People
Pete Heslop, Managing Director of Steadfast Collective, with his wife and Brand Director Rachel.
Published: August 1, 2023 | Updated: 1st August 2023
The team at Steadfast Collective are community builders, developing the digital applications behind businesses and organisations big and small.
As Managing Director, Pete Heslop also has his own internal community to oversee.
“There’s always two things I think about when I’m trying to make big, culture-defining decisions for our team”, he said.
“One is – I’ve worked at terrible places and I don’t want to work somewhere terrible again.
“So I’m always trying to put myself in the shoes of our team and ask, ‘would I be happy with that decision?’
“The other – it sounds cheesy, but I want everything we do to bring out joy.
“I want to run a team where I can finish at 5 o’clock and eat dinner with my daughters.
“When I bring up a proposal like expanding to a team of 20, I’m thinking – ‘is this going to bring joy, or just more stress?’”
It’s a question still fresh on Pete’s mind, as his company recently finalised the acquisition of UX/UI design agency Lobo Creative, headed by Jacob Dilley.
The two firms have collaborated on more than 40 projects over the past three years, so this latest move has been a long time coming.
“I met Jacob at a networking event a few years ago and we’ve been working together ever since”, Pete explained.
“We would always outsource to the people at Lobo Creative, but I knew that as our clients were getting bigger and bigger, it made sense to bring that in-house.
“I gave Jacob a call and said, ‘here’s the idea’.
“It was only a few weeks later that everything was signed and the wheels were in motion.”
With Jacob and company on board, the team is mostly spread across the Southampton area, where Steadfast Collective is based, as well as Dorset, the home of Lobo Creative.
Over the years they’ve developed platforms for plenty of Hampshire businesses, like Fareham-based online support service VetHelpDirect.
But in many ways that proximity is a pre-pandemic legacy, as Steadfast Collective continues to look further afield in both its hiring and client base.
“My wife and I founded the company eight years ago, and the plan was to build a digital product studio in Southampton”, said Pete.
“To start with we were quite a generic web development agency, but during the pandemic we had a look at our portfolio of clients and what we really enjoyed working on.
“We realised the place we could bring the most value were those communities and membership organisations, so we honed in on that.
“Since then we’ve grown and gone remote. We have team members up in Glasgow, Birmingham, and in Lyon, France.”
That pivot was another decision steered primarily by joy – as was the introduction of ‘ventures’, whereby staff are encouraged to spend 20 per cent of their working week chipping away at various side projects.
“We wanted to make sure that as a team we don’t get stuck doing the same thing for clients over and over again”, Pete explained.
“The idea was to push the boundaries of what we could do as a team technically, and it would also be a great chance for us to build some recurring revenue.
“That was the dream, and we still push it.”
The initiative has produced some real success stories for the agency, such as WordPress hosting platform Tap.
There was also Tree Exchange, a project to convert the size and quantity of servers hosted by DigitalOcean – a cloud computing provider – into the equivalent number of planted trees, as a way to help users offset their carbon footprint.
It was no doubt a contributing factor towards Pete’s nomination for this year’s BIMA 100, a prestigious lineup of individuals shaping the future of Britain’s digital sector.
“It’s one of those awards you see other people receiving in the industry, so when I got submitted for it, I was over the moon”, he said.
And he wasn’t just submitted – Pete found himself among the 15 CEOs and Leaders who landed a spot for 2023.
“We’re certainly one of the smaller businesses on there. There were people leading teams of 40 to 50 people, and we have 15.
“I’m pretty chuffed.”
Normally it would be Pete putting others under the spotlight, as earlier this year he launched a podcast talking shop with a diverse range of Digital Community Leaders.
It’s designed to complement Steadfast Collective’s annual Digital Community Survey, which attracts organisations of all sizes and sectors from across the world and has grown to become a highlight of the company calendar.
“The idea is just to benchmark people”, Pete explained. “How well are they doing? How are they growing?
“Then we’ll put together all the statistics and have a launch party up in London this September, make a big song and dance, and push on through the rest of the year.
“For now, we’re getting our heads down and cracking on with work!”
