Trevor Wolfe

Springleap is a marketplace for managed, curated agency-class creatives to help brands, agencies and start-ups source solutions to creative briefs and conduct creative audits, market research, and trend analysis.

Springleap, the crowdsourcing platform that connects brands and agencies with a community of 22,000 creatives, has expanded its offices to New York City and Johannesburg as it prepares for a new push into pan-African and Middle Eastern markets. The expansion comes on the heels of a first round of investment funding to the tune of R4.1m.

Wolfe's responsibilities are to manage African and Middle East staffing, financials, operations, and sales as well as global efforts at product development, revenue strategies, and go to market strategies of Springleap's new products.

About Trevor Wolfe

Trevor Wolfe, newly appointed MD and head of commercialisation for Springleap in Johannesburg, hails from New York. He is an active advisor to ad-tech and media-tech start-ups. In addition to the valuable experience earned while project managing expansion efforts at global insights firm Gerson Lehman Group, and technology firm Moveline; Wolfe has held senior digital product and marketing leadership positions at research houses Kantar and TNS, both divisions of WPP, the world's largest media and marketing services companies.

Q: What is your main business challenge?
A: I would say Springleap's main business challenge, for now, is finding the "early adopters" within the branding and communication industry. We're introducing a relatively new service, intended to make life much easier for brands and agencies, so it is important to quickly find the clients willing to accept a little change (improvement) in their process, and ultimately brave enough to take a short-term chance on a new vendor to solve medium to long term challenges.

Q: What is your core strategy?
A: At the heart of our business is our platform and community of 22,000 creatives. Our core strategy is to demonstrate the value to clients in having access to this engaged network of professionals, in an on-demand capacity, to help at different stages of their creative processes. Our product, marketing, operational and financial strategies are tied around that mission, which in essence is: to help creativity thrive.

Q: Most important attribute needed to do your job?
A: I try to be deliberate in the use of leadership qualities that I've learned in the corporate world versus my experience in the start-up scene in America. On one hand, I try to encourage a culture of supreme client service, efficient operations and communication within our team, but am also trying to foster an internal willingness to take risks, make decisions quickly, and stay clear of any typical office politics that would inhibit our success as we go to market.

Q: The biggest trend to note in the industry?
A: I think the South African agency industry is about to come out of an interesting period of consolidation where the majority of the largest independent agencies (in terms of billings) have been scooped up by the global holding companies. In isolation, that's maybe not so interesting, but as the agencies get back to focusing on expanding their client relationships, and less on mergers and acquisitions, there is a good chance that they will be benefiting from a lifting of the economic jitters that have suppressed marketing spend here, an invigorated push by clients into Pan-African markets, and a whole list of marketing trends yet to take centre stage in SA (native advertising, content and real-time marketing, DSPs, Big Data, etc.). It will put a lot of pressure on agencies to decide which direction, or which countries, to invest in 2015 and will shine the spotlight on some of the country's very talented agency leaders.

Q: How will you make an impact?
A: Inherent in Springleap's model, is the opportunity for our clients to scale their businesses into new territories or creative disciplines without the need for taking on a preventative amount of overhead.

Q: How do you inspire others?
A: By walking the talk; I'm a big believer in everyone in the company, at all levels, rolling up their sleeves to do the hard work.

Q: What are you currently reading for work?
A: Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull, the President of Pixar.

Q: Your life philosophy?
A: 'When making a major life decision, choose the path that will make for a better story.'

Q: At the top of my 'bucket list' is...
A: Gardening... Having just spent the last 15 years in the concrete jungle that is New York, I'm hoping to cultivate my green thumb while I have a garden.