New business model offers holistic growth for clients

Three Are One is a new business that claims its approach to unlocking business growth is “wildly different’, but is it?

6/6/25: Celia Wallace and Brendan Collogan, the team behind the new consultancy business Three Are One. John Feder/The Australian.

A new business that blurs the line between traditional consultancies and creative agencies has launched with a focus on unlocking holistic business growth for companies.

Three Are One aims to provide organisations with a “commercially grounded, creatively inspired alternative” which focuses on long-term sustainable business growth.

Its co-founders, Celia Wallace and Brendan Collogan, believe the key differentiator for the business is in its blending of strategy, innovation and creativity to drive growth.

“We bridge that gap between where consultancy and strategy ends and creativity begins,” Ms Wallace told The Australian.

“An important distinction between our positioning and an agency positioning is the strategic focus that we look at. When agencies talk about strategies, they are predominantly more brand strategy, we look at enterprise strategy, product strategy, customer strategy. It’s all encompassing and it’s far more holistic for the business world. And it bridges that gap with creativity sooner because the solution might not be an advertising campaign, it might be the development of a new product or innovation in some form.”

Ms Wallace is drawing from her experience working in advertising agencies, including M & C Saatchi, management consultancy EY and client side at Westpac, while Mr Collogan has held senior marketing roles at Optus and News Corporation .

The duo is keen to avoid being labelled as another new agency model, following a number of new start-ups in recent years such as The Bureau of Everything and Allegory. They believe the proof is in their foundation clients which include Medibank, AHM, News Corporation, On The House Group, The Washington Post, US based streaming start-up, My­Streme and a Saudi-based industrial business, Danat Saudia.

“We believe that the model we have developed has tremendous scalability here in Australia but also in the markets where we’re operating in the US and the Middle East,” Ms Wallace said.

Mr Collogan said the business was resonating with clients due to its broad remit which incorporated commercial strategy, product design and innovation, pricing, operating models along with brand positioning and advertising.

“Clients want more than decks and ideas. They want traction and impact. That’s what we’re here to deliver,” he said. “A lot of our conversations come in at the CEO level. Our perspective on growth is subjective so the right lever to pull might not be marketing, so by going in at the CEO level we can deploy to the right area of the business and address the growth problem and unlock the opportunity where it is.

“We are at the coal face of defining enterprise strategy, whereas fundamentally a lot of agencies respond to a marketing brief. A lot of the value that we add is before that brief is written.”

Three Are One is preparing to launch a proprietary AI tool, which it claims is a first for the Australian market. The business is also poised to announce a creative director to join the leadership team.

“Be Wildy Different is the overarching proposition that we stand for and creativity will become a huge and very important part of our business,” Ms Wallace said.