Mike Rowe and
Mike Davison
1000heads

Founder Mike Rowe started 1000heads from a converted cowshed in Oxfordshire in 2000, working together with Mike Davison to steer the company through its journey since then. Three of those years were spent with Phoenix after an investment was made in 2019. Now, 1000heads stands as a truly global business with a talented team spread across three continents and 10 offices.

Phoenix has 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.

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.

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