Growth doesn’t happen in pieces

Welcome to the match. I’m Robin and today I’m joined by Brendan Collogan, co-founder of Three Are One. Three Are One is a growth company. They unite intelligence, invention, and creativity to drive what they call undeniable growth. Brendan came to this from the client side with a career driving commercial growth across big companies like News Corp, Westpac, David Jones, and Singtel. And they built the business from a simple idea. Today, we’re getting into how growth actually happens and what that means for the way companies buy, build, and use the partners around them. Brendan, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

So to get us going, tell us a bit more about Three Are One. What’s Three Are One and where did the three as one idea come from?

My career for the large part has been on the client side. It’s only been up until around two years ago where myself and my co-founder launched Three Are One. The philosophy of Three Are One is fairly simple: you need three ingredients for growth. You need intelligence, you need invention, and you need creativity. And when you combine those three things, growth becomes undeniable.

The philosophy has come from seeing across my career the circumstances where I’ve been able to work with my team to create growth, and then circumstances where growth has been more elusive. What Three Are One has come together as is a codification of the former — codifying the elements that existed across the team capabilities in order to grow. And when I say grow, I don’t mean in any kind of short-term way. I mean in an enduring, compounding capacity over many years. The “undeniable” part — we say it’s growth that you can see and feel.

When you’re in an organization and you get to that point of enduring growth, I hate to say it but growth starts to feel easy, because you’ve put the work in. You’ve got the systems in place. You have those three forces all working in tandem together.

I had an experience — I won’t say which company it was — but my boss at the time said: “Brendan, for your performance review — you don’t really need to say any words.” I took that as my performance review being evident before I even walked into the room.

It’s what results you’ve delivered.

Exactly. And that’s the undeniable part. I don’t need to explain it. It’s obvious.

And so how is the business different from an agency? I know you describe it as a growth company — how’s that different?

The main difference between us and your more traditional agency is the types of problems we work on. Typically at an agency you’re working from a brief, whereas Three Are One starts its work from an open growth question. That’s the intelligence part. We use the word intelligence intentionally, because it’s very different to strategy.

The best way I can explain that is in a military sense: when you’re preparing for a mission, you firstly gather the intelligence, then you develop the brief, then you do the strategy, then you execute. Agencies typically work from the strategy stage — they’re given a brief. Three Are One works from the intelligence stage. So we’re about firstly finding and defining the commercial opportunity, developing a monetization and organizational model that can support that growth, the target audience and proposition that will resonate for that particular product. From there we develop a brief, which then moves into what is your more traditional creative process. But our philosophy is that growth should work end to end — from finding the opportunity through to activating that opportunity in market in a creative way.

You’ve got a very rich client-side background before coming to set up Three Are One as a growth partner to your clients. How does growth actually happen inside a big company?

The way it happens is firstly you typically have your core — your product, your proposition, an audience you’re going after, and you’re continually refining and optimizing that. And then you have your more outsized growth opportunities — there’s always a few kicking around. Where large clients really need external help is understanding those breakout growth opportunities.

The reality is it works similarly to the Three Are One proposition: you move from a hunch to quantification of the opportunity, to how do you develop a business model, how do you monetize it, how do you innovate around a different product, and then how do you launch that to market in a way that will make consumers care.

The best example I can provide is around Code Sports, which I ran the subscription business at News Corp for many years. I had this idea for a long time around a sport-only subscription proposition. We needed to go through a whole process — do we launch in Australia or overseas? Then how do we make money out of this, how do we resource it, what’s the product? You work through all of that, take it to the board for approval, then engage a creative agency. That in reality is how growth works end to end. Three Are One’s philosophy is that we cover all of it.

So often those disciplines are fragmented and separate, and therefore there’s opportunity for misalignment. What goes wrong when they’re not well aligned?

The best way to put it: when you have multiple agencies or multiple companies or stakeholders working on the same thing, everyone is doing their job, but no one is doing the job. What I mean by that is there might be one part of the operating model delivering the campaign — they’re doing the campaign bit. Then you’ve got another company developing the product — they’re doing the product. Another partner developing the commercial model and the pricing — they’re doing their bit. But no one’s owning the growth. And that’s what I mean by the job — because the job is growth. The job is not a campaign. The job is not a product. It’s not a glossy strategy deck. The job to be done is growth, and growth that is visible and undeniable.

A lot of those different disciplines can sometimes hide behind fuzzy metrics that aren’t really tied back to real commercial proof. How do you tie all of that work back to growth that a CFO will immediately recognise?

