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.
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”.
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.
Molly Hyndman has spent her career making organisations with something to say impossible to ignore. At Fireside, that often means building a campaign from scratch, steering businesses through a crisis, establishing a client as the expert journalists call when they need a take, or simply working backwards from what an organisation wants to achieve and making sure everything lines up behind it. She becomes part of the team, too: a trusted extension you can hand the wheel to and not worry about.
When she's not doing all of that, she's busy running Swell, her own consultancy dedicated entirely to cause-driven organisations. And when she's not doing that, she's somewhere on the Bellarine with a longboard, hanging ten and raising Fireside’s surfer cred in the process.