By any metric, Rethink is having itself a pretty good Silver Jubilee.

Among its many recognitions in this, its 25th year, the shop found itself at the top of The Drum’s World Creative Rankings as the most-awarded agency on the planet; named Independent Agency of the Year at the One Show; claimed top spot at the ADC Awards; nabbed a Grand Clio; acknowledged as both Independent Network of the Year and Independent Agency of the Year in Cannes; and now, it’s making AOY (and Rethink) history with its first quadruple Gold win.

Truly, the award shelf runneth over. While many agencies might have a year in which a standout campaign runs the table, Rethink dominated 2024 thanks to a generous collection of campaigns and a slew of talent. As agency partner and global CSO Sean McDonald puts it, both clients and Rethinkers had career years.

And you might say: ‘Well, yeah… Rethink.’ But the agency’s success was far from fait accompli. Nothing kills culture faster than growth and Rethink has had a lot of growth of late. In fact, since 2021, the agency has roughly doubled in both staff count and overall business, with offices to be found in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and New York.

“It wasn’t just exciting,” says McDonald of the agency’s momentum. “It scared the shit out of us. We had to double down and say: ‘What got us here? What was good?’ We took a very deliberate approach to keeping everybody on the same page and being really clear about what we think gets us to our goals.”

One primary goal was the aforementioned win in Cannes. Early in the year, the Rethink team deliberately set its sights on being named the Independent Network of the Year at the global event. But wishing rarely makes things so.

“Goals are just goals unless you set conditions to achieve them,” explains the agency’s global CCO Aaron Starkman. “We were diligent this past year in setting the right conditions to achieve our goals.” Starkman says that meant a laser-like focus on what he calls “eliminating wheel spinning” – meaning Rethink took every opportunity to create efficiencies within the group. That meant things like re-evaluating long meetings and other time sucks, and instead communicating via Slack, text messages or old-fashioned phone calls. Whatever it took to get to the best idea and execution swiftly and resourcefully.