Founder's Letter, May 2026.
Adam Ducquet, Managing Director - Head of Strategy, 121 Group
This site relaunch was provoked by a single observation. We'd been describing 121 Group as "the agency for healthcare groups and industrial brands", accurate at the 24-month aggregate level, true at the senior-strategist level, but missing the recency of where revenue was actually coming from.
When we ran the data, the answer was uncomfortable. 25.4% of our trailing-12-month services revenue was coming from our consumer / B2C brands on Shopify and WooCommerce. Not a side line. A specialist vertical we'd been quietly running while marketing ourselves as a two-vertical agency.
So we changed the H1. "The agency for healthcare groups and industrial brands" became "The agency for Australian healthcare, industrial & consumer brands." The website got reorganised around three specialist verticals instead of two. The /industries/consumer-brands/ page got upgraded from a 5-card supporting page to a 25-brand flagship page with sub-vertical depth.
Three other decisions worth surfacing
1. We made the Australian-only operating model explicit
132 clients on our active book, all Australian. Three Australian offices. No global aspirations. The constraint enables the depth, and we'd been quiet about it for too long. The /news/why-we-built-an-australian-only-book/ post is the long version of why.
2. We published our pricing
Three retainer shapes. Project pricing for capability statements, websites, AI Automation engagements. Block Hours at a published rate. A transparent management fee on pass-through ad spend. Most agencies hide pricing; we've made the operational case for publishing it.
3. We turned the site into evidence depth
Most agency sites have 15-30 pages. Ours has 220+ pages (as at May 2026) and counting. Three specialist verticals × seven sub-vertical pages × 53 named case studies (as at May 2026) × 30 news posts (as at May 2026) × 70 service pages × pricing × audit lead-magnets × capability statements × the operating-model essays. Vertical depth requires evidence depth. Long-tenure compounds named-evidence rights. AI-augmented production makes deep content economic.
What hasn't changed
Forty-seven-month average tenure across our material engagements. Ad spend at cost on every retainer. Senior-strategist-led delivery, the senior strategist who scopes the engagement leads it. Month-to-month, no lock-ins. Documented AHPRA review pipeline. Documented AI Governance policy. The operating model remains.
What changed is which vertical specialism we acknowledge publicly. The data made the case; we made the change.
If you're a buyer running healthcare, industrial B2B, or consumer marketing in Australia, the site demonstrates how we'd approach your engagement, with evidence drawn from the actual client book. If we're a fit, the founder call is direct and costs nothing.
Adam