Matt Shoom-Kirsch
Over the past three months, Taxi has tightened up its leadership structure, with a new national management team, new North American VPs and new directors on its key Kraft and Candian Tire accounts. The changes come in response to the loss of one of Taxi’s biggest clients, Telus, last year.
“When you have, by and large, a winning formula, you have to be careful not to radically change. This is about thoughtful change,” said Taxi CEO and president Rob Guenette. “We don’t want to turn ourselves upside down because we lost one big client.”
Overall, the restructuring has seen very few top Taxi personnel swapped out, and no new faces — Guenette said the agency relied on “bench strength” to reform its leadership. Taxi laid off just less than 20 staff in July, only one of whom — Taxi president Nancy Beattie — was at the executive level. Beattie left in December, when Guenette took on the combined role of president and CEO.
Two other executives did leave the company but Guenette said those moves weren’t part of the restructuring — chief creative officer Frazer Jelleyman returned home to the U.K. and chief development officer Jeremy Gayton left for lg2’s new Toronto office.
The key change, Guenette said, has been a “flattening out” of Taxi’s top management into fewer layers of seniority and regional purview, starting with his own newly combined role.
Shelley Raymond
At the first level in the new hierarchy will be a handful of executives with oversight over all of Taxi’s North American offices. This cadre includes Guenette’s “right-hand man,” Matt Shoom-Kirsch, who was promoted to VP client services North America in January after five years with the company, first as general manager of Taxi 2 and then of Taxi Toronto. In the new position he’ll bring his client relationship expertise to bear on all of Taxi’s offices in Canada and the U.S.
Also leading at the North American level will be newly minted brand director North America Shelley Raymond, whose role has been expanded to reflect her growing brand reputation management responsibilities on both sides of the border.
Shoom-Kirsh and Raymond will sit on the new national management team along with every department head, ECD and general manager at Taxi. New additions to those categories include Jack Dayan, Taxi’s new VP of strategy in Vancouver, announced last week, plus Sean McDonald, VP brand experience, and Ben Feist, VP technology, both promoted in January and working out of Toronto. Agatha Wronecka, promoted to managing director, Canadian Tire, will also be a part of the national team, as will CCO Paul Lavoie, who took the role in July after Jelleyman’s departure. Guenette will lead the group as chair.
Jack Dayan
“It’s quite a large group, probably larger than would intuitively make sense,” Guenette said. “Rather than have a bunch of splinter groups and subcommittees, I wanted one group with one truth. We discuss all the issues and everybody walks away from the table with the exact same information.”
Justine Ferron, formerly a senior planner at the Toronto office, has moved to Taxi New York, where’ she’ll be director of strategy.
Taxi has also tightened up its leadership on its two leading national clients, Canadian Tire and Kraft, in response to new assignments from those businesses. In addition to Wronecka’s promotion, Tom Greco has been promoted to creative director and will take the lead on creative development for Canadian Tire. At Taxi 2, Stephanie Santiago has been promoted from account director split across three major clients to group account director, focused solely on Kraft.
Guenette said Taxi will be doing a lot of new pitching in 2015, but it won’t be banking on winning a big national client to slingshot its revenues.
“It’s really difficult to replace quickly a client of the order of magnitude of Telus,” he said. “Obviously we want to close that gap, but it’s not dependent on winning one giant client. It will probably happen from an aggregation of winning a few pitches.
“If you’re not growing, you’re dying. We want to continue to grow, but we want to grow smart.”
