When G Squared's founders formalised their group of four agencies as Mercantile Co., they did something most agency operators postpone for years: they wrote down who owns which specialism and who leads which business. According to Campaign Brief, the new parent company brings together four specialist agencies spanning performance, social media monitoring, AI, technology and digital experience.
The record behind the move is worth reading closely. G Squared launched in 2012, grew to more than 70 people, and added three agencies over the past four years, per Campaign Brief. That is a company built by accumulation, then tidied by structure — a sequence many startups in services businesses will recognise. For related coverage, see Klarna's IPO Filing Shows a Smaller Company Than the $45 Billion Peak: What the Document Says.
For founders weighing the same step, the Mercantile Co. announcement offers four concrete, checkable moves. None of them require a transaction. All of them require deciding something.
What does the Mercantile Co. structure actually look like?
Before extracting lessons, get the facts straight. Mercantile Co. comprises four businesses, each with a defined lane:
- G Squared — digital performance across paid media, SEO, performance creative and data, led by George Photios.
- Burrow — a 24/7 social media monitoring, listening and community management agency, launched in 2022, staffed by an Australian team, and led by CEO Manuel Kambos, who joined in 2025.
- Wordie — designs, builds and supports WordPress solutions for organisations.
- GammaDX — an AI-native digital experience agency building platforms and commerce at scale, launched in January this year, led by George Pappas.
That per-agency detail matters for the lessons below, because each one rests on a documented choice the founders made, not on general agency theory.
Move one: name a leader for every business — including the ones you founded
The first move is the least glamorous and possibly the most load-bearing. Mercantile Co. did not leave leadership ambiguous. Photios leads G Squared. Pappas leads GammaDX. Kambos, who joined Burrow as CEO in 2025, heads that agency. Every business in the group has one named person accountable for it.
Founders consolidating multiple businesses often resist this step, because naming a leader for an agency they personally ran means giving something up. The record here shows the opposite pattern: the founders kept leadership of two businesses between themselves and installed a hired CEO at the third. The lesson is not "step back" — it is that every entity needs exactly one accountable name, and that name does not have to be a founder.
Move two: define the specialism before you need the structure
Each Mercantile Co. agency has a one-line specialism you could recite from memory: performance, social monitoring, WordPress, AI-native experience. The founders framed the parent company as giving "each greater clarity around its specialist offering," according to Campaign Brief.
The practical test for any operator: can you state each business unit's discipline in one sentence without overlap? If two units both claim "digital," the structure is not ready. Mercantile Co.'s four lanes — performance, reputation, technology, experience, as the group describes its coverage — are deliberately non-overlapping. Founders can run this test today, on a whiteboard, before any legal restructuring.
Move three: sell the group, not the merger, to clients
The founders' stated client pitch is worth quoting exactly. Pappas said the group structure lets them "bring the right Mercantile Co. agencies together, combining their capabilities to solve the problem without compromising what makes each agency distinctive." Photios framed it from the buyer's side: "Clients don't need agencies trying to be everything to everyone, now more than ever they need deep expertise."
That is two claims founders can borrow directly: specialism as the default, cross-group assembly as the option. The client list — including Endeavour Energy, P&G, Bunnings, the University of Sydney, Monash University, Mitsubishi Electric, the NRL and Mirvac, among others, per Campaign Brief — suggests the agencies already sold at enterprise scale individually. The structure formalises cross-selling that presumably already happened informally.
Move four: time the formalisation to a milestone, not a crisis
The announcement lands as G Squared approaches its fifteenth year, and Photios tied the timing to it: "As we approach our fifteenth year the opportunity is much bigger." The group had four years of acquisitions behind it before formalising.
The sequencing is the instructive part. The businesses grew first, developed "their own identities, client bases and areas of expertise" — the founders' words — and only then got a parent company. Founders who restructure first and figure out identity later tend to produce structure in search of a reason. Here the structure followed the operating reality. A useful rule from the record: formalise when the units have distinct clients and distinct offers, not when the org chart feels messy.
What has to be true for this to work
A sceptical read, since announcements write themselves favourably. The Mercantile Co. model depends on three things the record asserts but cannot yet prove: that the four agencies genuinely keep their independence in practice, that cross-group referrals actually flow, and that the specialisms stay distinct as AI-native work like GammaDX's overlaps with G Squared's performance offering. GammaDX launched in January this year; whether it and the performance agency stay in separate lanes is the fault line to watch. This connects to our earlier piece, How IPO Pricing and Lock-Up Periods Actually Work.
None of that is a criticism — it is the checklist. Founders copying this structure should write down, today, how they will know in twelve months whether their version kept the lanes clean. The founders themselves said the point was "building sharper expertise and a clearer role in our clients' success," per Campaign Brief. Sharpness is measurable. That is the part worth copying.
