Mike Rowe’s and Mike Davison’s story
Not many businesses can claim to have been started in a converted cowshed.
For 1000heads, this is exactly what happened in 2000 when the company’s founder Mike Rowe set up shop in Oxfordshire. The inspiration to start a new business? To offer a fresh take on how to connect brands with their customers.
“I was already running a PR agency at the time,” Rowe recalls. “But things took time back then. You would write a press release, stamp it, and send it off.”
A key figure in the early days of the business, Mike Davison, had joined forces with Mike Rowe some years earlier while working in one of Rowe’s other companies developing online services. “I’d stretched the truth to him in an interview about being able to code websites – which he’d been smart enough to realise – but he clearly saw some potential,” he says. “I came into a very ‘analogue’ operation, but Mike Rowe was exploring digital as a new frontier. It was something I was passionate about too.”
“He was such a great conceptual thinker and I felt totally on the same wavelength. It felt like a great chemistry from the start – there were no limits, just pure invention,” Davison adds.
1000heads toyed with a few operational models to start but ended up striking gold with an approach that married nascent social listening with a suite of services that helped brands engage with online communities, brand advocates and digital influencers.

“I’d regularly pull all-nighters in the cowshed trying to figure out how we could build things to give us a competitive advantage in what was really the primordial soup of social media tech,” says Davison. “We built UGC (user generated content) platforms and prototyped social media web crawlers for early online sentiment analysis. These were firsts. It took a few attempts to get the delivery right, but it was obvious once we’d cracked it.”
“With 1000heads, we were creating a word-of-mouth agency to provide brands with insights based on the conversations they were having with customers,” Mike Rowe says. “Social listening was an alien concept – companies didn’t have budget for it and didn’t have people in-house to coordinate the work,” he adds.
Over a beer in a local pub garden, the pair aligned on an ambitious growth plan for 1000heads and Mike Davison came in as the company’s other shareholder.
Tesco and Nokia were among 1000heads’ early clients, the latter providing an enormous amount of business for what was still a nascent organisation with a very small team.
“It got to a point where 90% of our revenue was coming from one client, so we knew we needed to diversify into new verticals and expand our international business even further,” Rowe says. “What it certainly confirmed was that we had something big on our hands and that we could grow 1000heads quickly if we could keep up with the demand.”
Indeed, as more and more social media platforms came online through the years, the opportunity to provide even greater value exploded.
This evolved into a comprehensive suite of services to help companies thrive in the social media era. Today, 1000heads’ ‘Social Transformation’ approach is an integrated, end-to-end solution encompassing data and analytics, strategic consulting, and creative execution, and is utilised by a number of familiar blue-chip brands.
The company’s enviable roster of global brands came with international growth opportunities. With an eye on US expansion, Mike Davison moved to New York in 2011 to support the successful growth of the business in North America as US CEO, before returning to the UK in 2019 to take on Group CEO responsibilities as the two Mikes sought private equity investment to underpin the next phase of 1000heads’ growth.
Partnering with Phoenix
“The business had already been growing rapidly to this point, but we had bootstrapped our way there,” Davison says. “Our thinking was that if we found a partner with a track record of helping businesses to scale even faster, particularly in operational terms, we could get to where we wanted to be more quickly.”
Phoenix came on board in 2019 to support 1000heads’ ambitions to accelerate its international expansion and seize the opportunity being presented by a global, high-growth market for social-first marketing services.
“There was a lot of energy invested into understanding our business and what we do from the outset,” Davison says. “Phoenix understood what makes 1000heads a unique business. They were committed to preserving our culture while allowing us to tap into expertise and resources to grow faster, go further, and do even bigger things.”
The investment from Phoenix also allowed Rowe to remain a significant investor in the business whilst also transition into a non-executive role.

“I had been seeking the opportunity to take a backseat, not least because I’m older than the others and wanted to pass the mantle on,” he explains. “But I wanted to do it properly and not just leave everything behind suddenly. I really enjoyed my time in the non-exec role as it offered new impetus and gave me a chance to see 1000heads from the outside.”
The Phoenix investment was used to open two new US offices, strengthen the company’s business development and operational capabilities that included the hiring of a new CFO and Chairman, and accelerate the development of proprietary tools and technologies. The business development function “made a huge difference,” Davison says, “with inbound enquiries increasing by 50% during the first year of it being in place.”
On the technology side, 1000heads implemented a new team to lead the development of its own solutions and IP, with attention also being paid to how the company marketed its tech-based offering to clients.

“It’s been an exhilarating journey,” Davison adds. “We’ve come a long way and, today, we’re proud to be a strategic partner to some of the very best brands on the planet. Our job is to help them stay relevant, conversational, and advocated – all at the speed of social, which is getting faster all the time.”
A new chapter
Over the course of the three-year investment period, these initiatives helped 1000heads to double its EBITDA and, ultimately, lay the foundations for Davison and the rest of his team to thrive in the future. In May 2022, the company entered its next phase when Phoenix exited the business through a sale to Labelium. It was at this point that Rowe moved on from the business entirely to set up a new events and wedding company, as well as a bakery business.

Since then, 1000heads has continued along its growth journey, opening new offices in Paris and Singapore to further expand globally.
“Today, we have 200 brilliant minds working across seven global offices alongside the likes of Verizon, Google, meta, The North Face, Shell and the UN, just to name but a few,” Davison says.

“Where Phoenix really helped us was bringing a calm head to the table. We were moving very fast and needed a collaborative partner to help steer us through a challenging time. They’ve helped us to be even bolder with our growth plan and keep an eye on that longer-term vision. It’s given us the confidence to grow faster.”