How Aira started
Officially, the conversation where Aira started was in the summer of 2014, but the story goes back a couple of years before that.
In 2012, Matt was Director of a digital agency in London and hired a social media manager on six-month work experience. That hire was Ellie (Paddy’s girlfriend, now wife). Matt and Paddy had known of each other before this point, going to the same conferences and bumping into each other in the SEO Twitter world. They got to know each other a little better as Ellie worked for Matt, while Paddy was working for an agency in London called Distilled.
Fast forward to the summer of 2014, Matt and Paddy were at MozCon in Seattle, with Paddy speaking (he was running the London office of Distilled at the time) and Matt attending (he was now running his own agency called Hidden Pixel). An off the cuff comment from Paddy at one of the networking events started the conversation:
“We should do something together at some point”
A few days later, Matt, his wife Nicola, Paddy and Ellie were all in San Francisco, with Matt and Nicola due to fly home the following day. Paddy and Ellie convinced them to change their plans and head to Vegas with them instead - so they did...
It was in Vegas when Matt and Paddy talked properly about the idea of starting a company together and, within an hour, they’d agreed on everything and started to make plans to make it happen. Aira officially opened for business in January 2015.
That conversation happened in a bar at the Aria Casino. Which is where the name Aira comes from. Aira = Aria backwards, get it?!
Fast forward to today, Aira has grown to over 50 people and is not only only delivering amazing work for clients, but doing a successful job of building an awesome place to work.
And we’re far from done yet…
What we do
Aira grows your businesses with multi-channel digital marketing that's measured in traffic, sales and revenue.
That might not sound complicated, but executing on it is another matter. However, over the years, we’ve grown our own company alongside our clients by doing just that - doing what we said we would.
But it goes beyond this. Over the years, we’ve discovered where we do our best work and, whilst we’ll work with most clients across many different industries, we’d have to hold our hands up and say that we do our best work across:
- SaaS
- Ecommerce
- Professional services
We’ve also found that we work well with businesses who have an established in-house marketing team, usually turning over £1m+ in revenue and able to invest more than £5k per month on their agency fees.
That doesn’t mean we say no to everyone else, but it does mean that we know where our strengths lie and aren’t afraid to double down on them.
We do say no to more projects and RFPs than your average agency though (we know, our team tells us this a lot!) because if we don’t feel that we can do our best work for them, we won’t pitch for the work.
More importantly, we try not to take on too much work at once. Quite often, we have a lead time for onboarding new clients which means that we lose out on opportunities to work with cool companies. As frustrating as this can feel, it’s the right thing to do because the last thing we want is to sell more work than our team can deliver. No one wins if this happens.
What we want to be
Our goal is to develop the happiest, highest performing, most effective digital marketing agency in the UK.
We will do this by building an amazing place to work and giving meaningful, fulfilling jobs to great people.
We believe that a happy, engaged team are more likely to deliver great work and results for businesses. Therefore, we over invest into the development and progression of our team in order to deliver great results.
What’s the big vision and mission?Let’s be honest, we’re a digital marketing agency. We’re not changing the world by curing disease or going to Mars. So we don’t have grand plans to change the world with bold vision and mission statements. We actually find many of them a bit cringey.
But we do want to have a positive impact and leave our small part of the world in a better place than we found it.
There are three concrete ways that we can do this:
Have a positive impact on clients' businesses by helping them grow and achieve their goals.
Have a positive impact on all of our team, helping them enjoy fulfilling careers and achieving their professional and personal goals.
Have a positive impact on the community around us by giving back and creating jobs.
The way that we do things (basically, our culture) plays a huge part in whether we achieve these or not, which is why culture is so important to us.
The Company Culture Awards
2022 Winner
How we’ll get there
Developing the happiest, highest performing and most effective digital marketing agency in the UK isn’t easy and we’ll never be 'done'. Even if we do a good job of this (we think we’re doing quite well already) there is always more that can be done.
We are very serious about this though and are very deliberate in our approach. For many years, we didn’t have much of a strategy behind Aira, we just kind of did our best and tried not to mess it up.
Honestly, this was the title of the first strategy document that Matt and Paddy wrote in their first year of running Aira
What got us here, won’t get us there!
Moving forward, we are making decisions and growing Aira in a way that focuses on hiring and developing the best people we can find, then giving them room to grow and thrive.
This means that we’re not for everyone, but we also don’t want to use that as an excuse to never look inwards and see what we can do to be better.
We are very deliberate about the people we want to hire and what we can offer them.
great work
effective
valuing autonomy
over dictation
& receiving feedback
from accountability
& responsibility
standards
These are traits and behaviors that join the dots between our culture and high, effective performance for clients. They are things that are closely linked to delivering great results, whilst helping someone improve and develop their career. This is why we value them so highly and look for them in new and existing team members. We use them to find people, nurture people and, sometimes, to let them go.
