With a background in recruitment and training, Brian Whigham founded Venn with the vision of bringing the performance and accountability of recruitment to the creative industry. But with a degree in PE Teaching, what qualified Brian to establish a leading digital agency when he couldn't design and build anything for himself?

Established in 2010, the vision for the business was based upon the three elements of a Venn diagram. Consult, Build and Optimise.

"I moved to England to better myself and challenge my ability. Realising my passion wasn't in teaching, I recognised I was competitive and a good communicator, so I fell into the recruitment sector.  I began to see the transition of recruitment going more and more online with the inception of LinkedIn and Job Boards, so I felt I could bring something new to the sectors via more interactive websites." 

Brian spotted an opportunity to build a database-driven platform where users could get back different information based on their search filters. With this, our first recruitment product was born. Within three years, Venn had over 80 recruitment agencies' websites and had won many prestigious industry awards. This led to the opening of our second office in Farringdon London, taking the business's headcount to 40+ staff.

"I've always held in high regard developers and designers, and to this day, they still fascinate me with what's possible. I knew my role was to sit between my client's wishes and what was technically possible; hence Venn's approach of Consult, Build and Optimise was born."

Taking the behavioural learnings from recruitment, Venn moved to deliver the same services to other industries. Supporting wider B2B sectors, Venn won work internationally with Bahco, Siemens and significantly LWC Drinks, the UK's largest independent Wholesaler of Beers, Wines and Spirits. By 2016 Venn had firmly established itself as a top 20 Digital agency in the North West with annual revenues exceeding £2.5 million and a multi-disciplined team.

Having invested over £500,000 into Venn's Software platform, in 2021, Brian pivoted the business into a unique offering under the product heading for Vennture. Now Venn has evolved to become a product-led business, licencing products that give clients unparalleled opportunities. 

"The team have collaborated throughout the pandemic to design an unrivalled offering that we believe clients need. Being in a truly digital era, we must keep adjusting our solutions to meet current market demands, and this is what we have done."

When asked what's next for Venn, Brian responded;

"Like everything, we need to evolve. I've had ten years of leading Venn from the front and tackling head-on every challenge presented to us. But now, I believe my role has changed, and I'm excited about what the leadership team can do next.  I want to listen more and talk less as I feel more talented people than me are now executing our vision.  We can get drawn into being the next high growth Tech Unicorn, but I feel more proud that we have a profitable, independent, sustainable business run by people I can genuinely call friends."

Let's see where we go next!