We’ve done quite a bit of work in this area. I’ve had some amazing mentors in my career — one in particular was very focused on drivers: understanding what are the things you influence that are correlated with growth. I’ll use a basic example. You may have a campaign and your job is to grow revenue in X product by Y%. It’s very difficult to make that leap from “I launched this campaign” to “I delivered that result.” But what you can do is put a step in the middle — around the driver. What are the things that are correlated with growth, acquisition, or retention? And your activity is focused on the drivers.

So in terms of your narrative with the CFO, you firstly prove the correlation — you say, well, if I improve frequency of visits on this product from 7 to 8, that will improve acquisition by X% and reduce churn by Y%.

Can you bring that to life a little further? What were some of the drivers that you aimed to influence?

I’ll use the example of any engagement-based subscription service, because this is now common knowledge in publishing and beyond. Engagement drives value is a really simple concept. The more frequently you can get someone to engage with your product — not within a single day, but across multiple days over a month — I’ve never seen a scenario in an engagement-based subscription business where that doesn’t correlate with churn reduction. So all of your strategies are about driving frequency.

The second most important driver is depth. I’ll use Netflix as an example — let’s say you have someone who comes in and uses the product frequently, but they never watch anything outside of crime content. The moment they get sick of crime content, they’re gone. So if you’ve got them there frequently, the next thing you need to do is get them to consume more broadly. The second most correlated behaviour with churn is breadth. So then what you do as a marketer becomes much more simple — you’re not saying “I’m launching a campaign to drive revenue.” You’re saying “I’m launching a campaign and I want people to consume the content two extra days a month,” and you know mathematically how that correlates with the topline number.

We do a lot of this work with clients — and quite frankly we do it for our own benefit too, because we have this strange kind of attachment where we really struggle to walk away from clients unless we can visibly see that we’ve delivered a result. So quite often we start that work even if it’s not explicitly part of the brief.

What does that mean for the types of partners growth leaders need to work with? What do they need from a partner?

Consumer sentiment hasn’t been this subdued in my lifetime for such a long period. Increasingly growth leaders’ focus has been taken towards day-to-day operations — not dropping the ball, basically optimisation. Whereas the companies that typically get ahead are the ones that are really good at that delicate balancing act: doing a really good job of running your business, but also taking every outsized growth opportunity that’s on the table.

Growth leaders at the moment don’t get enough time on the ladder. They’re so focused on that additional 5–6% growth year-on-year, or cost reduction targets, that some of the bigger 30–50% growth year-on-year initiatives are constantly put on the background to get to. And that’s one of our superpowers — working with clients to identify what are the adjacent opportunities to their brand.

That will complement what is challenging but more certain growth, with an overlay of more explosive, less certain growth. And by blending those two things together, you get a much healthier growth profile over the next 5 to 10 years.

Every investment needs to be really evidenced in terms of what it’s going to return, with probably even less tolerance for standardised, prepackaged solutions. How do you address that in terms of tailoring how you help a client?

The one thing that allows us to build trust early is putting the time in to truly understand our client’s business. What I mean is: how do they make money? What do the unit economics look like? That’s where we start to speak at the same level, particularly with the more senior people in the organization, to earn that trust. And from there you’re given a little bit more freedom and scope — in terms of invention, in terms of creativity — because you’ve demonstrated that you have a solid understanding of what they know. You can’t possibly expect to have the same understanding, but you’ve put the time in to have a really good conversation around: this new invention — how does it make money? This campaign — how does it pay back?

You’ve said previously: if a client has a predefined brief, they should talk to an agency. If they’ve got an open, uncertain growth problem, they should talk to Three Are One. What do you mean by that?

There are so many agencies — and there are some great agencies — who can respond to a brief. Our real point of difference is around the upstream work, and our ability to seamlessly flow that into any investment in digital product or marketing. That’s our superpower. We love working with clients on briefs, but we also expect that to be a much more competitive process because there are lots of agencies that can do that.

Fewer agencies can go further upstream and ensure — consistent with what I said earlier around growth as a system — that all of that topline intelligence flows seamlessly with no handovers. No moving from a strategy deck into a brief into something separate into an idea and into concepts. It’s one process. It’s one system that fits together.

Let’s talk about AI — you’ve got some strong opinions on it, having recently done some really interesting AI enablement work for Google. What’s your actual take on where we’re at and on the hype?

I’ve lived through a few different disruptions in my lifetime, and they’re all very different. But there are kind of three dimensions to disruption: scale, speed, and depth. When we talk about the internet, the mobile phone, social media — they all had different characteristics, but typically one of those three things was missing.

