Professional solvers of problems
‘Communications’ kind of undersells it. We’re an agency that likes to go broader, deeper and way more strategic. Talk to everyone. Research the heck out of things. Really uncover the heart of what you do.
The Team
Most agencies don’t have 25 years of editorial experience under the hood. Or a speech writer who’s worked across three tiers of government. Or a communications strategist who's shepherded mental health system overhauls and major public inquiries. We basically do everything but fight crime.
Over a 25-year career, Ben Hart has moved between the worlds of journalism, politics and communications. He’s been an award-winning tabloid reporter. He’s led the communications function at national organisations like Headspace, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and even the AFL players’ union. And he’s been Chief of Staff to a Victorian Environment and Climate Change Minister and the Lord Mayor of Melbourne. Since starting Fireside, he’s also had a nice sideline in culture and media commentary on breakfast television. As you do.
As well as running the show, Ben is our writer of narratives and crafter of the kind of messaging that solves big problems and explains the unexplainable. To him, the task is all about building a bridge between strategy and feelings. Ben believes that organisational communications doesn’t have to be awful, Love Actually should be tried in the Hague for crimes against storytelling, and that anyone who thinks they can engage people’s hearts and minds without taking some narrative risks is absolutely kidding themselves.
Chris Harrigan knows narratives better than most. As the former editor of Smith Journal, he brings a small forest's worth of storytelling expertise to Fireside, where he spends his days helping clients find that angle, that hook, that killer narrative through-line, then packaging it up in something that looks as good as it reads.
Unlike most writer-editors, Chris doesn't just think word by word (no shade on writer-editors, some of our best friends etc.) Instead, he's always looking for the human angle behind organisations. The narrative heart that will make people care. Or invest. Or just stop bloody scrolling. When he's not doing this for our clients, you'll find him applying the same lens to our creative projects, like The Story, our print magazine about storytelling, which critics have described as being “worth the paper cuts”.
It might be quicker to list the things Lauren Haberfield hasn’t achieved. As far as we can tell, she hasn’t been to space. That’s pretty much it.
Fresh off the plane from Paris, where she was Global Creative Director for Mars and Executive Creative Director for Edelman, and with 88 international awards under her belt, Lauren is Fireside’s Director of Creativity. It’s her job to take our clients’ stories and think up ways to bring them to life. An exhibition, an event, an object, a physical thing that never existed before (and that media will be tripping over themselves to cover for free). That’s Lauren’s baguette and butter.
For Lauren, a good idea has earn its coverage. That’s the test of creativity: can you make people care about something, or are you just throwing money at the problem? If an idea can't stand on its own two feet, it’s back to the atelier. (We had to Google that word, too.)
As our wunderkind Senior Comms Strategist, Ellie Sadrinajafi is often the one we send inside organisations to help them work through the chaos. She comes equipped with one of the sharpest minds we’ve seen, a laser-guided risk radar and a level head on her shoulders. When government departments, public health orgs and high-stakes public inquiries need someone to calm the storm and steer the message, they turn to Ellie. And Ellie invariably crushes it.
Ellie’s clients describe her with one word: 'unflappable.’ As far as we can tell, she cannot be flapped. And when the PR feathers are flying, unflappable, razor-sharp strategists with C-Suite advisory experience are exactly who you want in your corner. In Ellie’s own words, she “just goes into a job and gets stuff done”. And in answer to your inevitable question: sorry, no, you can’t keep her.
Where most people see organisational chaos, Ben Starick sees a chessboard. Or a puzzle. Or a Rubik’s Cube. At any rate, it's his idea of a good time. As the founder of comms and marketing agency Starling, Ben’s spent years parachuting into complex situations, fast-reading the room, then working out how to get everyone where they need to be.
At Fireside, he’s our go-to for the knotty stuff – the situations where everyone's pulling in different directions and can't agree on which way is forward. He calls himself “the first aid kit”, which is a characteristically modest way of saying he comes in, fixes things, then lets you get back to business. He also makes a mean jalapeño martini. It’s complex, a little spicy, and somehow exactly what you need. Much like the man himself.