Dom Mernock

Why the helmet icon?

Back in the day, I used to dabble in a spot of rallying in my spare time and now most people know me to be a self-confessed petrolhead. I'm into my motorbikes, and even won first place at the Engage Go-Kart Championships. My proudest moment yet.

A bit more about Dom

What do you enjoy most about your role?

Honestly, the range of it. No two weeks look the same, which suits me. On any given day I might be working through a new business pitch, sitting in a client strategy session, or thinking through how to grow the agency commercially. I'm wired to think about both sides of that, the relationships and the numbers, and at Engage you get plenty of both. The fact that no brief or client challenge is ever quite the same keeps it genuinely interesting.

What’s your favourite thing about working at Engage?

The fact that everyone here has skin in the game. Being employee-owned changes the dynamic in ways that are hard to explain until you've experienced it, people genuinely care about the quality of the work and about each other, because the success of the business is their success too. That's rare in agency land, and it shows up in the culture every day.

Which Summer Conference has been your favourite, and why?

All of them. That's my answer and I'm sticking to it. Genuinely though, each one has had its own character, and if I picked a favourite I'd spend the next six months fielding questions about it. What I will say is that there's a very specific kind of magic in getting fifty people out of their normal environment for a day or two. Conversations happen, inhibitions drop just enough, and you learn things about your colleagues that no amount of studio meetings could surface.

What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned in your career?

That relationships are the long game. You can have the best strategy in the room, but if people don't trust you or like working with you, it counts for very little. The best commercial outcomes I've been part of have always come from proper relationships, with clients, with colleagues, with partners, where there's genuine mutual respect and a bit of honesty on both sides. That takes time to build and it's easy to undervalue, especially early in your career when you're focused on proving yourself.