What it’s like to work at Aira
This is the real question and links directly to culture because when you boil it down, our culture is all about the way that we do things.
So, the question becomes, how do we do things at Aira?To answer this question, we asked our Team Leaders to share a few thoughts on how they run their teams and then our CEO, Paddy, summarises his take on how we do things at Aira.
We also asked a few of our current team to describe what it’s like to work at Aira.
And here is how Paddy, our CEO, describes how he’d describe working at Aira:
‘Before starting Aira, Matt and I talked about trying to build “somewhere where we’d love to work”. Many years later, we think we’ve done a good job of this so far.
As Aira has grown, it’s clearly more than just a workplace where the both of us would enjoy working, but a few things have never changed and probably never will.
These things include building somewhere that trust is the default and everyone is treated like a grown up. This leads to things such as avoiding micromanagement and giving individuals autonomy over their day-to-day work. It means setting outcomes but not dictating exactly how to get there.
We’re big fans of giving people trust and responsibility quickly - in fact, our interns are always shocked that we give them “real” work from day one!
At the same time, we’re always there to support and catch people when things inevitably go wrong.
This combination of trust and support, alongside always trying to do the right thing (even when the right thing is hard), forms the foundation of what it’s like to work here.’
It’s not just about our current team though.
Our team at a glance…
Want to be a part of photos like these?
Benefits and perks
Of course, alongside such a big focus on our culture, we offer a bunch of great perks and benefits. They don’t make our culture what they are because if we took them all away, our culture would still exist. At the same time, our perks are designed to support and fit into the culture that we’re trying to build.
Here’s a summary of our perks and benefits:
Unlimited holiday.
Yes honestly!
We don’t make you feel guilty about taking it either. If you’re curious about how it works, we wrote about it here. Basically, we don’t want you to worry about sticking to a fixed number of holidays, so we took that worry away.
Free access to mental health coaching during working hours
Looking after our mental health is important and many of us don’t make time for it. So we partnered with Sanctus to give you that time during working hours if you’re like to speak with a mental health coach.
Start early or finish late with flexible working hours
You can start anytime you want between 8am and 10am, then finish at anytime between 4pm and 6pm. As long
as you get your hours in and get your work done, we don’t mind.
Private Medical Insurance
with Vitality
We will enroll you in our company-wide Private Medical Insurance, giving you health cover for a range of services and advice. Once you’ve been at Aira three years, we’ll include your family too.
You get your Birthday off,
relax and celebrate
We don’t expect you to work on your birthday, so we let you take it off and celebrate. You’ll even get a surprise from Matt and Paddy to help you celebrate and you’ll come back to an obscene number of happy birthday GIFs on Slack.
£800 annual training and technology budget
Each year, we give you £800 to spend on whatever you want in relation to training or technology that helps you do your job better. You can also use it to spruce up your home working setup too.
Enjoy reading?
Unlimited budget for books
If you want a book to help you learn something related to your role, just tell us and we’ll order a copy for you. Simple. If you’d like to save a few trees and prefer a digital version, we’ll get it delivered directly to your Kindle.
Free eye care exams and glasses
if prescribed for work
You spend a lot of time each day staring at a screen. If you want to get a checkup to make sure your eyes are in good health, we’ll pay for it and if you need glasses, we’ll even help pay for them.
Generous maternity, paternity
and adoption leave and pay
If you or your partner are expecting a baby or plan to adopt, we offer generous benefits beyond staturot. We published them online here for transparency and have made the pregnancy loss pledge from the Miscarriage Association.
Get paid for referring great
people to work at Aira
We love it when our existing team recommends others to come and join Aira, it’s the ultimate compliment to us. We’ll pay you £500 for each successful referral that you make for roles at Aira.
Up to two days a year to volunteer for charitable organisations
We want to give back to the community around us and want to give you the opportunity to do so too. So each year, you can take two days of work time to work with a charitable organisation.
Free parking permit in
central Milton Keynes
This may seem like a small one, but it actually costs over £600 a year to park in central Milton Keynes. We don’t believe that you should have to pay to park when you come to work, so we pay it for you.
Work anywhere in the world for up to six months of the year
The pandemic has shown that remote working is not just possible, but that it can be very effective. If you want to extend a holiday for a few weeks or just work somewhere else, we can help make that happen.
Free on-site gym and showers, including fitness classes
Want to work out before work, during lunch or finish your day with a run? Just walk downstairs to our free on-site gym. Or if you cycle or run to work, make use of the great showers.
What’s next?
Our goal is to develop the happiest, highest performing, most effective digital marketing agency in the UK.
We think we’ve done well so far, but the word “develop” above is very deliberate. We will never be able to say that we’re done with this - there is always more we can do and we will never stop trying to be better.
So, for us, what comes next is about never settling and always finding ways to do even better work for our clients and building an even better place to work for our amazing team.
