“You can’t lose what you don’t have”Bester Burke opened shop in January 1997 with one brave client, a truckload of dreams and a Pub called The Perseverance just 37 metres down the road. Working from a cottage too small even for a micro microwave oven, Bester Burke staff meetings soon proved to be pretty crowded affairs. And when the staff compliment was increased to three, another plan had to be found. It was. 37 Metres down the road.
It was whilst sitting at the bar of the Perseverance, avoiding making any eye contact that could be construed as too lingering and cause for a swift head butt from the seasoned locals that the full might of the place we were sunk home. No salaries. No clients. No leads. No awards. No microwave oven. No staff. In short, we had nothing. And in a totally Oprah-like flash, we realized that this was undoubtedly the best position we would ever find ourselves in. Here we could write our own script. We could be whatever we wanted to be.
For if we had nothing, we had nothing to lose. Right then and there we wrote down on a damp napkin, with a borrowed pen, the agency we wanted to become. An agency that didn’t indulge its clients… one that wouldn’t indulge a petulant studio. Instead we decided that with the work we produced, we would indulge only the consumer. Somewhere along the 78-metre walk back to cottage, the scrap of napkin was lost. Its words however were indelibly etched into everything we did from that point onwards.
