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 20-year career, Ben Hart has done – if not all – then a heck of a lot. Political adviser. Award-winning journalist. High-flying agency founder. He’s the guy who led comms strategy at both Headspace and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). He’s also advised leaders across three tiers of government (including a stint as Chief of Staff to Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp) while scribbling features for the likes of The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Guardian Australia.
At Fireside, Ben is our writer of narratives and crafter of complex messaging. AKA The Big Cheese. It’s his job to straddle that weird gulf between strategy and feelings. Ben believes that good stories make strong organisations, Tina Arena is still criminally underrated, and that anyone who thinks they can engage people without taking risks is kidding themselves.
When you’re a small agency, having a Chief Creative Officer might seem a bit much. But not when that CCO is Louise Bannister. Louise often gets wheeled in to examine whether the path our client’s taking is the right one. She tends to ask big, money-saving questions like “Why are we doing it this way?” and “Do we even need this thing?”
As the co-founder of the award-winning publishing juggernaut, frankie, and with 25 years’ editorial experience under her belt, Louise has an almost supernatural ability to cut through the crap. To make complex stuff sound good. And to immediately see what can stay – and what needs to go. She’s a creative, problem solving machine, powered almost exclusively by those dark-choc-covered pumpkin seed things you get from The Source.
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.
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”.