We built an agency without offices. Then The Sunday Times told us we’d got it right.

The Guild Core team in the woods. Photo: Sarah Dollar.

Share

The Liberty Guild made The Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2026 list. And we’re properly chuffed! Especially as the list is voted by employees. Which means making it is a measure of what the people doing the work actually feel about doing the work.

We built The Guild differently from the beginning. No offices, no pool tables, no egos. And what our place on the list confirms, is something we’ve quietly believed for years: Freedom works.

Ironically for this accolade, we don’t have a head office, because most of the best talent doesn’t happen to live within an easy commute of the same Pret.

The best art directors, strategists, copywriters and producers live wherever their lives work best. If you build an agency that requires everyone to commute into a building five days a week, you’re automatically limiting the talent pool before you’ve even started. We always thought that was a bad deal for everyone. The talent, the clients and ultimately the work.

It also means we don’t build layers between the people doing the work and the clients buying it. The Guild is built around senior multi-award-winning specialists. The client gets the right talent on their brief, not a junior team reporting upwards into increasingly expensive meetings.

We don’t quietly funnel huge amounts of client money into real estate either. Most agencies are still structurally built around offices that made sense twenty years ago. We chose to put that money somewhere else. Into the people. Into the work. Into finding the best talent globally and paying them properly.

And perhaps most importantly, it means we work with trusted, incredibly talented creatives and strategists who are the very best at what they do.

But… Freedom only works if you can actually find the people.

The Guild has spent the last nine years building a global network of 500+ hard-to-reach trusted specialists. The real ‘A’ List. Talented souls we know, have worked with, rate highly and who we can assemble quickly around the right brief. Whatever the challenge. Whatever the discipline(s) required.

We’re not a freelance marketplace or a creative collective. The freedom doesn’t come at the expense of structure. The structure is just somewhere else.

We have a small core team (above) that scopes, builds and runs the work. And around that sits a global network of specialists assembled brief-by-brief based on exactly what the client needs.

We don’t sell hours either. We sell defined outputs with clear fixed deliverables. Most senior marketers actually want exactly that. Fixed time, fixed output, fixed fee.

When The Sunday Times asked us for a team photo, we couldn’t exactly do the standard lineup in reception by the brand wall. Mainly because we don’t have a reception. Or a brand wall. Or, in fairness, a building.

So we borrowed Ben’s rather lovely patch of woodland, brought the dogs, and took a snap. Which, now we think about it, probably tells you most of what you need to know about the Guild.

Seeking out even more brilliant and talented people globally. Pairing them with ambitious clients. And cementing the proof for the belief that freedom works.

We dedicate this listing to our amazing clients. The ones we know and love. And the ones we have yet to meet.