The LOTE Agency

Where David started

The LOTE Agency had nearly a quarter century of experience in multicultural PR, research, and communications when David Bartlett came on as GM. The agency was well-credentialed — serving government departments, universities, and corporates on anything related to CALD (Culturally and Linguistically Diverse) communities. Research campaigns, communications strategy, translations, media buying. A genuinely specialist operation in a sector where relationships and trust take years to build.

It was also growing. Sharply. The business had tripled revenue in a single financial year, and the question wasn’t whether LOTE had something worth scaling. The question was whether the structure could hold the ambition — and whether the growth was building real profit, or just building turnover.

The real problem

Fast revenue growth creates a specific kind of pressure that most founders don’t see coming. The business gets bigger before it gets better. More clients means more delivery pressure. More delivery pressure means the people at the top — the ones who hold the key relationships — are spread thinner. That’s manageable when you’re small. It becomes a structural problem when you’re scaling into new markets.

LOTE’s strength was its depth of specialist knowledge and the quality of its relationships with government and corporate clients. That strength was also a concentration risk. Revenue tied to relationships is revenue tied to individuals. If the agency was going to access new markets and operate at the next level, it needed a commercial and operational foundation that wasn’t dependent on any one person holding it together.

That kind of constraint doesn’t get solved by a one-off strategy day. It requires someone close enough to the business to see where the load is sitting and how to redistribute it — consistently, over time.

What we worked on

Aggressive growth strategy

The mandate was clear: access new markets, build the team, and grow. Tristan sat on LOTE’s monthly board throughout the engagement — not as an adviser on the periphery, but as a regular presence in leadership-level decisions. That proximity matters. Strategy that doesn’t get stress-tested in real operating conditions doesn’t hold.

Profitability alongside growth

Revenue tripling is a result. Profit is a discipline. The business had achieved significant growth and set a target of consistent annual profit at 15% — a material improvement on where they had been. The coaching work addressed the difference between revenue that comes in and margin that stays. Pricing, delivery efficiency, scope management, and cost discipline all feed into that number.

Mentoring at multiple levels

Tristan mentored Adrienne Meakin (founder and director) directly, and also worked with the sales and marketing team. That two-tier approach matters: leadership coaching at director level and capability building in the people who drive new business are not the same work. Doing both meant the growth strategy had execution muscle behind it, not just direction from the top.

New market access and team building

Accessing new markets requires a different commercial posture than serving the markets you already know. New relationships, new sector knowledge, new service configurations. LOTE hired staff to support the expanded operation. Building a team into a scaling business — rather than hiring reactively to fill gaps — is a different kind of challenge, and one the board-level engagement was specifically designed to support.

Where The LOTE Agency is now

The numbers from the coaching period are genuine: revenue tripled in the year before the engagement deepened, profitability improved by 30%, and the agency accessed new markets it wasn’t serving before. Staff were brought on to support the expanded operation.

David Bartlett described the work directly: “Tristan has helped us deploy a fairly aggressive growth strategy where we’ve seen an increase in revenue, we’ve accessed new markets, we’ve employed new staff.”

Four years in, the engagement hasn’t stopped. Tristan still sits on the monthly board. That’s the tell. When a business keeps a coach at board level for four years — through the growth phase, through the new market push, through building a team — it’s because the value compounds. The problems at year four are different from the problems at year one. The coaching has to move with them.

LOTE is a specialist agency with nearly 25 years of standing in its sector. The coaching didn’t create that reputation. It helped build the structure that could make the most of it.