The Change Agency

GATED

Rebuilt from named Drive sources on 1 Jun 2026 (E2G Coaching Toolkit, visioning exercises and goals sheet for First Tier Media / The Change Agency, dated 15 Mar 2023). Content is honest and qualitative — this was an early-stage engagement with no recorded outcome metrics, so no results are claimed. Sensitive material has been excluded. Pending review before publication.

Where they started

The Change Agency (which began life as First Tier Media) is a small Melbourne agency that does public relations, campaigning and lobbying, and fundraising for the not-for-profit sector. It is run by founders David Latham — a former journalist, lobbyist and PR director — and Anna Demant, who brings fundraising and strategic experience and a capacity-building program for community groups.

The work itself was strong. The founders could point to campaigns they were genuinely proud of: shaping national arts policy, a hard-fought regional campaign, and helping small not-for-profits with their own fundraising. Their reputation in the sector was their strength. What they wanted help with was the business behind the work.

The real problem

When coaching began in March 2023, the founders were busy and exhausted — and both of them were buried in delivery. As David put it in the intake, the business was spending most of its time “servicing clients and doing basic stuff others could do rather than generating more leads.”

The pattern was familiar for a founder-led agency: the people who should have been setting strategy and winning new work were instead writing the releases, doing the pitching and reporting back to clients. There was no regular rhythm for working on the business — at the start they didn’t even have a weekly WIP. Contracts were month-to-month, which made everything feel precarious, and there was no team to delegate to, so taking real time off felt impossible.

In their own words, the secret wish was simple: “Get off the tools.” David wanted to be at the front end — selling the vision and mapping the strategy — while trusted staff handled execution. Anna wanted to pass on her specialist knowledge to people she could train.

What we worked on

The early coaching focused on getting clarity before chasing growth. Through the intake, visioning and goals work, the founders named what “different” would actually look like:

• Productising the offer. Instead of bespoke, month-to-month work, they set goals around repeatable products — strategic plans and retainers with templates that could be reused — so the business was less reliant on reinventing every engagement.
• Getting the founders off the tools. A primary goal was shifting David toward the front end (acquisition and strategy) and freeing Anna to train others, rather than both being consumed by delivery.
• Building a team they could trust. Hiring competent staff so the business could run without them, with sensible protections around their intellectual property and client relationships.
• Creating space to lead. Putting in a rhythm to work on the business at a macro level — new services, processes and a plan they could actually roll out — and ultimately being able to take holidays without the business faltering.

Underlying all of it was the founders’ own clear brief for the coaching: big-picture thinking is welcome, but they wanted to walk away with concrete strategies, systems and actions — clear products, processes and procedures.

Where they are now

This was an early-stage engagement, and the honest position is that the foundational work — clarifying the vision, setting the goals and naming the bottleneck — was the work at this point. The records capture the diagnosis and the plan, not a set of finished outcomes, so there are no performance numbers to report here.

What changed first was clarity. The founders moved from a vague sense of being overstretched to a specific, shared picture of the business they wanted: productised services, a team that could run delivery, and the two of them spending their time where they add the most value — leading, selling and directing campaigns rather than executing every one. That shift in focus is the starting point everything else builds on.