onefourzero: Our Culture and Approach

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To say a lot is happening in the world at the moment would be an understatement. The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted our everyday lives beyond recognition. Lockdowns, travel restrictions, store closures, remote working, remote learning, the list goes on. 

Businesses have certainly felt the sting of the pandemic. Thousands of organisations across the globe were unprepared for the sudden migration to remote working. It is not a fad, either – remote working is here to stay in some form. The effects of the pandemic have been far-reaching; it fast-tracked the need for digital transformation in a way never seen before.

Companies that were expecting to roll out a digital transformation strategy over months or even years had to transform in a matter of days as millions of employees started working from home. Organisations in a range of industries had to embrace all things digital to survive the storm. Consumer behaviour has changed drastically; in some sectors, for good. Digital data has always been a businesses’ best friend, but the pandemic solidified that friendship even further.

remote working

So, where does onefourzero come into the picture?

We provide digital commercial insights for investment, transformation and value creation. We do this by analysing robust, global datasets, which provide an essential foundation for our expert consultants. Our digital data-led reports help assess commercial growth potential, competitor analysis, digital strategy, reputation, operational efficiencies, and new vertical expansion viability. 

The onefourzero culture

We’ve experienced significant growth in the last couple of years. Despite this, we have maintained our company culture, an essential aspect of the organisation that we take immense pride in. Our culture has five components: kindness, diligence, excellence, team, and innovation.

Kindness

Kindness is at the core of everything we stand for. It drives empathy; it drives appreciation for need, and it drives our approach and the way we treat our staff, clients and associates. Kindness underpins everything that we stand for. When we innovate, we do so by understanding what is truly needed from our customer’s viewpoint and considering the imaginations of our staff. At onefourzero, no idea is a bad idea.

We act diligently to ensure a good output (we wouldn’t be doing our jobs very well if not). Still, we also act diligently to ensure that we manage communications, workloads and deliverables well. We cultivate excellence by motivating our colleagues and co-workers and through listening and encouraging – kindness is at the core of our company culture.

Our team is second to none. The way that everyone treats each other, supports each other and is collaborative and understanding of each other is something that they can take equal credit for – it comes from within them because they are inherently kind people.

Diligence

As a company, we are extremely detail-oriented and strive for excellence in all projects. All our work is double, if not triple checked, to ensure validity and all our data sets are triangulated. Cross verifications across a range of sources allow us to offer accurate, actionable insights. We also realise that data alone is insufficient. Our combination of multi-source triangulation, digital and sector experts, and innovative tools built in-house enables us to provide insights that have proven commercial value. 

data

Excellence

It is important that our clients work with the best analysts. For that reason, we only hire the best-in-breed for our team. No matter the project’s size, the team does not compromise on the quality of output; excellence is always our goal. 

Similarly, the project process is in-depth, and our talented team follows a set structure that yields excellent results. First, we define the project’s scope and take time to understand the brief presented to us. After that, we begin the data collection process. We compile data from more than 19 different digital sources. Our talented analysts then get to work to identify particularly interesting trends in the data that will interest clients. After a report is put together in the client’s preferred format, it is sent for review to ensure it is of the highest quality. After any necessary amends are completed, we present the findings to the client.

Commercial Analyst Alex Mickiewicz explained that “part of what makes our strength as innovators is that onefourzero employees come from diverse career backgrounds all bringing different knowledge to the table. Being able to learn from each other’s set of skills is a wonderful exercise in challenging our views, not staying in the same place, and regularly rethinking what we do and how we do it to ensure top-level analyses and reports.”

Innovation

onefourzero remain at the cutting edge of digital research techniques to ensure high levels of data confidence. We develop our own formulae and technologies to improve efficiencies and cater to varying client needs and expectations. The world is changing so quickly, but so are we. We develop our own code and tools to scrape, standardise and visualise data using artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine learning. Our experienced Data Scientist creates highly impressive and innovative tools that add a considerable amount of value to our team offering. These proprietary algorithms ensure efficiency and consistency in findings while also enabling our team to spend valuable time adding human expertise and expert insight.

Team

When you work with onefourzero, you collaborate with a team of specialist analysts. Our team members have a background in statistics, private equity, mathematics, marketing, business analysis, consultancy, management, economics, retail, and more. 

The onefourzero team is led by CEO Fleur Hicks. Fleur leads the team on all things digital as she has 17 years experience in digital and commercial consulting. She oversees all onefourzero’s work with the investment community, including in areas such as consumer, travel, FMCG, health, education, gaming, fintech, and financial services. Ben Martin is the Head of Insights and Behavioural Science, and he has spent the last 13 years producing actionable insights for digital brands, publishers and agencies. His experience encompasses a range of industries spanning over 40 countries, where he has found audience, marketing and performance patterns in both first and third-party data.

The structure of onefourzero has changed in recent years to reflect the needs of various stakeholders. To learn more about the individuals that have enabled us to be where we are today, click here

The onefourzero culture: Diversity and inclusion

Diversity and inclusion are incredibly important to us. In the private equity world, gender diversity is improving slowly, with the proportion of women in the industry rising to 38 per cent. Ethnicity representation is not rising at the same speed. For example, Gurpreet Manku, Deputy Director-General of the BVCA, says “it is obvious that when it comes to ethnicity, further work is needed.” 

diversity

Additionally, it is important that everyone is treated with respect and is listened to. Regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, disability, and religion, everyone deserves to be heard. Commercial Analyst Marta Fajlhauer explained that the organisation has “an inclusive culture that respects all values and needs”. She said that onefourzero is a “multicultural team working in technology with a nearly equal gender balance that supports each other.”

Most of all, we are a collaborative team that embraces a culture of care and kindness. We love this quote by Airbnb founder Brian Chesky: “Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with a passion”. Chesky’s quote resonated with us because it applies to onefourzero as an organisation. We are a group of experts who love what we do and this shines through in our work.

What do our clients think?

We have received brilliant feedback from our valued clients:

“We had a great experience working with onefourzero. The team was able to pull together a lot of very interesting insights in quite a short period of time, with just access to external data. The report was very thorough and applied good commercial judgement in pulling out key questions for us to raise with the Management team of a target company.” ~ Investment Director, EU Mid Cap Firm.

“Across a number of engagements, the onefourzero team delivered high-quality insights under time pressure and which helped inform our investment theses in a meaningful way. They are our go-to specialist digital marketing diligence firm.” ~ Investment Director, UK Mid Market Firm.

Connect with us

If you need assistance with your next project, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d be happy to help you enhance your digital capability.