in agency life: a never-ending supply of patience, Heracles-level resilience and a sense of humour. With Sarah, Jo and Steph as the backbone of the agency, we didn’t just survive, we thrived. There were ups and downs—of course there were—but we did some great work for some wonderful people and many of the personal and professional relationships I most value today, or look back on with fondness, were wrought tough in the fires of D&S ( Matt Cheung , Claudia Meyer-Scott , Jennifer Robson , Martha Silcott , Tom Sinclair , Daniel Patrick Vaughan … and many, many more).

Talented, ambitious, effective people often move on: Sarah is bossing it as Client Services Director at NE web institution Visualsoft Ltd , Jo completed a personal metamorphosis to Earth-mother eco-warrier and we couldn’t be prouder of the brilliant work she now does for CleanHub . We’d have both back in a heartbeat. But some like Steph stick around.

It’s not like she hasn’t had offers. One time Steph was briefing a recruitment consultant on a role we were advertising: “You sound really organised and clear about what you’re looking for. Have you considered a position in HR? We’re actually looking to fill a Head of People role at the moment…” She sent them away with a flea in their ear. Seriously, how do they sleep at night?

Another time she was courted by one of the biggest and most exciting NE agencies, where, after careful and transparent consideration, she turned down better money and higher-profile work. Why? Their systems weren’t a patch on what she’d already put in place at D&S. Also, “unfinished business”, the intangible sense of quest that building something remarkable seems to engender in the most special of people.?

In 2017 D&S spun out accidental SaaS start-up, Wordnerds, and in 2019 we faced the most terrible dilemma. We were offered generous seed funding for Wordnerds, but only on the condition that we closed down the agency and went all in.?

We worked out pretty quickly that the biggest asset we had was our people—agencies are difficult things to sell—and though we planned to move as much of our abundant talent across to the start-up as possible, to my great shame we just didn’t have room or roles for all of them.?

Who could possibly mastermind and orchestrate a route forward for the agency? Only Steph. I offered it to her—a profitable, established operation with (hopefully!) a good reputation—free of charge and without prescription. She knocked me back. “Fuck that, I want to come work at Wordnerds”.

And work at Wordnerds she did. Moreover, she’s the one that really got Wordnerds working. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a team sport requiring vital contributions from linguists, data scientists, devs, sales people, account managers, customer success, innovation and finance, but Steph is the Queen of Execution.

Where Steve Erdal (self-proclaimed Craig to my Charlie Reid) and I see opportunity, Steph builds systems. Where we dream up ideas, Steph designs customer tests. She eats complexity and shits process. Why is the least glamorous work often the most vital? She’s never complained.?

And when, in a few short years, she got us up to a point of operational competence, she started again on the product side. I don’t think there’s a role at Wordnerds she couldn’t do better than most of us currently doing it, including the creative ones.

But it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. And Steph exemplifies, personifies and lives the values that set Wordnerds apart:

• Learn, experiment, change—I recall countless conversations pouring over learnings with Steph from our latest audio-book, blog post or podcast and filleting out the actions we can implement.
• Own your impact—nobody takes more responsibility for moving the needle on our metrics than Steph. Hell, she invented the metrics. And then built input metrics to make sure we had leading indicators and early warning
• Sevens kill start-ups—she’s a solid 10. No exceptions.
• Make a connection—compassionate, people-focussed and a sense of humour that’s dry as sticks, people tell Steph when there’s a problem because a) she makes them feel better and b) she’ll do something about it
• Challenge because you care—If I’ve learned one thing from the amazing institution that is Clarasys it’s that saying you want an organisation where feedback is candid, immediate and omnidirectional is one thing, but people only believe it when they see it. In Steph, Hugh Volpe , Helen Precious , Peter Houghton and, latterly, Nat G. , Wordnerds see a leadership team unafraid to deliver feedback (kindly) in any direction. And yes, often when Steve or I are being a dick.

So here’s to you, Steph, and your 10-year nerd-iversary. You know me well enough to know that I’m much more comfortable writing piss-takes than eulogies, particularly when I know you’ll hate this level of public praise.?

But fuck it. Why do we wait until people leave before we talk about how much we enjoy working with them, how much they teach us and just how grateful we are that they choose to dedicate so much of their career to the thing we’re trying to build?

Bizarrely, D&S ceased trading yesterday. Tomorrow is the 10th year anniversary of Steph, Ange and I all working together. I am absolutely sure I speak for all of us—nerds, managers, board, founders—when I say thank you for the last ten years and congratulations on what must be a milestone achieved by a vanishingly small percentile of start-up land.

And thank God you’re here. There’s still so much to do!