Ben Stephens

At the age of 27 Ben was kicked out of Account Management. He became the founding partner of TBWA Direct, subsequently taking the agency through two mergers and emerging as Joint CEO of Tequila in the UK. He was then MD of Rapier for four years before setting up SFW with Neil and Chris in January 2005.

Running agencies with between 1 and 220 staff has left its mark on Ben. His role, he says, is to ‘find talent, inject passion and demand rigour’. If that doesn’t work he is also a firm believer that blackmail may be used as a legitimate motivation technique.

Ben is an elected member of the DMA’s Agencies Council.