Happy 20th anniversary Vertical Leap!

Today, proudly, Vertical Leap celebrates 20 years of providing search marketing services to our customers.  In those 20 years we’ve worked with hundreds of customers of all types and sizes, from SMBs through to household name brands, helping them to grow, increase online visibility and importantly, reach more business.

The company we are today, whilst evolved, still has at its core the foundations built by founder Matt Hopkins and the senior management team of Gina Paterson, Bill Greer, Kelly Mitchell and Steve Masters.  Where many other agencies have become generalists, we’ve retained and honed our search marketing specialism, developing proprietary intelligent automation technologies to improve our effectiveness and expanding the platforms we can optimise for.  Google continues to lead the world of search, but it would be folly to ignore the importance of optimising for Amazon, Facebook and mobile app stores; or the myriad of other platforms that offer our customers the opportunity to be discovered.

Those foundations have been instrumental to the resilience of Vertical Leap.  In 2016 we became part of the Sideshow Group, the fastest growing independent agency group in the UK; and in and around 2019 Vertical Leap’s founders stepped aside for a new senior management team made up of myself, Kelly Mitchell, Lee Wilson and Nick Pearse.

Welcome to 2020

Of course, we all know about the pandemic and its impact on our lives and businesses. Like so many others, we experienced a downturn and the stresses that came with that; but it was the resilience of our team, our processes and our foundations that got us through – being able to trust your team to continue maintaining standards and work ethic during a globally uncertain time is a powerful motivator and I am humbled by everyone at Vertical Leap for how they rose to the occasion.

It was those standards that early on meant we took the decision to support our customers no matter what. Regardless of their size, industry or success, we worked with everyone of them to fit their situation. We provided free marketing tutorials so that those with reduced budgets could keep the marketing lights on, flexed our services and generally tried to be there for them in whichever way was needed.

And so to the next 20 years

The foundations we’ve built and the decisions we’ve made up to this point have served us well.  As business recovers and markets open, we are a different company to the one we were.  We’ve grown and are bigger in every way to the company that we were, going into the pandemic. Business is good and we’ve more people than ever, including our two new apprentices.

The Sideshow Group has grown too, both in the number of companies and clients, further bolstering our growth and strengthening our future.  It is an exciting time and the learnings from the pandemic and the benefits of being in the group mean we can provide an increasingly positive environment for our people in the form of remote working, group culture and career opportunities.  With that comes more opportunity for our customers as we grow our group capabilities, technologies and our evidence-driven services.

Raising a glass

And so today we’ll be raising a glass to Vertical Leap being twenty years old, and to the Vertical Leap team and wider group. Most importantly, to our brilliant customers with whom we continue to grow.

Happy 20th anniversary Vertical Leap!