I’m finding it hard to believe that Twenty One Twelve will have been running for nine years in 2025. The years seem to have flown by—though I’ll admit, there have been days that felt like a lifetime. Running a small business is not without its challenges, you feel every bump in the road. But those same challenges make the triumphs all the more rewarding.
Our beginnings feel like both yesterday and a lifetime ago. The journey started in 2016, after Ryan and I won a national award for our work in digital and technology. The business was launched with an initial investment of just £300—funds we quickly had to reclaim as soon as our first invoice was paid.
Yet, success arrived faster than we anticipated. Among our first clients were Belvedere Vodka, Moët Hennessy, and The Luxury Network International (TLN), alongside a host of ambitious SMEs. Within a month, we were jetting off to Monaco to follow TLN, networking on a superyacht while the Formula 1 practice session unfolded around us—a pretty surreal, yet unforgettable experience.
Over the years, Twenty One Twelve has grown steadily, working with a diverse range of clients across various industries. As we’ve matured as a business, so has our strategic focus. Today, we have a clear preference for sectors like SaaS, Tech, and Financial Services—industries where our processes consistently drive exceptional, measurable results. These sectors have become our sweet spot, enabling us to deliver disproportionately impressive outcomes for our clients.
This year has been no different, with the Twenty One Twelve team helping the likes of Pathfinder Wealth Management and Richardsons Accounting to record years, while supporting The Disruption House, InfoDesk, Panjea and Mio Coaching with ambitious plans to scale up their ideal client acquisition.
Our work for clients this year has centred around helping them focus and develop a precise approach to their marketing. This involves articulating their approach within their distinct competitive landscapes. It also involves finding the most efficient routes to market, based on our understanding of their ideal clients.
Each of our greatest successes has combined precision in targeting, specificity in messaging and utilising partnerships wherever possible to help clients’ content gain traction much faster than it could through their distribution channels alone.
In partnerships we find our lowest customer acquisition costs and the fastest way to generate know, like, trust in new and existing markets for clients. Partnerships are also an underutilised tactic, while all the data highlights the growing inefficiency of cold outreach, partnerships offer a more intelligent approach which competitors will struggle to emulate.
2024 marked a first for Twenty One Twelve as we took our first sweat equity position in a company in the form of Chop AI. As avid students of AI, we keep our fingers on the pulse of the latest developments and tools, frequently testing new tools to try and find those marginal gains we can apply across our campaigns. We’ve been offered sweat equity several times before and each time, we’ve always felt there were too many variables outside our control to drive a successful outcome. What Chop offered us was a great product, a dynamic founder and an existing clientele, all the company lacked was a strong marketing function to drive its success.
Since deploying the Twenty One Twelve philosophy with Chop, the company has:
- Quadrupled monthly recurring revenue
- Signed its first enterprise level client
- Launched a new tool which is unique within the market
- Completed 16x product developments
- Developed a systemised lead generation strategy
- Built referral and affiliate programmes
We’re incredibly excited to continue to develop Chop. As a gift for reading this far I have two offers. The first: If you create a lot of talking heads' video content, then try Chop AI to repurpose that content into slick, short form videos for any social media platform for free. The second, is an opportunity to beta test our unique personal branding and business development AI - the PB tool. Reach out if either is of interest.
Back to Twenty One Twelve, one of the things we’ve really focused on this year has been developing our own structure as we endeavour to become a better place to work. It’s always been our desire to build a culture of success for all, meaning that a win for the company is a win for our employees too. In 2024, we attempted to practice what we preach more effectively. Initiatives we have implemented include:
Employee share scheme: Employees now receive shares in our venture projects such as Chop.AI.
Private medical insurance: Every team member now holds tier 1 private medical insurance with Axa.
Flexible working: Employees pick their working hours. They also benefit from ‘summer hours’, which means Friday afternoons off from June - August.
Learning & Development: Each team member has a codified learning and career development plan. We double down on this by retaining access to world-class coaches including Chris Evans and James Moon.
Cybersecurity & HR: This year we have retained the services of 76 IT and Stellarmar HR, as well as becoming Cyber Essentials Certified.
Charity work: We have continued our support for Bishopsland Educational Trust and The Riverside Counselling Service as well as supporting client initiatives such as Pathfinder’s fundraising for Millimetres to Mountains.
Completed the Real Living Wage Accreditation. This applies to our overseas suppliers too.
If you are looking to improve your business resilience and ESG standing talk to The Disruption House, who have been invaluable in supporting our journey.
Finally, it would be amiss of me to wrap up without mentioning the Twenty One Twelve team. They have been fantastic throughout 2024 and I must extend a huge thank you to them all. They continue to push me and our clients to new heights, a big thank you to them all and our suppliers but in particular our management team of Chloe, Gabriel and Cam.
As we move towards the end of the year, you may be reading this and analysing your own performance. If your client acquisition failed to deliver acceptable results during 2024 then it would be worth talking with us. We are happy to offer readers of this article a free 1 hour strategy session in which we will diagnose the core issues and suggest solutions to remedy them. Feel free to book in by clicking here.
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