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Why the BastionBUNTIN Merger Took 2 Years to Get to Yes
Jeffrey Buntin Jr. and Jeff Browe on the values checks, money questions and 10 integration meetings that came before the deal
A few years ago, two agencies on opposite sides of the world were working toward the same idea, and neither knew what the other was up to.
In Nashville, Jeffrey Buntin Jr. and his team at BUNTIN, the agency his father started in 1972, worked out of a rail yard. Business was good, with clients who had stayed 20, 30 and 40 years. He wanted what he calls “transformational growth,” and he wanted it without trading away the agency’s values.
Meanwhile, Jeff Browe was leading the U.S. West Coast for Bastion, the network founded in Melbourne. Bastion had experiential, influencer, performance, PR and social under one roof, and it was after the same thing BUNTIN was: more scale, with its independence intact.
Today they are one agency, BastionBUNTIN, with Buntin as co-chairman and Browe as CEO. Getting there took two years.
Two kindred parties
Buntin describes the two sides as “two kindred parties without knowing what the other one was doing.” They met about three years ago, and the overlap was hard to miss.
What set the conversation apart was that nobody needed rescuing. “Neither of us did this trying to solve a problem,” Buntin says. Both agencies had momentum, so neither had a reason to hurry and both had something to protect.
For Buntin, the thing to protect was culture. “Talent with bad culture is not really talent,” he says.
Why Browe took his time
Browe had been through this before, at other agencies and in other countries, and he had seen how it goes wrong. Sometimes the fit felt forced from the first conversation. Sometimes he followed the money and things got, in his words, “squirrely pretty fast.”
So he and Buntin started with values and worked outward from there. “There’s a dance there,” Browe says, and this one lasted two years.
The longer they looked, the more the two shops lined up. Bastion, he says, was built on strength, and BUNTIN on conviction.
One table, every other week
Then they began planning the combined agency before it existed. Leaders from Nashville, the West Coast and Australia sat around one table every other week, 10 meetings in a row, working out how the new shop would run.
Buntin knew how that much time could look from the outside. “You’re either working on something that long because it’s wrong and you’re forcing it, or because it’s right and you’re doing it the right way,” he says.
The time also let people get to know each other. The Nashville team flew to California, where Browe’s crew did its best with barbecue for guests from what Buntin calls “a hot chicken town.” When the Australians came to Nashville, everyone went to the Music City Rodeo, and the global CFO walked in wearing a new cowboy hat.
What two years bought
The deal was announced in August: more than 400 people across the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, all independent. By then, most of the surprises had been found and handled around that table. Within weeks, the new agency was in fresh conversations with clients.
It also changed what a job there can be. Anyone in Nashville, Buntin says, can now raise a hand and say, “Hey, transfer me to Melbourne for a year.”
Buntin sees something bigger in it too. “This is not an anti-holdco play. I think of it as a pro-client play,” he says, and he would like the industry to be defined by independents working at this scale.
Browe’s measure for the first year is simpler. “It’s about client success and opening doors that we haven’t been able to do in the past,” he says.
Two years to get to yes. Now comes the part they planned for.
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