The WiredCo. sisters on navigating business as family

Marketing was on neither Michelle nor Angela Hampton’s radar as a first career choice. Despite this, the pair are making their mark in the advertising industry, and they’re doing it together as sisters.  

Combining family and business can prove difficult, but for the identical twins, they know how to complement one another’s skillsets and share the same collective values.  

Angela and Michelle have developed WiredCo. with David Kennedy-Cosgrove, an Australian independent digital and creative business. The company won the 2022 AdNews Digital Agency of the Year award.  

Michelle Hampton: “Ange was a registered nurse and I was a law school drop out. But we somehow both switched our career paths at the right time and ended up studying marketing but in different specialties."

Angela Hampton: “Fast forward a few years, and WiredCo. was born off the back of continuing my people first pursuit, where creating a place people genuinely feel accepted and cared for in their working life took centre stage, coupled with my other love of digital marketing.” 

Michelle Hampton: “Recognising how much growth potential there was in digital marketing when Ange started WiredCo. back in 2014, I invested in the business some six years ago now.  

“What attracted me to digital and performance marketing was the extent to which we could influence tangible and directly attributable commercial outcomes for brands.” 

Growing up in a small regional town, Cooma in NSW, had a profound impact on the sisters personal and professional lives, becoming a driving force for the pair to standout in the industry. The values they learnt there have become embedded in their work ethic and company culture.

“Living in a small country town for the better part of 18 years, meant that our sense of community was front and centre in our lives.   

“Community spirit, giving and kindness is what holds small towns together and because of our exposure to this from the beginning, our sense of community in our own business is incredibly strong. 

“It’s easy for us to put our people at WiredCo. first, because we’ve been doing this since we were kids,” said the Hamptons.

Knowledge of the importance of community gave the sisters an advantage in transforming their business to one in which the people working are heard, valued and supported.  

“Growing up in the country also presented big challenges for us. There was this stigma attached to being a country kid (that we were lesser humans who had fewer career prospects).   

“We found incredible energy and drive to work hard and prove people wrong. This was great in many ways as we’ve managed to become quite successful in business, but trying to prove people wrong is also exhausting.   

“Over the years, we’ve both worked hard to become detached from this key driver and focus more on what brings us joy professionally,” said the Hamptons.  

The sisters credit their dedication and diligence in building the success of WiredCo., often being told by friends that they’d inevitably end up owning their own business in the future.  

“We might look very similar, but our personalities are very different and so are our professional capabilities. We are the classic yin & yang pairing and this extends to what and how we contribute in business.   

“We see this as one of our biggest strengths though, and perhaps consistent with what business experts will tell you.  And that is, to partner with people who complement your skill set, yet share the same collective values,” said the Hamptons.  

Michelle Hampton: “We’re both pretty business savvy, but what I lack in digital performance expertise, Angela makes-up in droves. What Ange lacks in creative comms, I tend to fill the gap. 

“What makes our business even stronger is with our third business partner, David Kennedy-Cosgrove who invested in the business and became managing partner back in February, 2021.  

“His background running other agencies and experience in strategy, offers a unique skill set that’s complementary and he’s really elevated how we approach our work strategically for our client partners.” 

Merging business and family requires a balance of personal and professional relationships. The Hamptons admit it’s sometimes a struggle to accommodate for the different dynamics as colleagues and as sisters.  

Angela Hampton: “Boundary setting isn’t either of our strongpoints so quite often the lines are blurred where we’ll meet up for a yoga session on a weekend, and end up launching into business talk before and after. 

“But maybe that’s not all bad. We’re so busy during work hours, sometimes having the space and uninterrupted sister time is the perfect time to talk business. 

“We’re incredibly close and have enough trust and respect for each other, we don’t hesitate in pulling one another up if the out-of-hours work talk gets suffocating.” 

Regardless of the challenges, the sisters recognise that being in business together is a gift.  

Michelle said: “We share the same energy and motivation to make our business succeed and look after our people, yet we somehow balance out this drive, with having fun and being ridiculously silly at times (which our team seems to thrive on).  

“Running a business is stressful, especially in agency land, but having a like-minded sibling with you on this mad rollercoaster of a ride, somehow makes us both feel safe. We give each other strength when we need it, we call each other out on our bullshit and we’re intuitively connected so we know when each other needs to talk or needs some space.   

“We often find people are intrigued by identical twins which provides a great ice-breaker when we walk into any boardroom or new business meeting.” 

The sisters have learnt who and what to prioritise if any challenges come their way that they need to overcome.  

“We do our best to listen, respect each other's opinions and always put the company and its people first when making important decisions.  If you put the company first, it becomes a lot easier to make good decisions that aren’timpacted by your own personal biases. 

“Working with family members is a big call and fraught with risk,” said Michelle and Angela Hampton.  

On enduring the difficulties of remaining impartial and unemotional during periods of conflict, the Hampton sisters said: “With family, it’salways personal, but we’vebeen very luckyin the sense that our values have always aligned despite how different we are.  

“That is the key ingredient to any successful business partnership. If you align on values and have an open and honest, no-bullshit (but respectful) relationship, you can get through anything.” 

Michelle Hampton said: “For our business partner, David, he’s had to face a really unique scenario where he’s invested in what was originally a family owned business and had to navigate how to work not only with siblings but with identical twins who are very close, yet very different. 

On the current media market, Michelle said: “There's no surprises, brands are feeling a bit nervous, particularly ones that sit more within that discretionary spending space.I think what's happening is the worry is outweighing the reality. Quite often nervousness tends to be more exaggerated than what'sactually happening in the market.  

"When revenue stability comes under threat, brands tend to become quite hyper focused on bottom of funnel conversion activity. And they focus very much on the bottom of the funnel because they felt that was the best way to secure consistent revenue.

"What brands actually found though, was that because they focus so much on that, and there was a bit of a departure away from brand activity that they lost brand equity.” 

Angela Hampton has noted one trend in that brands aren’t increasing budgets.  

“It's not usual for our industry to be like that because year on year you want brands to be growing and growing. You want them to be investing more and more in marketing. It has plateaued out and I think that goes back to my point before about when there's economic uncertainty and tend to you know, tighten their budgets. 

“Over the next couple of months, provided the economy stabilises I think we'll see budgets increase again, but it's just I think it's the worry that's tightening budgets more than anything else.” 

The Hampton sisters advise anyone starting out on their won venture in the industry to choose the right company and look critically at businesses. 

Angela Hampton: “It's understanding what their values are, whether they are a value in their business in the first place and whether those values align with you as a person.

The other thing is looking at culture, making sure that the businesses is a people- first organisation, they have good culture, that they've got a professional development and training programme -all of those components that increase your well being and in a workplace.

And lastly, make sure you're choosing a brand that you'rereally passionate about. One thing is what you do, but the other thing is who you represent.”