Community Over Competition
Cat Hartland joined SBS as a two-person startup, built its UK go-to-market from the ground up, and grew it to hundreds of leads and its first industry event inside a year. Her core conviction, questioned quietly since the start of her career, is that the word competition is often the wrong frame for an industry that works far better when everyone around the table wins.
“We still need human beings for creativity, support, and expertise. The talent leaving holdcos is extraordinary.”
Cat Hartland was UK Growth Lead at SBS, the programmatic curation solution built for independent agencies, from June 2024 to October 2025. She is now Growth Lead at BIMA, the British Interactive Media Association, on a mission to grow the community’s access to inspiration, opportunities, and career support in creative tech. She also runs Hartland Consulting, advising B2B agency and technology businesses on GTM strategy and growth.
Cat has spent her career at the intersection of agency growth, business development, and community building. She spent over three years as Head of The Drum Recommends, the client review and agency recommendation platform, growing membership and introducing its first ecommerce revenue stream. Before that she held business development director roles at Big Radical and Creativebrief, and spent nearly six years at Upfront Business Development running new business programmes for agencies.
At SBS, she designed and executed the UK launch strategy from scratch: beginning with audience research, building a value proposition from the findings, producing the company’s first branded industry report, and converting it into an event that attracted over fifty media leaders. The SBS model is built on partnerships with 70-plus ad tech platforms, enabling independent agencies to access omnichannel programmatic delivery with the support and expertise that had previously been available only to holding company agencies.
“Indie agencies need tools, not just access.”
“We give indie agencies a fair advantage, not just access. The talent formed in holdcos is amazing.”
The wave of talent leaving holding company agencies to start independent shops is one of the most significant shifts in the agency market. These people have the client relationships, the expertise, and the ambition. What they lose on day one is the technology infrastructure that holdcos provide as a matter of course. SBS was built to close that gap: a single access point to 70-plus ad tech platforms, with the programmatic expertise and hands-on support that makes those platforms actually usable at the quality level clients expect.
“We don’t use the word competition, we use community.”
Cat’s critique of the industry’s competitive instinct is not naive. She is clear that partnerships are ineffective when there is an imbalance of value, when one stakeholder leaves everything on the table and another leaves nothing. The community model only works when every participant, agencies, vendors, clients, platform partners, has a genuine and visible stake in the outcome. Getting that balance right requires the kind of frank conversation that the industry has historically avoided.
“We look for energy, passion, and kindness. Or should I say underrated?”
Cat’s three hiring criteria at SBS were energy, passion, and kindness. The third is the one she brings up unprompted. After building teams across fifteen years in B2B growth, her experience is that unkind behaviour is a net tax on productivity and culture that almost no skill set compensates for. The SBS team had collectively experienced it. They built it into the foundation of what they were creating.
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