On December 23rd, Europa Creative Partners turns ten.

(The featured image is a photo of me from 2016, in the first year of Europa’s operations.)

When I look at the company registration, I sometimes can’t believe it.

It feels like yesterday and like a lifetime ago. Europa has had three distinct incarnations over that decade, and each one has taught me something different.

I’ve written about Europa’s origins before. This time, I’d like to share some of the key themes and learnings I’ve picked up: some are hard-won.

Incarnation 1: Side hustle

For the first few years, Europa was a moonlighting gig. I was working corporate roles, learning the ropes of big business, but keeping my creative spark alive on the side.

The lessons from Europa v1:

I learnt from this time that you can learn a lot by earning a salary for someone else, but you can never truly build your own dream while you’re building someone else’s.

I’ve always had a deep well of energy. But nobody has that much energy. I needed to commit to going full-time on my obsession.

It would be years later before I did that.

Incarnation 2: Solo Consultant

Then came the leap. I went out on my own. Just me, a MacBook, and a lot of coffee. This was the “hustle” phase.

What Europa v2 taught me:

I learned to sell, I learned to deliver, and I learned that there is a hard ceiling on what one person can do.

Especially in marketing. With all the noise around “it’s a great time to be a generalist” with AI… It’s simply not true for marketing. It’s too diverse, you need specialists in certain fields, or you cannot have a full marketing programme.

I was not scalable.

Here’s the big takeaway from that time: if your business relies entirely on your time and your brain, you don’t have a business; you have a job with a terrible boss (you).

Incarnation 3: Europa becomes a “We”.

About 18 months ago, we decided to scale. This was an ambitious call as I found myself without a job or a car in the middle of a deep recession (in New Zealand at least). I partnered up with Cory Gordon and Roger Roger Marketing, an already successful SME-focused marketing business. Together, we’ve grown, built a boutique team of specialists, and allowed us to deliver superior work to more people.

Getting to work with my wife, Ferris, and our fantastic colleague, Charlene, is a real highlight.

This has been the hardest and most rewarding phase. We are now big enough to handle complex, full-stack marketing for ambitious tech companies, but small enough to actually give a damn.

We’ve spawned some incredible offshoots: our newsletter, Bright Objects and our podcast, Slideshow with Dave Hayward (on YouTube and Spotify, amongst others).

The big theme of Europa v3 (so far):

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

I know that our strategy, systems, and processes work because I’ve spent a couple of decades honing them for others. I had to have courage and believe that they would work for me. They did.

The reason we’ve grown is that we apply the exact same rigorous, performance-driven marketing to ourselves that we apply to our clients. We believe in a simpatico relationship between sales and marketing, and we’ve lived that too.

I’ve been on a fanatical (and still ongoing) quest to grow the business through sales and marketing rapidly.

I’ve worn out sneakers, both conceptually (through video calls) and actually (through meeting people).

And I’m still an enthusiastic salesperson at heart, love meeting new people and succeeding together with the people that matter most to me (our clients).

Thank you to everyone, clients, partners, friends, and readers, who have been part of these three incarnations. We’re just getting started.

One (nerdy) final thing Europa taught me:

Always listen to your sister.

Originally, I was going to call the business Enceledus Creative Partners after my favourite icy moon (of Saturn). But my sister, Jackie Gulik, (correctly) vetoed it because “it sounds geeky and people will find it hard to say.” So I went with my second-favourite outer-planet icy moon, Europa… and the rest is history.