Who we are, and why we started The Wayward Co.

So, who are we?

We're Jimmy and Sarah McLellan. Two Kiwis who somehow ended up building a marketing company on the other side of the world. The Wayward Co. is a technical marketing partner: proudly from Aotearoa, UK-based now, and working with clients pretty much anywhere the wifi reaches. We went public in November 2025, though the frustration that got us here had been brewing for a lot longer than that.

Sarah's the operations half. Project management, delivery, timelines, the unglamorous stuff that keeps a business actually moving. I'm the marketing, AI and automation half. Between us we've worked around the world, including a decent stint in Canada, across more big platforms than either of us cares to count. If Sarah's already walked you through how this all kicked off in her "Ok ok, it's actually happening!" post, think of this as the companion piece, same story, but I'm going properly deep on the why.

What actually made us start it?

One frustration, repeated so many times it eventually turned into a company: watching businesses buy powerful marketing technology and then never actually use it. Not in any real way, anyway, just the most basic form of it, and then nothing more.

And to be clear, this isn't a dig at the CMOs or the commercial leaders. They usually know exactly what these tools could do for them. But time and again I'd watch a company buy a serious platform, wire up the bare minimum, and stop there. Then a year or two down the line the CFO or COO clocks the invoice and goes: why are we paying this much for something we get nothing out of? Bin it. Downsize it. Gone.

Or you'd get the flip side, a growth marketer quietly underperforming. Not because they're bad at their job, but because they never got the other four tools they were promised. The budget never came through. Either way, the business either gets ripped off by a tool it didn't need, or badly undervalues a tool it did need and never implemented properly. And in both cases, guess who cops the blame? Marketing. "Marketing's not delivering." Marketing never got a fair shot.

"So many people buy these big platforms, wire up one system, it barely works, and it eats their money for barely any advantage. We want to help you spend money that actually makes you money."

Here's the thing though, the tools usually aren't the villain. Take HubSpot, the one everyone loves to moan about once you're into the professional hubs and the price starts climbing. Is it pricey at that level? Yeah, it is. But it's also a genuinely brilliant platform, it integrates beautifully, the UI's great, and they're forever building more into it. I'm a big fan of using it, if you can afford it. The point was never that the tools are overpriced. The point is that a tool only pays you back when you actually build on it.

Set up the automation. Set up the enrichment. Set up the tracking. Pull your teams into one system, make it the single source of truth, and let everyone genuinely work inside it. Do that and these platforms can make you an extraordinary amount of money. Skip it, and you're just paying rent on software nobody opens.

Sarah and I had both watched this happen for years. Her from the operations, delivery and project-management side, me from the marketing, AI and automation side. Same story every time, whether it was Salesforce, NetSuite, or any other big automation or ops platform you can name. So when we were both leaving Canada, we hit a fork: go work inside another company and be quietly annoyed by this from the inside, or build something that actually helps. We built. That's where our one-line tagline comes from, building marketing systems that actually work. We want to build things that earn back the money you've worked hard for, so you can make more of it. Not shiny software sitting idle because someone said you should have it.

Why "partner", not "agency"?

Because "agency" carries baggage we want no part of. Too often it means a slick pitch from the senior people, then the actual work quietly handed off to whoever's junior and free that week. It means slides, retainers, and a relationship built to keep you needing them.

A partner works differently. We sit alongside your team, inside your systems, building things you own. When we set up your CRM automation, your enrichment, your tracking, it's yours. No lock-in. If we walked tomorrow, it all keeps running. We'd much rather earn the next piece of work because the last piece actually worked than because you can't function without us. Senior operators only, no junior hand-offs. You can see the full spread on our expertise and technology pages.

What do we believe about marketing?

That most of the "new" marketing hasn't changed nearly as much as everyone's shouting it has. The names are new. The fundamentals aren't.

"Growth marketing, GTM engineering, AEO, GEO, they're just the next stage of what we already had. The tools got deeper and richer. The fundamentals didn't change. And that means anyone can learn them."

Everyone talks about this stuff like you need to hire some once-in-a-generation genius engineer just to understand what the tools can do. I don't buy it. Take AEO and GEO, treated like an alien discipline nobody could possibly grasp. They're the next stage of SEO. You reformat your pages so the content reads differently and the back end can be read differently, which is exactly what we did for years, every single time Google shipped an update. Now that more than Google is reading it, everyone panics like it's witchcraft.

Same deal with GTM engineering. Peel the name off and it's outbound and account-based marketing: find the right audience, spot a timely signal, get the right message in front of them at the moment of pain. Marketers were buying lists and mailing people who'd just raised funding decades ago. The difference now is the tools. Far richer enrichment, better data, sharper automation, more customisation, at a scale you couldn't dream of before. Deeper tools, same fundamentals. (This is a belief I'll properly die on, so it's getting its own post down the line, but that's the short of it.)

How are we different?

Three things, mostly:

• Senior operators only. You work with people who've actually built this before. There's a real, vetted bench of senior specialists behind us, the founders are Sarah and me, but there's no junior hand-off. The person who scopes the work is the person who does it.
• Ship, not slides. We're judged on systems that run, not decks that describe them. Strategy matters, but you're paying us to build the thing and make it work, not to present a roadmap and vanish.
• No lock-in, no BS. We build in your tools, on your accounts, as your source of truth. Pricing is quote-based and scoped to the job. You keep everything. We won't sell you what you don't need, and we won't hold your setup hostage.

If you want to see what that produces, our client stories are the honest version, real work, real results.

Where are we headed?

Straight into the gap we built the company to fill. There are more businesses than ever sitting on powerful platforms they've barely switched on, and more genuinely useful tooling, AI, enrichment, answer engines, landing every month. The distance between what these systems can do and what companies actually get out of them is only getting wider.

That's the gap we exist to close. We want to be the partner you call when you've got the budget, the tools and the ambition, but not the systems to make them pay. Building marketing that works for the money you've worked hard for, so it goes and makes you more. If that sounds like where you're sitting, request a quote and let's have a chat.