Simon sits down with Nathan Frater, founder of Backbone Marketing and one of New Zealand's most respected performance marketers, for a wide-ranging conversation that goes as deep into mindset as it does into the mechanics of running an agency.
Nathan grew up two houses from the Headhunters HQ in Kaitaia, raised by two priests with an unshakeable moral compass - one that first kept him broke, then made him wealthy. He started working at nine, had a job at every age, launched company after company, and eventually built Backbone into a decade-old global team across four countries with clients in six or seven.
We go deep into what actually breaks agency relationships - the unit economics problem that most agency owners never solve, why productised retainers at $1,500 a month are a trap, and how Backbone rebuilt their model as a fractional marketing department at the price of a marketing manager. We also get into self-sabotage disguised as progress, why your financial success tracks your internal self-worth almost dollar for dollar, working with your partner as your commercial director, and the difference between marketing and advertising that most brands still get wrong.
This is an honest conversation about 25-year thinking, building with integrity before it became a marketing buzzword, and what it actually takes to create client relationships that last.