The internet had huge scale but was very slow — it took decades to reach meaningful scale. The mobile phone changed how we consume content significantly, but while it was pronounced in some industries, it wasn’t particularly deep. Social media had huge scale and speed — the infrastructure was already there — but again, fairly shallow disruption. Now when I come to AI, all three are there. The infrastructure exists. ChatGPT’s adoption exceeded the speed of TikTok’s. But what’s truly different about AI is the depth — the impact is across almost every industry. The mobile phone arguably didn’t have much impact on medicine. AI certainly does, in the same way it has an impact on journalism, commerce, professional services.

Say more about that depth, because there’s a point of view that says a lot of what we’re seeing is adoption for adoption’s sake. Where do you see it actually making a difference to work being done inside companies?

I’ll firstly comment on perhaps why people think that. I think there’s incredible misuse of AI, and in some respects as individuals we’ve over-delegated to it. The reality is AI is very good when you give it the right constraints and you’re very clear. It’s pretty average when you type in a one-sentence prompt, because of the nature of AI — it goes wide before it narrows. If you’re much clearer around how it’s used, it will give you much higher quality answers.

There’s also a lot of noise. There are really only four or five generative AI models that matter, and there’s a lot of capability out there that is effectively repurposing the results of those models in different ways — a gold rush to monetize and differentiate. The capability is pretty centralized around the big players.

My focus is nearly always on enduring things — operating models that endure, products that endure. And in this case, it needs to be on internal capability, because that endures. What I would do is cut out the middleman. Train your team on how to use one of the big four models — train them really well. Democratize that, but don’t do it unfiltered or in a way that’s uncontrolled. Be quite specific around the types of work it can be used for. If you give people the right information and the right training, they can get phenomenal output from these models.

And it’s mind-blowing how quickly it’s improving.

They’re certainly going to get better.

Exactly. Which is why I say: use one of the top four models. My caution would be don’t jump around, because they will leapfrog each other for the next 10 years. Develop a really strong capability on one or two of them and just stick with it. Sometimes you might be working with a model that’s ranked second or third in a particular category — then they’ll upgrade and they go to first. So don’t jump around. Focus on really getting to know and hone your skills on a pretty narrow part of the stack.

Pretty much every big company at the moment is figuring out what they’re doing in this space. What else would you say around how they should think about the question of build versus partner as they become more proficient in bringing AI into their business?

This is a technology that is here to stay. I anticipate some form of correction in terms of company valuations — similar to dot-com — but then it’ll just go back to normality and AI will continue to be a really important part of our daily lives. I struggle to understand the value of outsourcing AI capability for something that’s going to be so fundamental for the foreseeable future. At some point you’re going to have to develop the capability internally — so just get started now.

The important thing is to have really good workflows so you know what the process is and you guide the process. AI helps fill each narrow part one step at a time. It’s having a really good workflow: here are the steps to get from a brief through to a campaign. Those steps don’t need to be fundamentally changed from what they are today, but you need to create roles for AI at each of those component parts — and not let AI drift into things it shouldn’t be working on. Keep it focused.

What does that mean for the work that you and your team do? What’s different now and what’s stayed the same?

We’ve well and truly been born in the AI era — we started the company less than two years ago. We do see a lot of AI adoption for adoption’s sake, and our caution is: what’s the problem to be solved, what’s the friction, and how do you value the impact? Let’s say you’re in a senior role and 30% of your time is tied up in administrative tasks — managing meetings, minutes, catching up on sales results. The way to think about it is: what’s the role of agentic AI to take some of that workload off you, and then what’s the value of that time if it’s redeployed into high-value growth-oriented tasks?

There are very few components of a company now where you couldn’t see a solid use case for AI adoption — but work from top to bottom. Where is it going to have the highest impact? Don’t guess. Work through the list. Value it. And then you’ll truly understand firstly that you’re focused in the right areas, and secondly be able to measure the impact post-implementation — because it will either address the problem or it won’t.

That really does tie back to a lot of what you’ve said through the conversation. Let’s bring it to a close — what’s the one thing you’d want a growth leader listening to this to take away?

I just want to reinforce something that they intuitively know, which is that growth doesn’t happen in pieces. Growth happens when everything comes together. And in order to get to a place where you have an enduring platform, where your results are compounding — 1% a month, 2% a month — that’s what growth looks like. Growth doesn’t look like 10% up a month. Growth looks like continuous improvement, great processes, great technology, great intelligence, great strategy. It’s all of those component parts coming together.

Fantastic. Great note to end on. Thanks so much Brendan. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.