Founded in June 2019 by former Edit and Branded3 colleagues Carrie Rose and Stephen Kenwright, Sheffield-headquartered Rise At Seven has already exceeded its own lofty targets.
Last June the firm announced £1.5m turnover in its first year, and shared plans to double that by June 2021.
The company has already hit £4m ahead of its financial year in May and its growth is entirely organic, having returned money from its one early investor.
It is now reinvesting profits back into the business and continuing a hiring spree as it expands into London and the US.
This time last year the company had 14 staff, it now has 62, with 12 in its London office, 49 in Sheffield and one in the US.
Its Sheffield headquarters is being expanded to double the size, and its newest goal is to have 100 staff by the end of 2021.
“We’ve hired one person every week in the last six months, which is mental!” exclaims Co-founder and CEO Carrie Rose.
“There are about 40 staff that I’ve never even seen,” she told Prolific North, confessing that for the first time, she recently saw a member of staff whose name she didn’t know.
Despite the rapid growth of the agency, which offers technical SEO and creative marketing, Rose said she still feels the company could grow even faster as the lockdown eases.
“I feel like the business is waiting to be let loose, and despite us growing at a rapid pace, in the next year we’re going to see something massive,” she said.
Breaking entrepreneurial stereotypes
The 27 year old entrepreneur is modelling her own approach to business after fast-growth, high profile entrepreneurs who have come before her. She cites the likes of Social Chain’s Steven Bartlett and US business influencer Gary Vaynerchuk as inspiration.
Like them, she too decided to create a vlog about her experiences and day-to-day work in a fast growing company, but the decision was not without reservations.
“Not many women, especially in marketing, were vlogging. I wondered if there were not many women in marketing because there aren’t many women CEOs, or if they had tried it and haven’t got the pick-up,” she said.
“I had this thing holding me back, which was that maybe it just doesn’t work for women. People aren’t that bothered about what we have to say about marketing or building a business.”
Ever the entrepreneur, Rose decided that the lack of female business influencers on YouTube was an opportunity, and “jumped into it”.
As her channel nears its first 1,000 followers, Rose said “I’ve realised I was completely wrong in that assumption, but I think it’s just because I’ve never seen it done before.”
“I was always hesitant about whether I’d be able to succeed as a female CEO in SEO. I always had doubts.”
She said when the company first launched in 2019, some people from the SEO industry criticised her gender and age.
“It was very interesting how much stick I got as a woman in comparison to [co-founder] Stephen Kenwright [pictured above], even though we’re 50/50 founders.”
But the success of the company has answered those doubts, she said. “People are starting to respect how much we’ve achieved and how good we are at our jobs”.
The company is 68% female, and those staff make up 70% of management. “It just naturally happened, and it’s nice to see that we have a good mix” she said.
Newsjacking the world
The agency has made waves in recent months with a new approach to viral stunts, designed to grab the attention of potential big-name clients.
Rather than waiting to secure these clients, Rise At Seven instead seizes the best opportunities it sees and does the work on the brand’s behalf, for free.
These have included a fake IKEA advert for the ‘BERNIË’ folding chair following the now famous photo of a bemittened Bernie Sanders, which went viral across LinkedIn and Twitter, gaining multiple retweets, shares and seven thousand likes.
